As 2020 thankfully sputters to its conclusion, Apple has released its list of the year’s best 15 apps and games “notable for their positive cultural impact, helpfulness, and importance.”
The App Store Best of 2020 winners cover a multitude of areas — from the Zoom app that more or less defined the year of lockdown to streaming service Disney+ to a nifty sleep app.
Fans of Defending Jacob and Servant listen up: Apple has ordered a new psychological thriller series titled Surface. The show, which likely won’t debut on Apple TV+ until 2022, stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw, already known to Apple TV+ viewers as Hannah Shoenfeld in The Morning Show.
The series is written and exec-produced by Veronica West, who has previously worked on Mercy, Brothers & Sisters, Hart of Dixie and State of Affairs.
Apple was one of several large companies that reportedly lobbied to weaken a bill that sought to bar U.S. companies from making products in China with the aid of forced Uighur labor, according to The New York Times.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act passed the House with a 406-3 margin in September, and has the necessary support to pass the Senate. It aims to ban U.S. companies from importing products made in the Xinjiang region unless the manufacturers can prove they do not use forced labor.
Apple has delivered millions of units of personal protective equipment to the Ministry of Health in Zambia to fight the spread of COVID-19.
In response to the coronavirus, Apple earlier this year started sending its charitable donations through the (Red) nonprofit to help the Global Fund provide critical support to health systems most threatened by the pandemic. This will continue through June 30, 2021.
Apple still hasn’t announced a date for its MagSafe Duo charger, which could stir fears among more nervous fans of a repeat of the much delayed, ill-fated AirPower charger of a few years back.
Have no fear, though: If an Apple reseller in Switzerland is to be believed, we don’t have too much longer to wait until the MagSafe Duo will be shipping.
“You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you!”
That’s the Charlton Heston-pounding-his-fist-dispairingly-into-the-sand sentiment that shot through my mind when I saw what Apple did to the Clock app in iOS 14. Specifically, Apple ruined the app’s alarm feature, making it so unintuitive that you’ll struggle to believe it was made by the company that coined the phrase “it just works.”
How did Apple manage to take an app that worked spectacularly well and screw it up?
An ultra-rare Apple-1, the first computer Apple ever produced as a company, is coming up for auction. And it’s signed by none other than designer and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
This Apple-1, one of only a handful of the computers thought to exist today, has been restored to an operational state. It comes in its original shipping box, making it an even less common specimen. It could be yours for no more than the price of a typical mid-priced American home.
Apple has reportedly declined to sign on to a new French initiative that asks big tech companies to commit to paying their “fair share” of tax.
French President Emmanuel Macron has set up a “Tech for Good Call” that will seek to implement these changes. However, while Google, Microsoft, Facebook and 72 other companies have joined, Apple and Amazon haven’t signed on yet.
As great as it is to see brand new games arrive in the App Store, it’s in some ways even better when a game you enjoyed as a fresh-faced young person, eyes shining excitedly at the prospect of life stretching ahead of you, gets ported to iOS. What better way to relive misspent youth?
The latest title set to receive this treatment is Square Enix’s SaGa Frontier, an RPG which found relative fame on the PlayStation (that’s right, young people: the first PlayStation) back in the late 1990s. Look for SaGa Frontier Remastered to arrive on iOS (alongside Android, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC) in summer 2021.
Check out the trailer.
Italy’s competition authority has fined Apple 10 million euros ($12 million) for allegedly misleading customers about just how water-resistant iPhones are.
Apple claims that several of its iPhone models can withstand being submerged for up to 30 minutes. However, the competition body says that this is only with pure water in a lab. Such tests supposedly yield different results from real-world scenarios in which a phone may be dropped into water.
Apple is making inroads in taking over Samsung’s home turf. Well, sort of.
Cupertino is getting ready to open its second brick-and-mortar Apple store in South Korea, home to Samsung. The store will be located in the main finance district of Seoul, Korea’s capital city. Apple Yeouido is located in the upscale IFC Mall Seoul. No exact opening date has yet been announced.
Mariah Carey is doing her bit to make this holiday season a bit more festive — courtesy of an upcoming Christmas special for Apple TV+. And she’s bringing a whole lot of friends with her.
In a sneak preview posted on Twitter with the message “One week to go,” Carey showed what we can expect from the upcoming Magical Christmas Special, arriving on Apple TV+ December 4.
Alongside Mariah, it will include appearances by (deep breath) Tiffany Haddish, Billy Eichner, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Hudson, Snoop Dogg, Jermaine Dupri, Misty Copeland, and plenty of others.
The Apple TV app, which includes Apple TV+ and iTunes, is now available on Sony television sets from 2020, 2019, and high-end 2018 models. Sony initially introduced the Apple TV app to its XH90 (X900H) TV model in October. However, it has now greatly expanded this rollout to cover a large number of its other television models.
In addition to Sony TVs, the Apple TV app is available on certain LG and Samsung TVs, Amazon Fire, Vizio, Roku TVs, and games consoles. That’s in addition to its availability on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV set-top boxes.
Cherry, a movie starring Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo, and directed by Avengers: Endgame helmers the Russo brothers, will debut on Apple TV+ on March 12.
A break from the Russo’s typical blockbuster fare (Endgame is the highest grossing movie of all time), Cherry is described by Vanity Fair as a “smaller, more intimate” movie, based on the bestselling 2018 novel of the same name by Nico Walker. This already has the makings of one of Apple TV+’s biggest hits of 2021.
Apple improved its processors’ performance by a massive 3x in the past five years, according to analysis carried out by AnandTech. Meanwhile, Intel’s best single-thread performance only improved 28% during that same time frame.
The stats help cement why the risky jump from Intel to Apple Silicon in Macs makes a whole lot of sense.
Apple’s Online Store is down ahead of today’s “One More Thing” event. When it returns after today’s virtual event, expect to see details of various new Apple products — including the company’s first Apple Silicon Macs, the first to feature Apple in-house CPUs.
Yes, Apple could easily update its website in real time without taking it offline for a few hours. But where’s the fun and drama in that?
Like most tech giants, Apple and Google have a strange “coopetition” relationship, whereby they simultaneously compete and work together.
The latest example? Google, the company that spawned the rival Android mobile operating system, was the top developer in Apple’s iOS App Store last month.
The last thing you need when you’re a manufacturer trying desperately to deliver orders for Apple is to be hit with a ransomware attack. According to a new report, that’s exactly what happened to Compal, maker of MacBooks, over the weekend — when it was reportedly hit with a massive $17 million extortion attempt.
The firm says that it was simply an “abnormality” in its system, but Taiwanese media claims that it was a cyberattack. This has seemingly been backed up by the website BleepingComputer, which obtained the ransomware note.
Maxing out (no pun intended) at $1,399 for the 512GB iPhone 12 Pro Max, Apple’s top-of-the-line iPhone isn’t cheap. But if you live in the United States, you can consider yourself lucky.
That’s because a list assembled by the website TechnoBlog highlights the places in the world where the iPhone 12 is most eye-wateringly (iWateringly?) expensive. The U.S. price looks like a bargain by comparison.
The first reviews of the iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 mini make both of them sound like winners. However, the two devices — which occupy opposite ends of the size spectrum — also elicit some caveats.
Many of the comments sound the same as earlier first impressions of the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. But some unique observations apply specifically to Apple’s very large and very small handsets.
Here’s what the early reviewers made of the iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 mini.
For the first time in three years, Samsung sold more smartphones than Apple in the United States in the third calendar quarter of the year, market researchers at Strategy Analytics claim in a new report.
Apple accounted for a 30.2 percent market share of the U.S. smartphone market in Q3 2020. However, it lost out slightly to Samsung which made up 33.7 percent of the marketshare. The last time Samsung beat Apple in Apple’s home country market was Q2 2017.
Apple has placed Pegatron, one of its largest manufacturing partners, on probation after discovering the company violated Apple’s supplier code of contact. This relates to the unauthorized use of students carrying out overtime and night shifts.
Pegatron employees reportedly went “to extraordinary lengths” to cover up the wrongdoing. Apple has said that the manufacturing giant won’t get any new work from Apple until corrective action is made. However, it will continue building current iPhone handsets as per previous orders from Apple.
What do you do when you pick up some food in the store, and want to quickly check how good or bad it is for you? You glance at the nutrition label, of course.
Throughout the last century, mandated labels on food forced manufacturers to reveal more and more information about the contents of their products — and their effects on people who consume them. Now Apple is bringing that same level of insight to apps in the App Store.
It’s about time!
As apps become ever more central to our lives — with increasing access to our most sensitive personal data — transparency about exactly how developers use that information is becoming more necessary than ever.
A class action lawsuit against Apple claims that the company hid news of declining iPhone demand in China, thereby triggering billions of dollars lost on the part of investors.
The case, brought against Apple by a UK pension fund, has been given the go-ahead by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. It concerns comments made by Tim Cook during an investor call back in 2018.
You know that a tech accessory has become ubiquitous when people start inventing special custom vacuum cleaner/grabber devices purely to pick up ones that have been dropped.
That’s apparently what has happened in Japan, where a new report claims the East Japan Railways has began developing just such a cleanup device due to the frequency of this problem occurring — and the unsuitability of traditional “grabbers” for retrieving them.