Apple

Apple bolsters its Health team by re-hiring Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll

Evan Doll, former Senior iPhone Engineer who left Apple a few years ago to co-found popular social news reader app Flipboard, has been re-hired by the Cupertino firm to help advance Apple's health-related initiatives. Bloomberg first caught wind of Doll's re-hiring this morning, based on his recently updated LinkedIn profile revealing his new position at Apple: Director of Health Software Engineering.

Purported fully assembled iPhone 7 front panel shown on images

In addition to a fresh batch of crisp, high-resolution shots showing a purported iPhone 7 in Gold pictured alongside its 5.5-inch brethren that surfaced on the web, here's another leak to chew on this morning—prolific French leakster Steve Hemmerstoffer shared via his @OnLeaks Twitter account these claimed photographs of a fully assembled front panel for the upcoming devices.

Photos of iPhone 7/Plus dummies (or are they?) in Gold surface on the web

Crisp images of alleged iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices in Gold surfaced today, first discovered by Czech blog Letem svetem Applem. According to mobile peripheral website Topp Ten, which provided the images, the phones will be offered in a Deep Blue variant replacing Space Gray, in addition to existing Rose Gold, Gold and Silver colorways. It's also possible that the pictures show iPhone 7 dummies, which are readily available from sites like AliExpress.

Apple’s upcoming World Trade Center store to open next Tuesday

Apple is set to open a new brick-and-mortar outlet at the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, a $4 billion train transit station in Lower Manhattan, in less than a week, on Tuesday, August 16, at 12pm ET. The firm announced that its tenth store in New York City, located at 185 Greenwich Street, is located in the lower level section of the Oculus Transportation Hub.

Apple: ConnectED program now reaches over 32,000 students

Apple on Wednesday announced that its ConnectED efforts now reach over 32,000 students. In a note on its website, the company said that as of the start of the 2016 school year, there are 32,145 students at underserved public schools in the US that are learning on iPad through the program.

First claimed photo of iPhone 7’s A10 chip surfaces

We may have just been treated to our first glimpse of Apple's next-generation A10 system-on-a-chip that should power the forthcoming iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices.

Leaked on the web through a Weibo account that belongs to Chinese repair shop GeekBar, which in the past provided genuine components for unreleased Apple products, the chip's label suggests it was manufactured in mid-July.

What's more, the package has the same number of pins as its predecessor, potentially alluding that it could sport the same 64-bit LPDDR4 interface like the current A9 chip.

India’s finance minister ratifies a proposal that’d let Apple run retail stores in the country

Apple is one step closer to opening first-party retail stores in India, its increasingly significant market with population of 1.3 billion people, with a new Bloomberg report claiming that India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley has approved a proposal that clarifies how Apple could open retail stores without initially having to source components locally.

Last month, the cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved a three-year extension on local-sourcing rules that require foreign firms wanting to run their own local retail stores to source at least 30 percent of components within the populous country.

Tip: quickly measure your Netflix streaming speed with this iPhone app

Netflix yesterday announced a brand new iPhone app on the App Store which it designed to let you quickly measure how fast your broadband downlink is by testing the connection to Netflix’s servers. The goal of the free app, aptly named Fast, is to give Netflix subscribers a better understanding of the streaming quality they can expect from the service on their Internet connection. It's not a replacement for SpeedTest or similar software and does not measure the uplink speed because it has little effect on streaming quality.

Will overhauled MacBook Pros debut alongside iPhone 7 in September or in October?

In an article this morning, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman rehashed much of the previous rumors regarding Apple's widely expected MacBook Pro refresh with Touch ID, AMD GPU, an OLED touch strip replacing the row of function keys and more. As per the report, these new MacBook Pros “aren’t likely” to debut alongside the new phones at the September 7 iPhone media event.

Which brings me to our question of the day: will the new machines launch in September, October or maybe even later? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue on learning from Maps debacle and improving the service

Monday, Fast Company interviewed CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives, with Cook revealing that public iOS betas actually exist to help improve the Maps service, which was widely panned and ridiculed over egregious inaccuracies shortly after its September 2012 debut.

Today, the publication interviewed Eddy Cue, Apple's boss of Internet Software and Services, and Craig Federighi, who is Apple's chief of Software Engineering, on learning from Maps failures.

Here's what they had to say about improving Maps over the years.

Bloomberg: next-gen MacBook Pro with OLED touch strip “most significant update in 4 years”

Bloomberg threw its weight today behind rumors that a next-generation MacBook Pro would have Touch ID and an OLED touch strip with programmable shortcuts replacing the function key row, among other features first predicted by KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Author Mark Gurman now writes for Bloomberg that the new MacBook Pros represent “the most significant upgrade” to the lineup in four years with the updated, thinner notebooks offering more powerful graphics processors “for expert users such as video gamers” and design features like a smaller footprint, thinner appearance, a bigger trackpad and more.

DigiTimes: TSMC to build 16nm Apple Watch 2 chip

An Apple-designed 'S2' system-in-package that will power a second-generation Apple Watch won't be produced by Samsung, like the original Apple Watch's S1 chip. According to a new report by Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes, semiconductor foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has managed to beat Samsung in securing S2 orders. In fact, both the second-generation Apple Watch and an enhanced version of the original Apple Watch will be driven by the S2 chip, built using TSMC's 16-nanometer process technology.