There are many theories as to how earth’s mightiest heroes will deal with the shocking aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War, but the one short trailer and handful of ambiguous posters haven’t given Marvel superfans much to confirm one way or the other. Now that Spider-Man: Far From Home has a teaser trailer, however, there’s more evidence that one theory might be more correct than the rest. 

SEE ALSO: First ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ trailer shows us life after ‘Infinity War’

To recap, Spider-Man: Far From Home takes place after the events of the yet-unreleased Avengers: Endgame and is in itself a spoiler (Sony producer Amy Pascal said that the plot of Far From Home begins “minutes after Avengers 4 wraps as a story“). Spider-Man, who was turned into dust at the end of Infinity War, is clearly alive and well at some point down the line, as is Nick Fury and Maria Hill, who both appear in the Spider-Man trailer despite falling victim to Thanos’ Snapture. 

What’s odd about the Far From Home trailer is how normal everyone seems. Aunt May is flirting with Happy Hogan, Peter’s classmates are as teen-ish as ever, and countries across the world are all in perfect functioning order. Most tellingly, Peter makes a decision to leave his spidey  suit at home while he travels with his school to Europe, claiming that he doesn’t anticipate anyone needing Spider-Man. 

Um, does any of this seem like it takes place in a world that very recently experienced the human apocalypse? Sure, the humans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do seem to be a bit more resilient to weird stuff than us regular folk do (they really took the whole “aliens are real and they have guns/are hot” news in stride), but one would expect a little more reticence on behalf of the entire planet to go on with business as usual post-Thanos. 

This ties into one of the two primary schools of thought regarding how the Avengers deal with Thanos in Endgame. The first school says that the Avengers will find a way to reverse the snap but stay in their current timeline, bringing everyone who was dusted back from wherever they went and keep trucking along with their lives. The other school says that the Avengers will negate the snap, fiddling with time and space to ensure that the snap never happened in the first place. 

The world’s rapid return to normalcy in Far From Home seems to indicate that Thanos’s snap was negated and not reversed. Ordinary people don’t seem to be laboring under the trauma that the Snapture would cause — what parent would let their child go abroad for weeks when they were very recently made aware of the fact that life can end with the snap of two big, purple fingers? 

Of course there’s nothing in the trailer that indicates how the Avengers stop the Snap from happening, but many theories revolve around using Ant Man’s van-sized Quantum Zone gateway to travel around in time to either collect/destroy the Infinity Stones or get a second chance at stopping Thanos. 

There’s still plenty of time to go before Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame answer everyone’s questions, but at least the Spider-Man trailer exists to remind us that when the Avengers are on the job, everything (usually) turns out OK in the end. 

The future of Apple is uncertain now that iPhone sales are flat, and it’s not clear what the company’s next big act will be or when it will arrive.

Tim Cook partially blamed lower than expected revenue projections on a number of factors including challenges entering the Chinese market (no doubt exacerbated by the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China), rising device prices, and an unexpected uptick in iPhone battery replacements made attractive by a special $29 promotional price all last year after the company was caught slowing down performance for older devices.

Just how many people took advantage of the battery replacement instead of buying new iPhones? According to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, the company replaced 11 million batteries. That’s 11 million people who could have bought a new iPhone, but chose not to.

Should Apple expect more battery replacements in the future as the new norm? Maybe, but it’s nothing to be alarmed about.

SEE ALSO: It’s official: iPhones are too expensive

Crunching the numbers, 11 million battery replacements times $29 works out to $319 million in revenue.

In contrast, if hypothetically, all 11 million of those users purchased an iPhone XR at the minimum $749 starting price, Apple would have raked in $8.23 billion. And the revenue would’ve been even higher had these people purchased an iPhone XS at $999, earning Apple at least $10.98 billion.

These numbers are in line with the the $5-9 billion in revenue correction Cook advised in his call with investors.

Per Gruber, Apple reportedly only expected to replace “1-2 million battery replacements normally,” but instead saw a 10x increase.

As is always the case, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how Apple was totally blindsided by an increase in battery replacements. Gruber has a guess, though.

“The effect of the battery replacement program on new iPhone sales wasn’t apparent until after the iPhone XR and XS models were available,” says Gruber. “A few million extra iPhone users happy with the performance of their old iPhones with new batteries — who would have otherwise upgraded to a new iPhone this year — put a ding in the bottom line.”

What does consumer awareness on battery replacements mean for the future of the iPhone? More lost sales because customers could choose to get a battery replacement (even at $69 for iPhone X and newer and $49 for iPhone 8 Plus and older)?

It’ll certainly be something analysts and pundits will watch closely in 2019 and beyond, especially since Apple is no longer reporting unit sales for iPhones. 

The reality is: smartphones have plateaued. Yes, new models are have better screens, bigger batteries, faster performance cooler designs (some without notches!) and cost more, but the group of people who need the most cutting-edge technology is diminishing. Phones have been good enough for a while and for most people, they just need it to work. A cheap $50 battery replacement is a drop in the bucket compared to forking out $1,000 for a new iPhone.

At the same time, these changes in the market aren’t a sign that phones with user-replaceable batteries will return. No, they’re never coming back. Removable batteries have no place in a world where phones are built to such tight tolerances. Hate to burst the bubble on that dream.

Where Apple can make up for a drop in existing iPhone owners buying new iPhones is services. Apple’s ecosystem lock-in is the strongest there is with features like iMessage, FaceTime, and Apple Music augmenting the cost of a device. 

An iPhone user can be tapped to subscribe to a service such as Apple Music if Apple can provide content that isn’t available anywhere else. It would essentially be stealing the Netflix playbook. Additionally, hooking existing users on it services further locks them into Apple’s “walled garden” and makes it less attractive to jump ship to another ecosystem such as Android.

Cook’s outlook has always been for the long-term and creating a loyal and valued customer that maybe won’t buy every new device, but won’t switch either. Providing new services such as the rumored video streaming service the company’s reportedly building keeps these people in the Apple playpen, which’ll make them upgraders down the road. Apple’s not just investing in customers today or tomorrow, but trying to make sure it keep the customers for the next five, ten, and more.

Teresa Camacho Badani’s boots brimmed with water after slogging through flowing streams in Bolivia’s mountainous cloud forest. It had been a taxing day searching for an elusive frog that potentially still inhabited the gushing streams here — though the species hadn’t been spotted in 10 years. She was exhausted.

But she stepped into one last stream, and found a wild-eyed, orange-bellied Sehuencas water frog. She screamed.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Badani, the chief of herpetology at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny, said over the phone from her office in Bolivia.

At a time when conservation news is repeatedly dour and current extinction numbers are between 100 to 1,000 times that of the natural, expected rate, the discovery of this female frog (along with four others) provides a dose of cautious optimism.

No one knows how many of these rare frogs still exist in the wild, said Badani. But it’s undoubtedly few. So conservationists at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny will now attempt to expand the water frogs’ population in captivity — now that they have females.

For 10 years, the museum kept watch over a lone male Sehuencas water frog, which they nicknamed Romeo. And after raising funds to support intrepid expeditions into the remote forest (Badani and her team spent three hours pushing their car out of a muddy river), Badani’s four-person team, comprised of veterinarians and biologists, ventured into the wilderness. 

SEE ALSO: George is dead and his species likely extinct. It’s the loss of a ‘crown jewel of evolution.’

Once the water frogs are healthy and habituated, the captive breeding program will begin. They now have three males and three females.

But the species is by no means saved. Like many critters globally, the Sehuencas water frog is victim of a depleted habitat. Big swaths of its already-limited ecological niche are being cleared away, largely for plantations and agriculture. These agricultural ventures aren’t always necessarily bad — people in remote regions need to find ways to support themselves. But it’s happening in Sehuencas’ habitat.

Many of the images of the frogs’ forest home are burgeoning with vibrant green forest. But “the pictures are deceiving,” said Badani. This pristine wilderness is vanishing. 

And it’s not just the Sehuencas water frog that’s suffering. Before finding their first frog at the day’s end, the conservationists hadn’t even spotted another frog species. 

“It was empty,” said Badani. 

But now, they have an improved hope to raise a population of these depleted frogs. The next step — if the captive breeding proves successful — is finding protected habitat for the frogs to survive.

It’s an ambitious effort to preserve the world’s color and biodiversity, up in the cloud forests where the orange-bellied water frogs roam the streams, and hop through waterfalls.