Luke Dormehl - page 76

Apple and other tech giants this week participated in a White House conference call discussing with the Trump administration their role in grappling with the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

The conference call took place Wednesday, hosted by US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios. In addition to Apple, other attendees included representatives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Twitter. Kratios’ focus was on getting these companies to remove fake news relating to the outbreak. But it wants them to help out elsewhere, too.

Apple is one of 40 companies to sign an open letter published Wednesday by the Human Rights Campaign. The letter protests U.S. bills that will target the LGBTQ community — in particular trans people.

One such bill is the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act. This was passed last week by the Alabama Senate in Tim Cook’s home state. It would make it a felony for doctors to prescribe puberty-blockers or hormones to minors. Companies signing the letter say that legislation such as this does not reflect their values.

Ahead of its debut on Apple TV+ April 24, Apple has dropped the official trailer for Beastie Boys Story, its upcoming feature length documentary on the pioneering American hip hop group.

Beastie Boys Story is directed by Spike Jonze, the music video, feature film and documentary director who first worked with the band on the music video for Sabotage.

Classic video game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night landed in the App Store last week and, boy, is it great!

The 23-year-old side-scroller pits Dracula’s half-son Alucard against the evil count himself. The game, widely regarded as one of the best video games of all time, has made its way onto various games platforms over the years. Now you can finally play it on your iPhone. Frankly, that’s the best news I’ve heard in ages.

Apple is reportedly introducing new measures at Apple Stores designed to help avoid the spread of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.

According to a report by Apple Insider, Apple Stores will be limiting the number of customers who can enter its retail stores at any one time. It is also reducing customer seating by half, and introducing “social distancing” protocols in which employees are asked to stay three feet away from customers and each other.

Democrat lawmakers want Apple and other tech giants to rethink their stance on menstruation-tracking apps.

In a letter sent Tuesday to Apple, Google, and Samsung, New Jersey senator Bob Menendez and representatives Bonnie Coleman and Mikie Sherrill voiced their concern about menstruation- and fertility-tracking apps which share user health data without permission.

The spread of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus might have negatively impacted iPhone sales in China, but it may have also helped boost demand for iPads in the country.

According to a new report, iPads have experienced a surge in demand as families buy the tablets to carry out e-learning at home due to coronavirus-related school closures.

The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak may be continuing apace, but Apple manufacturers are getting back to work.

According to two new reports published Wednesday, Apple contract manufacturers Compal Electronics and Wistron are joining Foxconn in planning for production levels to return to normal by the end of March. Apple’s A-series chipmaker TSMC is also gearing up to start producing its new 5-nanometer chips.

The chances of Apple having to cancel — or drastically change the format of — its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) have ramped up significantly, with Santa Clara County banning all mass gatherings.

Both Apple’s Cupertino campus and the WWDC venue in San Jose fall within those county limits. The ban, announced Monday night, is currently planned to last for only three weeks. However if the spread of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus continues it’s highly possible that gets extended.

Apple’s “game-changing” Shot on iPhone ad campaign typically ranges from a single image to a short film such as Lady Gaga’s latest music video. Things have certainly ramped up for the latest installment, however.

In Apple’s newest Shot on iPhone video, debuted Monday, it depicts a beautifully filmed after-hours tour through the iconic State Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Total running time? Five hours, 19 minutes, and 28 seconds. This includes more than 45 galleries and even a live ballet sequence.

You can check it out below. (There’s also a 90-second teaser if you happen not to have five hours to watch the whole thing.)

A music licensing company accuses Apple, Spotify, Google, SoundCloud, and other streaming services of entering into a price-fixing “conspiracy” to keep streaming music prices at anticompetitive levels.

Pro Music Rights (PMR) filed the complaint Monday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut. PMR previously filed a lawsuit against Apple in December for allegedly streaming copyrighted music without the necessary permissions.

Apple’s iPhone sales declined to just 494,000 in China during February as the country grappled with the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, official figures from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology published Monday show.

Samsung had trucks of apples delivered to its offices and placed in rooms where employees took coffee breaks. They were then encouraged to take a literal bite out of Apple (or, well, an apple) as the South Korean tech giant waged war with the Cupertino-based tech giant.

The anecdote comes from a forthcoming book, titled Samsung Rising. It promises to tell the story of how Samsung took on Apple and the battles that followed. “We had one objective: beat Apple,” says an unnamed Samsung executive in the book. “I’m not kidding you.”

The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus could hurt Apple’s plans to launch its first 5G iPhones in the second half of 2020, a new report claims.

According to a DigiTimes report Monday, Apple extended restrictions on employees traveling to parts of Asia until the end of April. The extension will delay tests for the next-generation iPhone that “could have a direct impact” on launch timing.

Apple may soon add to the health-tracking features in Apple Watch with the ability to detect users’ blood oxygen levels and notify users when these are at a dangerously low level.

9to5Mac discovered the potential feature in iOS 14 “code snippets” it discovered. It’s not clear exactly what the hardware and software requirements would be for the feature. That means it’s unknown if this would be a feature that could be retroactively added to existing Apple Watches or if it would be one limited to Apple’s next-gen Apple Watch.

Apple-owned movie The Banker is due to land on Apple TV+ later this month. But if you want to catch it on the big screen, you can do so starting today.

The movie, which is based on a true story, stars Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson as Bernard Garrett and Joe Morris, two of the first African-American bankers in the United States. To combat systematic racism during the Jim Crow era, they hire a white man (Nicholas Hoult) as the face of their business while posing as a chauffeur and janitor.

With plenty of scaremongering about the COVID-19 coronavirus, Apple is doing its part to stop the spread of misinformation related to the outbreak. According to a report published Thursday, Apple is cracking down on non-official apps relating to the novel coronavirus.

Those are apps not made by recognized institutions such as governments or hospitals. Independent apps providing functionality like tracking of the outbreak’s spread are being rejected by Apple, developers claim.

Episode one of Steven Spielberg’s anthology series Amazing Stories debuted on Apple TV+ Friday.

The first episode of the five-episode season is about a person who discovers a portal back to 1919 in the storm cellar of a house they are restoring. The show promises to “transport the audience to worlds of wonder through the lens of today’s most imaginative filmmakers, directors and writers.”

Apple’s biggest contract manufacturer, Foxconn, endured a rough February as the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak worsened in China.

The company, which is also the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, suffered its biggest monthly drop in revenue in around seven years. Its earnings, announced Thursday, show an 18.1% decline in revenue versus the same period last year. This marks the company’s third straight month of decline.

Apple’s iPhone SE 2 could be pushed back beyond the March release some were expecting as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak causing disruption in Apple’s supply chain.

A report published Thursday claims that Apple has deferred orders for the flexible printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the low-cost handset. Orders initially scheduled for the first quarter have been delayed until the second.

At $1.3 trillion these days, Apple’s a pretty darn valuable company. But how much could you have netted had you been smart enough to invest in the company in December 1980 when the stock first went public?

Obviously that depends on how much you’d have invested in the Cupertino computer company, and how long you had the nerve to keep the stock. A new report by CashNetUSA ran the numbers for a $1,000 investment in 1980. And, well, you’d be pretty happy with the results.

Apple’s supply chain might be suffering due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, but that isn’t stopping things moving forward for the iPhone SE.

According to a report published Thursday, the new entry level LCD iPhone has entered the final stages of engineering validation in Zhengzhou, China. That’s the stage at which the finalized hardware is tested and validated. Should all go according to plan, it will then undergo design validation and testing, prior to going into mass manufacturing.

Want $5 for free? Of course you do — and thanks to Wells Fargo, you can claim it. Provided that you use Apple Pay or another digital wallet, that is.

From now through March 5, 2021, customers who access a Wells Fargo ATM using the debit card in their digital wallet for the first time will earn five bucks. Here’s how you get your hands on the loot.

Police arrested an alleged iPhone thief after the device’s rightful owner used the Find My app to track down the missing handset.

A 21-year-old Madison, Wisconsin, resident left a bar on Sunday, only to notice that her debit card, driver’s license and iPhone X were missing, according to WKOW. When her card was used later, she visited the location of the purchase — and managed to get surveillance footage of the suspected thief.

App Store Confidential, the recently released German-language book written by a former App Store manager, is seemingly so confidential that even Apple won’t reveal the bits it thinks are classified, according to legal counsel representing the book’s publisher.