After more than a year of calling it “top of the list” in the company’s priorities, Apple today announced that it is partnering with China UnionPay to bring Apple Pay to China, the country Tim Cook has been outspoken about calling Apple’s biggest market of the future.
Apple today announced a bit of a corporate reshuffle — with Jeff Williams named Chief Operating Officer, VP of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji getting a boost up to Senior Vice President level, and Phil Schiller expanding his role as Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing to include running the App Store across all platforms.
Ten employees of Apple manufacturer Pegatron have been jailed after stealing and selling 227 iPhones, 360 motherboards and 58 Apple batteries — with a total market value of $154,000.
3D Touch was the single biggest selling point of the iPhone 6s, so naturally every other smartphone vendor is tripping over themselves and each other to add their own version of Apple’s pressure-sensitive iPhone feature to their next handset.
Because of this, a new report claims that force sensing module shipments will grow by a whopping 317 percent in 2016 to reach 461 million units. As a result, almost one in four new smartphones shipped will include the technology.
Apple Music has a respectable 6.5 million subscribers right now, but respected music business analyst Mark Mulligan estimates that Apple’s streaming music service will come close to hitting 8 million subs by the end of this year — and a massive 20 million paying customers by the close of 2016.
In news which could well be good for Apple Music, but bad for rival free streaming music services, the federal Copyright Royalty Board has ruled that ad-supported internet radio companies such as Pandora must pay higher royalty rates to artists and record labels.
Starting next year, Pandora, iHeartMedia and others will pay 17 cents for every 100 plays of a song on their free tiers. This fee will increase over the following four years in line with inflation.
People who are hoping Apple will one day sever ties with Samsung as a supplier are likely to be sorely disappointed, as a new report states that Apple will be relying on OLED displays from Samsung Display when it makes the switch to OLED screens for future iPhones.
If you’ve been waiting to check out Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie (and, based on the dismal box office figures, people certainly haven’t rushed out to theaters), you’ve got a couple more months before you can watch it from the comfort of your own home.
Apple and IBM today announced that they have hit their partnership goal of creating more than 100 IBM MobileFirst iOS enterprise apps together. These so far cover 14 different industries and 65 individual professions — ranging from wealth advisors to flight attendants, first responders, nurses and retail buyers.
And the two companies aren’t finished yet!
Apple is allegedly using its secretive new lab facilities in Taiwan to develop microLED displays which are thinner and more energy-efficient than the displays currently used in the company’s products, a new report states.
Two years after it acquired Topsy, a San Francisco-based firm offering Twitter analytics to companies, Apple has officially shut down the service.
“We’ve searched our last tweet,” Topsy has noted on its official Twitter account. Topsy’s website redirects to an Apple support page detailing how users can use search features on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
With his ability to fire people up and get them motivated, Steve Jobs has been likened to a great football coach. And now to bring things full circle, a real football coach (or “soccer” to you American readers!) is using Jobs’ creation, the iPad, to help coach his players.
The coach in question is Gary Neville, who a new report claims has distributed iPads to the Valencia football team to teach them strategies on the pitch, while covering up for his lack of fluency in Spanish.
Hit-and-miss Apple analyst Gene Munster has admitted he couldn’t have been more wrong about the likely customer uptake of Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program, the $32+ per month scheme designed to get new iPhones into the hands of people happy to pay a monthly fee to Apple.
Microsoft has given its Outlook iOS app an overhaul — offering iPhone 6s owners the chance to use 3D Touch to create new emails and events, or access the calendar directly.
Apple has bought a former chip fabrication plant in North San Jose — shelling out $18.2 million for a 70,000 square-foot facility next door to Samsung Semiconductor’s new campus in the area.
Tesla CEO and all-around real-life Iron Man Elon Musk has been on quite the roll, making various verbal swipes at Apple as of late — and a new interview he gave to GQ doesn’t break the mold.
Describing Steve Jobs as “kind of a jerk,” and saying, “It’s not that I care about currying favor with Apple” before backing off his answers, the parts of Musk’s interview concerning Cupertino read like a textbook case in passive-aggressive behavior.
Whatever happened to the guy who thought an Apple Car was a “great idea?”
Apple has opened a secret production lab in northern Taiwan, developing screens for future iOS devices, a new report claims.
The company has reportedly hired talent from display makers AU Optronics and Qualcomm — the latter company having previously operated the building. By running its own display manufacturing facility, Apple hopes to reduce its reliance on third party suppliers such as Samsung, LG Display, Sharp, and Japan Display.
Having previously said that a verdict on Apple’s Irish tax arrangements would be announced by Christmas, a new report reveals that an announcement won’t be made until February next year after all.
The reason for the delay is additional supplementary questions sent by E.C. investigators, concerning whether or not Apple potentially underpaid on billions of euros of tax in a so-called “sweetheart” deal. The additional questions may relate to a new line of inquiry in the long-running investigation.
Apple’s iPhone business may have been stronger than ever in 2015, but — never fear — the Apple doom predictors are never far away.
In this case, the doom report comes from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty who predicts that iPhone sales will drop for the first time ever in 2016.
BBC’s iPlayer app has landed on Apple TV in the U.K., joining the other streaming set top boxes — such as Roku, Google Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV — for which it was already available.
The app includes a full catalog of programs from the past month, along with live-streaming of BBC TV stations, the ability to start watching a program on your iPhone or iPad and then switch to Apple TV or vice versa, and personalized recommendations.
Taylor Swift has announced that she will debut her new concert movie, The 1989 World Tour Live, on Apple Music — six months after her public spat with Apple over artist royalties.
“I have a little surprise for you,” Swift wrote on Twitter, with a link to the trailer of the upcoming behind-the-scenes concert documentary, which will also presumably include appearances from special tour guests such as Ellie Goulding, Justin Timberlake, Mick Jagger, and others.
Want a spectacular stat for a Friday? Apple stock has increased 22,250 percent since its IPO almost 35 years ago.
And the accompanying depressing thought: If you had taken the money a new Apple computer cost at the time and instead spent it on AAPL stock during its 1980 public offering, you’d be sitting on a personal fortune of $965,650 today — just a few dollars away from being a freshly-minted millionaire.
Security firms Symantec and FireEye say that 2016 is set to usher in an increase in the number of attacks on Apple systems — following a rise in the quantity of threats to Mac computers, and the more-than-doubling of iOS malware in 2015.
Apple is selling an enormous amount of iPhones right now, but in its efforts to get an extra holiday sales bump it’s pushing an unsolicited pop-up notification to owners of older iPhone handsets — informing them of how “ridiculously powerful” the iPhone 6s is.
What’s the opposite of an iPad Pro? Presumably it would be an iPad con — and if a new scheme proposed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice comes to fruition, there could be a whole lot of them.
The proposed project aims to give prisoners taxpayer-funded iPads so that they can video chat with their families, while also improving their numeracy and literacy skills.
Couldn’t we at least pretend prison is designed as a punishment, and hand convicts cheap Android tablets as a deterrent instead?