Apple on Thursday announced that it has invested $1 billion in Chinese Uber competitor Didi Chuxing, reports Reuters. Speaking with the outlet, Tim Cook said the venture will help his company "better understand the critical Chinese market."
The move comes amidst slumping iPhone sales, which has driven Apple's stock price down to $90 per share, and other struggles in China. Last month, the State Administration shut down the iBooks Store and iTunes Movie sales in the country.
Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game King Rabbit. This means that for the next 7 days, you'll be able to download the popular action-puzzler for both iPhone and iPad for free—a modest savings of $1.
For those unfamiliar with the title, King Rabbit is a puzzle-action crossover. Players are tasked with helping King Rabbit rescue his bunny citizens from devious enemies using keys, potions, bombs and other items they find along the way.
Yet another member of the original Siri team, Darren Haas, has left Apple. The Information reports that Haas, one of the last remaining team members that came over to Apple in the Siri acquisition, has left the company for General Electric. He'll join Steve D'Aurora, another Siri team member who also left Apple for GE a few weeks ago.
Apple is preparing to completely terminate music downloads in the iTunes Store, reports Digital Music News. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the outlet says an aggressive, two-year timetable to switch completely to streaming music is gaining traction within the company.
Hedging on its claim, the site also says other shutdown plans are being considered, including one that would see the iPhone-maker offer music downloads for another 3-4 years. Regardless, executives have agreed that keeping downloads running forever is no longer on the table.
Old iPods have apparently become the latest craze in the world of collectables. As noted by The Guardian, various Apple-branded MP3 players from the early 2000s are going for insane prices on eBay right now, depending of course on the model and condition.
For example, a factory-sealed third-generation iPod shuffle is listed on the auction site at $999.95, and it has 10 watchers. A fourth-generation U2 edition iPod is priced at just under $7,000. And a new-in-box second-generation iPod classic? A staggering $20,000.
WhatsApp on Tuesday launched a native desktop app for Mac and Windows computers. The Facebook-owned messaging service says the app provides a "new way to stay in touch anytime and anywhere - whether on your phone or computer at home or work."
To download the new desktop version of WhatsApp, visit whatsapp.com/download from your desktop browser. Then, open the app and scan the QR code using the WhatsApp app on your smartphone (be sure to look for WhatsApp Web menu under Settings).
Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn is close to signing a deal with the Indian government to open an iPhone manufacturing plant in the country, reports the Economic Times. More specifically, the company is looking for a 1,200-acre plot of land in Maharashtra.
Today's news comes nearly one year after we first heard of Foxconn's interest in building facilities in India. If the deal goes through, the electronics-maker hopes to construct a $10 billion building for assembling Apple's smartphones, and others would likely follow.
Apple on Monday began notifying recipients of this year's WWDC scholarship winners. A number of developers have taken to Twitter to announce they've received word from the company that they've been awarded a scholarship, and are invited to the conference.
Applicants were required to submit an app demonstrating "creative use of Apple technologies," as well as an essay about their coding process. In all, 350 scholarships will be given out to students and STEM members, and 125 to developers with financial limitations.
There's a new app in the App Store called System and Security Info that shows detailed information about your device and running apps from a security standpoint. It can do a lot of things, including monitor memory and disk usage, show running processes, and it even detects malware and other anomalies.
A few other things about the app also caught our eye. One, it's capable of telling if your iPhone and iPad have been jailbroken, and two, it appears that former jailbreak contributor Stefan Esser (also known as i0n1c) is involved in the project. In fact, it was Esser who penned the announcement blog post.
Are you excited? You should be excited. One, it's the weekend, and two, we've put together another great list of apps and games for you to check out. This week's Apps of the Week roundup includes a news curation app, a sleep timer for audio apps, a new email client and two really great-looking games.
The Tapbots on Friday issued an update for their popular iOS Twitter client Tweetbot 4, bringing the app to version 4.3. The update includes a number of improvements, and a brand new feature called Topics that promises to make tweetstorming easier.
A Topic is a way to let you quickly Tweet a group of related Tweets without having to manually reply to yourself and/or add the same hashtags over and over. You can activate Topics by tapping the gear menu in the Compose screen, and they sync via iCloud.
It’s been several months since Apple killed off the iOS 9.0.x jailbreak, and since then the state of the jailbreak has been very unstable. True, a new version of the Pangu Tool came out in March, for iOS 9.1, but by then most folks had already updated to 9.2 or the 9.3 beta. So as you can imagine, we’ve received a lot of questions regarding the current status of the jailbreak. Here is what we know so far.