On Trevor Noah’s Daily Social Distancing Show, the comedian addressed Apple’s decision to make it easier for users to skip Face ID for passcodes on their iPhone, due to the challenges of unlocking them while wearing a protective mask.
“This is the genius of Apple,” he said. “They’re trying to take us back in time. Because if we’re back in time, there’s no corona.” Check out the clip below.
Cynthia Hogan, Apple’s VP for public policy and government affairs, is helping pick Joe Biden’s running mate for the U.S. presidential campaign.
Hogan previously worked as Biden’s White House and Senate counsel. Now she’s working alongside former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, congresswoman Lisa Blunt and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to find Biden’s pick for vice president.
With coronavirus lockdown, new streaming TV content is more appreciated than ever. Fortunately, Apple TV+ has loaded up on new content for another packed week of new shows. Debuting Friday are all eight episodes of the first season of new comedy series Trying.
There’s also episode four of the excellent Chris Evans-starring drama series Defending Jacob. That should be enough to fill at least part of the weekend!
Warren Buffett may be one of the shrewdest financial minds of our time, but don’t expect him to be able to use an iPhone. Despite receiving a personal lesson from Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“I went out to California, and Tim Cook very patiently spent hours trying to move me up to the level of the average two-year-old,” Buffett told Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer. “And didn’t quite make it.”
iPadOS 13 introduced native support for opening multiple windows of the same app side by side. Now, seven months after iPadOS 13.1 officially shipped to users, Microsoft has started beta-testing the ability for iPad users to do this on Word and PowerPoint for iPad.
Microsoft shared the news in a blog post detailing how users can “take advantage” of the new (for Microsoft) feature. Here’s how you do it:
A group of app developers have set up a new lobbyist association called the App Coalition. This independent group will lobby Congress regarding issues relating to app developers.
A Bloomberg report, published Wednesday, notes that nine mobile app developers have banded together for the new organization. The new lobbying group is distinct from the App Association, already sponsored by Apple, Microsoft, and others.
What could be better than a mobile app that lets you play masses of games, like an old-school arcade squeezed onto your iPhone? A mobile app that lets you play masses of games and make your own new ones.
That’s what Swedish developer Martin Magni created with Fancade, a new iOS app launching Thursday. It offers a huge collection of mini-games, all created using the app itself, along with a drag-and-drop game-maker that lets you create your own.
According to a new report from Digitimes Research, global tablet shipments will climb 45.5% sequentially and 9.9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2020, reflecting the recovery of China’s supply chain and backed-up demand for tablets for e-learning.
Apple, which retained its position as the world’s no. 1 tablet maker in early 2020, is reported to “significantly increase” iPad orders for Q2.
Social video app TikTok isn’t just a big hit on iOS. According to new data published Wednesday by app analytics platform Sensor Tower, it’s an unprecedented hit — having enjoyed the best quarter of any app ever.
The firm says that TikTok has now been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally across both the App Store and Google Play Store. This comes just five months after it passed the 1.5 billion downloads milestone.
To lend a helping hand during coronavirus lockdown, Google Wednesday announced that it will be making its premium videoconferencing service Google Meet free to users starting in the next few weeks.
Google Meet is the business-oriented version of Google Hangouts. It supports up to 100 callers with no time limits on conversations, making it a good enterprise-focused video chat tool. While normally Google Meet comes with a price tag attached, it’s now free to all Google users through September 30.
Spotify has 163 million free, ad-supported users, and an impressive 130 million paid subscribers, the streaming music giant announced Wednesday in its financial earnings for Q1 2020. These premium subscribers are up 6 million from the end of the previous quarter, and 30 million year-on-year.
While Apple hasn’t released updated Apple Music subscriber figures for a while now, it last announced 60 million paying customers last summer. Although Apple Music has reportedly experienced a nice bump while people are stuck home during lockdown, that suggests that Spotify is still enjoying a comfortable lead in the streaming war.
iPhone achieved 78 percent growth in India’s fast-growing smartphone market year-on-year for the first quarter of 2020, new figures from Counterpoint Research suggest.
While Apple is still a tiny fraction of the Indian smartphone market, that makes the iPhone the third fastest-growing brand in the country, following Realme and Oppo. There’s still a long way to go before it can threaten the top-selling likes of Xiaomi, Vivo, and Samsung, however.
Apple agreed to pay $18 million to claimants in a California class-action lawsuit that argued Cupertino broke FaceTime on older iPhone devices to save money.
The court filing, made Monday, means that members of the class action each will receive a whopping $3 for their troubles. However, that amount could increase if some members fail to cash their checks. The remainder of the money will cover lawyer fees and other costs.
The half-hour reunion special of Parks and Recreation, airing this Thursday, was entirely shot on iPhone due to the challenges of production during the current coronavirus pandemic.
The logistics of getting the episode together were “very difficult,” co-creator Mike Schur told trade publication Variety. Not only did the special have to be written in under three days, but it then had to be directed via Zoom, with the cast filming themselves using a “little rig with a tripod,” an iPhone, light, and microphone.
Simon Property Group, the biggest mall owner in the United States, will reopen 49 of its shopping centers in early May — potentially bringing 13 now-shuttered Apple Stores back online.
The locations span across seven states, in major cities including Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis and Austin, Texas.
Video-calling apps are booming right now, but which ones can you trust when it comes to security? A Mozilla report published Tuesday assesses all the major platforms, noting which apps do and do not pass the privacy-conscious foundation’s minimum security standards.
The big takeaway? Most of the top video conferencing apps, FaceTime included, are actually impressively secure. But there are a few outliers.
The coronavirus pandemic might have wreaked havoc on the economy, but consumer spending on tech gadgets actually seems to be up during lockdown. Like, way up.
According to NPD analyst Stephen Baker, there was a surprising 23% hike in consumer tech sales year-on-year for the week ending April 18. That compares to an overall decline of 23% across all industries the firm tracks.
With coronavirus lockdown stopping a large number of public gatherings, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, took a high-tech approach to addressing the nation on Israel’s Independence Day Tuesday: he used augmented reality.
With the aid of augmented reality and volumetric video, Rivlin found a way to visit every home in the country. Now that’s one form of democracy that the AR-loving Apple could surely get on board with!
Apple makes technology so intuitive that even a kid can pick it up and use its basic features without too many problems. But they probably shouldn’t be able to find feature-breaking bugs, right?
According to a recent Reddit post, an 8-year-old kid was able to find a workaround to the Screen Time restrictions that let parents block out access to apps like YouTube. This feature was introduced in iOS 12 to record the amount of time users spend looking at their devices. It also lets parents better control what their offspring are doing on an iOS device.
Well, at least it does in theory…
In a video update to Apple employees, Deidre O’Brien, VP of retail and people, says that “many more” Apple Stores will start reopening next month.
In comments shared by Bloomberg, O’Brien said that: “We are continuing to analyze this health situation in every location, and I do expect we will reopen up many more stores in May.” She didn’t state exactly which stores Apple would be reopening.
Have $499,000 to spare and looking to show off your Apple fandom credentials? A replica of the Apple-sponsored 1979 Porsche 935 K3 race car, which once raced at Le Mans, has shown up for sale online.
Apple sponsored the original car, operated by racing team Dick Barbour Racing, in 1980, only a few years into Apple’s history. That vehicle, which features the Apple Computer name and rainbow colors, is now part of radio host and podcaster Adam Corolla’s extensive car collection. While the model for sale here is just a replica, it’s still a pretty stunning collector’s piece — as suggested by the sizable asking price.
Germany has reportedly changed its mind over whether or not to embrace the decentralized approach to contact-tracing technology supported by Apple and Google.
As recently as the end of last week, Germany was backing a centralized standard technology called PEPP-PT. This stands for called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing. It has now seemingly switched its support to a “strongly decentralized” approach. This is the approach backed by Apple and Google.
It’s not just building new Apple devices that has slowed down with the coronavirus pandemic. According to a report published Monday, work on Apple’s new London HQ — located in the city’s iconic Battersea Power Station — has also been impacted by COVID-19 lockdown.
CNBC‘s article notes that work on both Apple and Google’s individual new London headquarters have ground to a halt, with both now “turned into ghost towns.”
The iPhone SE does a great job of taking the body of the iPhone 8 and infusing it with some of iPhone 11’s cutting-edge tech. But not every feature carried across to Apple’s new budget phone. For instance, the iPhone SE lacks the ability to take Portrait photos of pets.
That’s somewhat confusing, since iPhone SE’s Portrait mode works impressively. Fortunately, updates to a pair of highly rated apps will let iPhone SE owners take Portrait photos of nonhumans for just a few bucks.
A 2020 iPhone SE teardown shows just how similar the new phone is to the iPhone 8. Many — but not all — components of the new handset are totally swappable with the 2017 iPhone, according to a weekend report from iFixit.
The iPhone SE’s cameras, SIM tray, Taptic Engine and display assembly can be directly swapped out with the iPhone 8. However, not all parts are so switchable. The iPhone SE’s battery might look the same, but it won’t work on the earlier iPhone due to a different logic board connector.