Last year, Apple honored Earth Day with an App Store promotion that sent 100 percent proceeds from select app purchases to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It ended up being wildly successfully as the company revealed it donated $8 million to the fund. This year in celebration of Earth Day 2017, the two brands are collaborating on a similar money-raising initiative involving Apple retail stores.
Launching a week from today, a new Apple Watch variant created in partnership with Nike pairs a Space Gray Apple Watch Series 2 aluminum case with a strap featuring a new creamy color and black perforations (they're calling this color combo “Light Bone”). Marketed as Apple Watch NikeLab, this limited-edition version of the wearable device will be available on nike.com, at NikeLab doors and at an Apple Tokyo popup store in Isetan beginning next Thursday, April 27.
Did you know that Apple makes its own artificial sweat to test whether or not products like Apple Watch and Apple Pencil that come in direct contact with the human body would irritate the skin? Neither did I, but that's what they apparently do. I was educated about this, and other fun facts, by watching Apple's new cartoonish videos that highlight the company's efforts at sustainability.
Apple on Thursday announced a new JavaScript-based API for web developers who wish to enable embedding of Live Photos in their websites and web apps. Called LivePhotosKit JS, the new API is in addition to Apple's current Live Photos API which enables Live Photos on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac devices and in apps that use it, like Facebook's mainland mobile app, Tumblr for iOS and others.
Toshiba has narrowed the list of bidders for its lucrative semiconductor business to a small group that includes Western Digital’s rivals such as Apple's favorite contract manufacturer Foxconn, memory chip maker SK Hynix and wireless chip maker Broadcom. Western Digital, however, feels that Toshiba should negotiate with it first.
In a new Bloomberg report Thursday, Western Digital has confirmed it's currently in talks with Japanese government-backed investment funds regarding a potential deal with the Japanese conglomerate. Mark Long, Western Digital's CEO, hinted that his company has held discussions with Apple as it tries to win a battle for Toshiba’s flash memory unit.
More than four months after Apple Maps users in the United States gained the ability to locate ChargePoint electric vehicle stations around them, Apple is bringing a similar feature to its customers in the United Kingdom. As a cool bonus, European users can now identify bike rental hubs on a map, too.
According to Bloomberg earlier this week, Apple is using data from German company Cirrantic’s Moovility service, which maintains a detailed list of charging stations for electric vehicles made by Tesla and Nissan, among others.
A little more than a month following Chrome's version 57 release, Google today announced that it's rolling out Chrome 58 for Mac, Windows and Linux featuring a number of bug fixes and developer enhancements. Although beta versions of the browser on the Canary channel included support for Touch Bar shortcuts on the new MacBook Pro, Google pulled it from subsequent betas as well as from the stable release as it wasn't ready for prime time yet.
Yesterday at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, photo-sharing service Instagram introduced an offline mode in its Android app. A Facebook spokesperson says the team is “exploring” adding that feature to the company's iPhone and iPad app, TechCrunch has learned. Offline mode could be an important feature for users with limited network connectivity or no data plan, especially given that 80 percent of Instagram’s 600 million users are outside the US.
Apple's 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report, covering fiscal year 2016, states that the company will establish a “closed-loop supply chain” and stop mining the earth altogether in order to make its products from 100 percent renewable or recycled materials, including aluminum, copper, tin and tungsten.
An industry-changing objective, indeed, but Apple has yet to completely figure out how to do it. “One day we’d like to be able to build new products with just recycled materials, including your old products,” said the Cupertino firm.
Apple is putting the final touches on its new campus in Cupertino, called Apple Park, and drone pilot Duncan Sinfield took his Inspire 1 Pro to the skies and flew it above the 175 acre site at night. Apple is expected to being moving in employees this month, a process expected to take six months during which time the company will be completing landscaping and other work at the site.
As Apple is winding down its supply deal with UK-based GPU designer Imagination Technologies over the next two years, a new report alleges that the Cupertino firm is about to slash payments to Imagination to just one-third of its current royalty rate.
Reuters cited UBS analysts as predicting that Imagination could very easily become a loss-making company by fiscal 2019 without any Apple royalty contributions. The British GPU designer may even have to axe jobs and consider other potential cost-cutting moves in order to weather the storm ahead.
Chinese regulators have taken issue with live-streaming apps that can be downloaded from App Store. As Reuters said Wednesday citing the official Xinhua News Agency, a government body in China’s capital charged with regulating Internet services is planning to “summon” Apple and urge the company to “tighten its checks” regarding live-streaming apps on App Store.