Apple opened its second and largest retail location in Thailand Friday. Located in Bangkok’s famous Ratchaprasong, the new store is spectacular even by the high standards of existing Apple Stores.
“In December, I visited the team in Bangkok as construction was underway, and I know they can’t wait to help our customers and to share this special space with the whole community,” Tim Cook tweeted in celebration.
Apple now offers a gift card that can be used at the Apple Store to buy hardware and also at the App Store to buy software. And iTunes is included as well.
Previously, the company sold separate cards, one for iTunes/App Store and another for the Apple Store.
Apple Watch Series 6 reportedly will come with a blood oxygen sensor capable of measuring the amount of oxygen being carried by a wearer’s red blood cells.
Making sure the balance of oxygen-saturated blood is at the correct levels is crucial to a person’s health.
Apple TV+ today released the latest episode of its series Little Voice.
Producer J.J. Abrams’ series, created with songwriter Sara Bareilles and writer Jessie Nelson, is about aspiring singer Bess King and her attempts to forge a path for herself as a singer.
Alongside the new episode, Apple TV+ also has the first two episodes of Oprah’s new show The Oprah Conversation.
Apple has defied the odds by consistently growing its business through the COVID-19. But just how amazing that is isn’t apparent until you compare Apple’s iPhone success in Q2 to other smartphone makers.
According to a new report by research company Canalys, Apple was the only vendor to grow its smartphone shipments during the April through June quarter. Apple shipments increased 25% from the previous year. That made it the only smartphone maker to experience positive growth during the period.
Facebook is concerned that one of the big new features in iOS 14 will hurt the social networking giant’s ad-targeting business model.
As reported by CNBC, Facebook CFO David Wehner said Thursday that Apple’s new feature for the upcoming operating system, which allows users to see how activity is being tracked across apps and websites, will make things tough on Facebook ads.
People around the world turned to Apple products at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. And the result was an 11% increase in Apple revenue during the June quarter. Some products contributed to that growth more than others.
The pandemic sent people buying Mac and iPad in huge numbers. But it hurt handset sales, despite a relatively strong launch for the iPhone SE. And Apple services experienced something of an off quarter, too.
The 2020 iPhones likely won’t arrive until October at the earliest, Apple said during Thursday’s earnings call.
“Last year we started selling new iPhones in late September,” said Apple CFO Luca Maestri. “This year, we project supply to be available a few weeks later.”
Apple’s board of directors has approved a four-to-one stock split, the company said Thursday. AAPL stock, which closed Thursday at $384.76, should go for around $100 a share when the split occurs in late August.
The news, revealed in Apple’s blowout Q3 2020 earnings report, means investors with one share at close of business on Aug. 24 will be given three additional shares trading at one-fourth the price. It’s basically a psychological move that makes Apple stock seem more affordable.
Apple took in $59.7 billion in revenue last quarter, an annual increase of 11%. That solidly beats the estimates of analysts, who predicted a drop in revenue as the iPhone-maker, and the rest of the world, grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Very strong increases in revenue from Mac and iPad significantly pushed up the total.
For the second time, a season of The Morning Show is having to be completely rewritten to reflect sweeping global changes.
The Apple TV+ show had to be virtually rebooted prior to the filming of Season 1 due to the #MeToo movement and the firing of TV host Matt Lauer as the result of sexual impropriety accusations. Now Deadline reveals that Season 2 is also being rewritten — this time to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple agreed to halve its App Store fee for Amazon so the company would bring its Prime Video app to iOS and Apple TV, emails reveal (.pdf).
Apple exec Eddy Cue and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos personally negotiated the deal in 2016, it was revealed during Wednesday’s antitrust hearing looking into tech giants’ business practices. They agreed that Apple would get a 15% revenue cut from day one for customers who signed up through the app. Apple normally gets a 30% cut for the first year of an app’s subscription. It then claims a 15% commission for subsequent years.
Popular secure messaging app Telegram filed a formal antitrust complaint with the European Union over App Store practices, the Financial Times reports.
In a complaint addressed to EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager, Telegram’s creators argue that Apple must “allow users to have the opportunity of downloading software outside of the App Store.”
Apple’s 30% commission on certain apps is one of the main areas Apple CEO Tim Cook was grilled on during Wednesday’s U.S. House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing.
However, according to internal emails revealed as part of the inquiry, Apple previously considered increasing its cut from 30% to 40% in some cases.
Apple CEO Tim Cook mostly avoided questioning during Wednesday’s historic congressional antitrust hearing on the business practices of Big Tech.
Cook took only a handful of questions from the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. Lawmakers directed most of their questioning — which capped a year-long investigation into antitrust issues — at Cook’s fellow CEOs from Facebook, Google and Amazon.
When Apple reports its fiscal third-quarter earnings Thursday, the world will learn how the company is doing in the middle of a global pandemic.
Analysts predict a drop in revenue. But Apple itself previously said it’s seeing an increase in Mac and iPad sales. And investors have pushed the stock up almost 30% this year.
The Attorney General of Arizona is reportedly looking into Apple’s practice of slowing down the performance of older iPhones to preserve battery life.
Apple admitted it was doing this back in 2017, and gave users control of if and when it happens. But the investigation by the Arizona AG goes on.
Google on Wednesday committed to a free iOS app that lets iPhone users automatically back up photos, videos, contacts and calendar events. This goes into the 15GB of free storage offered by this company.
This will compete with a service offered by Apple to do the same.
Apple CEO Tim Cook defended App Store business practices and said his company treats all software developers equally as he faced questioning Wednesday in front of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee.
Cook said it’s in Apple’s best interest to treat devs fairly. The company wants the best and brightest to write iOS apps, he said, because killer software proves essential for a company engaged in a “street fight for market share in the smartphone business.”
Anyone wanting a serious dose of nostalgia should install a just-released emulator of a classic Apple desktop computer running Mac OS 8, first released in 1997. There’s even a bunch of games and productivity applications from the same era.
Spotify’s Q2 earnings showed largely positive growth, although the streaming music giant suffered a 21% decline in ad revenue and a 48% rise in operating costs due to deals like its $100 million licensing deal for The Joe Rogan Experience.
Total monthly active users on the platform grew to 299 million, while paid subscribers increased to 138 million. Apple Music, which does not operate a free listening tier (outside of Beats 1 radio), last reported 60 million paid subscribers in June 2019 when it had passed 60 million.
A new deal means that movie fans won’t be waiting as long to see Universal Pictures movies pop up for sale on iTunes and other digital platforms after their theatrical debut.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, an agreement between theater chain AMC Entertainment and Universal means that the theatrical exclusivity window will be cut from 75 days to just 17 days. This means certain titles will be available after just 2.5 weeks after they first arrived in theaters.
Get ready for some high plains drifting because Mario Kart Tour is headed west. To the Wild West, more precisely!
Having travelled all over the world in previous updates, the mobile-focused version of Mario Kart is now going back in time to frontier country with its latest update. And it’s brought some appropriately themed characters along for the ride over yonder.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will argue that his company does not dominate any market in which it does business when he appears before the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee Wednesday, according to his opening statement released ahead of time (.pdf).
While Cook will say that “scrutiny is reasonable and appropriate,” he will assert that Apple refuses to make “concession on the facts” by agreeing that it is a monopoly. If anything, Cook will argue that Apple is no gatekeeper, but, through the App Store, has actually opened the gate to developers.
When Apple CEO Tim Cook takes questions from Congress on Wednesday, he’ll surely get an earful of software developers’ complaints about how the App Store operates. Chief among the criticisms will likely be the fact that Apple charges a percentage of revenue earned from in-app sales.
There’s not a bit of justification for any of these highly publicized complaints. They come from companies that want to have their cake and eat it, too.