Apple’s new streaming music service is coming under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for possible anti-competitive practices.
The recently launched Apple Music costs $9.99 per subscription (or $14.99 for an up-to-six-person family plan), with the first three months free. Competing services like Spotify or Rdio are subject to Apple’s 30 percent take from any app sold on the App Store, which makes the FTC uncomfortable, as Apple Music is not subject to the same rules.
Apple’s earnings fell just shy of Wall Street’s expectations for third-quarter revenue despite continued strong sales of the iPhone 6, which helped the company bring in $49.6 billion in gross revenue and $10.7 billion in profit.
Perhaps even worse for AAPL, the company’s fourth-quarter revenue forecast fell short of analysts’ best guesstimates.
Along with the release of new betas for iOS 9 and watchOS 2, Apple has seeded a fourth beta of OS X 10.11 El Capitan to developers today. The release comes nearly two weeks since the last beta was made available to developers are well as public testers.
Apple has released a new set of betas for the mobile operating systems it announced at WWDC 2015 in June. iOS 9 beta 4 and watchOS 2.0 beta 4 are now available to registered developers, nearly two weeks after Apple seeded the previous betas.
Square continues to add to its lineup of small business tools, especially for owners and managers who want an overall better grip on their businesses. It’s introducing a new Dashboard app that does just that: it lets owners track sales in real-time right from an iPhone. Still, the only requirement is a free Square account.
Apple is set to report its financial results from Q3 2015 to investors this afternoon and, as usual, Cult of Mac will be here to liveblog all the action, from the numbers down to the analysts’ questions.
Apple Watch sales have been looming large in the minds of investors and analysts now that the device has been available for a full quarter. We don’t expect CEO Tim Cook or CFO Luca Maestri to announce the Watch sales as their own category, but there’s sure to be plenty of speculation as to whether the new wearable has met sales expectations.
Today’s earning’s call is set to kick off at 2 p.m. Pacific, but we’ll be kicking off the liveblogging party early with a breakdown of all the numbers. Bookmark this page and join us for the Apple earnings bonanza.
When Apple created the MagSafe power connector for its highly desirable line of MacBooks back in 2006, the world changed. Gone were the days of tripping over your power adapter cord and pulling your entire MacBook down onto a cold, uncaring floor.
These days, your iPhone and iPad have a similar problem, with a Lightning cable that connects so securely to the power port that if you happen to walk by and trip on the cable, you’re gonna fling that oh-so-precious device right to the ground, dashing its poor little silicon brains out.
This Kickstarter project, ZNAPS, aims to fix this design nightmare with a magnetic Lightning cable adapter that will transform the way you charge your Apple mobile devices, all for an excitingly low price of $9.
We’ll get our best — though still inconclusive — estimate of how the Apple Watch is doing later today, when Apple has its quarterly earnings call. Ahead of that, though, analysts are continuing to churn out their own figures regarding how Apple’s debut wearable device is faring thus far.
The latest people to play analyst roulette are research firm Canalys, who peg Apple Watch shipments at a very respectable 4.2 million units, meaning that Apple “easily overtook Fitbit, Xiaomi and all the smart watch vendors, despite the Apple Watch’s significantly higher pricing.”
We’re still waiting for our jetpacks, but at least today’s lightbulbs are properly futuristic. The best example of how far lighting has come is the ilumi A21 Bluetooth Smartbulb, a super-efficient LED light that sports features straight out of sci-fi. And right now, it’s going for nearly half its normal price, just $49 at Cult of Mac Deals.
Apple and IBM have been collaborating on creating an excellent suite of apps for the iPhone and iPad over the past year, but starting today, IBM’s MobileFirst apps are adding support for Apple Watch.
The Apple and IBM partnership revealed today that it’s created 10 more apps that cover everything from managing employee shifts to helping government inspectors get all the data necessary while out in the field.
Take a tour of the new apps below:
Fans hoping to catch MTV’s announcement of this year’s VMA nominees on Beats 1 this morning got a rude awakening as Apple servers crashed right before the artists were revealed.
We’ve been trying to access Beats 1 radio all morning but keep getting “Request timed out” errors on all our devices. Other services have been impacted as well: People on Twitter have reported a number of issues with Apple services, including problems accessing the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iTunes Match.
Here’s a list of Apple services affected:
From predicting potential heart attacks to helping dementia sufferers, we’ve gotten used to the idea that our Apple devices have a part to play in what is referred to as the mobile health drive.
But here’s a medical application you might not have thought that your iPad would ever be able to play a role in: helping couples to conceive.
Try telling that to the Taiwanese start-up Aidmics, which is hoping to carve out a piece of the $40 billion global human fertility market with an iPad-compatible microscope and accompanying app that lets users know exactly how plentiful their lil’ swimmers are.
Apple’s quarterly earnings call is set to take place later today, but one set of figures we’re not expecting to get is the initial Apple Watch sales. Apple has already acknowledged this data be hidden in the “other products” category — alongside the iPod, Apple TV, Beats Electronics and accessories division.
However, while Apple is likely to keep quiet on the exact breakdown of Apple Watch sales, it will be possible to get a rough idea of how the company’s debut wearable device is faring by doing the following:
You can’t stop staring at the new 12-inch MacBook, especially the gold one. It’s lighter and smaller and while it has all the computing power of your suddenly-bulkier model, you’re not sure about life with a single USB-C port.
A Miami startup, led by an electrical engineer, has designed adapters that will allow you to plug in all your peripherals and then gradually cut back as you move to a more wireless future.
The Cusby Building Blocks plug into a USB-C port with each offering a more traditional plug-in, like the current standard USB-A port, another with an HDMI video-audio port or another with an extra USB-C port.
We are one step closer to the end of Touch ID as we know it.
Following on from Apple’s recent patent filing concerning “finger biometric sensing pixels” for future iPhones, tech R&D company Sonovation has announced that it’s discovered a way of putting ultrasonic biometric sensors under Gorilla Glass — by bonding the sensors directly onto the display panel. Better yet, it works accurately even when fingers are wet, dirty, or oily.
The Apple Watch is a great way to unlock all sorts of aspects of your life, from better health to your bank account. Heck, it’ll even unlock your Mac. But will it unlock your door? It can now.
Do you jailbreak? Might want to watch your Snapchatting, then. The video messaging platform is starting to lock out users who uses Snapchat-related jailbreak tweaks to hack the core features of the service.
Apple’s crowdsourced “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign has been described as a “game changer” by Cannes Outdoor Lions jury president Juan Carlos Ortiz, but — let’s face it — most of the videos we shoot daily on our iPhones aren’t the kind of artistic masterpieces Apple chooses to highlight.
With that in mind, Elite Daily has put together a hilarious compilation of “honest” iPhone 6 ads, which are a bit closer to reality for most folks. Check them out below:
A number of Silicon Valley technology giants have backed Samsung in its legal battle against Apple. Documents confirm Dell, eBay, Facebook, Google, and HP all took the South Korean company’s side in a “friend of the court” brief on July 1.
If you want to hear who this year’s MTV Video Music Awards nominees are, you’ll hear it on Apple Music’s Beats 1 channel first. Even before you’ll hear it on MTV!
Project Titan, Apple’s hundreds-strong initiative to create a next-generation electric car, is continuing to ramp up.
Word has it that Cupertino has just hired one of the industry’s veteran manufacturing executives to help push the so-called Apple car to market.
If the granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and “breathtaking water views” don’t sell you on moving into East Beach Marina Apartments, maybe the offer of a free Apple Watch will.
Just lease one and move in by the end of July, and you’ll nab a free Apple wearable that will help turn you into the perfect neighbor.
The Apple Watch has been out for a few months now, and it’s given us plenty of time to decide what we do and don’t want from the wearable. It’s a versatile device, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that we expect it to do everything for us. In fact, a lot of the apps that we use all the time on our iPhones and iPads would be ill-suited, if not impossible for that plucky little screen.
Here are some Apple Watch apps that wouldn’t break our hearts if nobody ever got around to making them.
Give Aaron Johnson the chance to give you his elevator pitch and he just might convince you that you need a tabletop photo studio.
But even if you accept his points, you probably don’t have studio know-how or the room for the lights, the tripod, backdrops and a ladder.
Johnson answers with the SHOTBOX, a collapsable tabletop studio with seamless diffused lighting with a setup that can have you camera-ready in seconds. The SHOTBOX is designed for iPhone and other smartphone users who want to make simple product pictures, digitize family photos and copy documents.
Not long after debuting to a pretty successful launch, Filters for iPhone is up for sale. Developer Mike Rundle explains that he has a full-time job plus children to feed and his little side project of love deserves more attention than he can give. His asking price? $10,000.