In August, the European Commission slammed Apple with a tax bill from hell over a sweetheart deal it received from Ireland—which, in the Commission's view, constitutes “illegal state aid”.
Dublin promptly promised to join Apple's fight against EU and it's put its money where its mouth is.
Michael Noonan, Finance Minister in the Irish government, said that Dublin today challenged the EU judgment by submitting an appeal to the European courts in a bid to block the decision, ArsTechnica reports.
About a year ago, a certain California firm quietly snapped up VocalIQ, a UK-based startup that used machine learning to build conversational virtual assistants. Subsequent reports noted that Apple kept most of the startup's employees to work out of their unmarked Cambridge, UK office on integrating VocalIQ technology into Siri.
Citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Business Insider reports that Apple is now looking to increase the size of the Siri team in Cambridge.
You no longer need to have Instagram's standalone Boomerang app installed on your iOS device to create looping videos: thanks to the latest Instagram update that went live on the App Store today, Boomerang features are now available to you from within Instagram 9.7 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Instagram for iOS also includes other enhancements, such as support for @mentions and links in Stories.
AirPods, Apple's Bluetooth earphones featuring the company's in-house designed W1 wireless chip, may be launching next week. That's the gist of a new report Thursday from German blog Apfelpage.de. The publication cited Apple's European reseller Conrad as confirming that it'll receive stock of the delayed earphones on November 17.
Conrad will reportedly make the AirPods sellable by November 18-19. The AirPods were originally advertised with a “late October” launch date until Apple said it needed more time to work out the issues. Apple.com currently lists them tentatively as “coming soon”.
Daydream, Google's new Android-powered virtual reality platform, was announced at the company's annual developer pilgrimage in May. Daydream View, Google's first virtual reality headset, is now available for purchase from a number of retailers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia for $79 apiece.
Google today pushed a small update to the native YouTube application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. YouTube 11.43 for iOS, a 105-megabyte download from the App Store, packs in three interesting improvements.
YouTube creators can now take advantage of a new Dreamy filter that can be tried out by uploading a video, then hit the filters icon. You also get tappable timestamps in YouTube comments and recent history/personalized recommendations in search.
As promised, the iconic PC strategy game ROME: Total War today launched on the iPad as a $9.99 download from the App Store. Yes, you can now enjoy the grandeur, glory and brutality of Ancient Rome on your Apple tablet.
The game contains no IAPs and was ported to the iPad by Feral Interactive. Originally developed for PCs by The Creative Assembly and released in 2004 by Activision, it's one of the best reviewed strategy titles of all time.
Yup, it's that time of year again—with the holiday shopping season just around the corner, Apple's 2016 Holiday Gift Guide recommends various gift ideas ranging from the iPhone 7, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Apple Watch to the fourth-generation Apple TV, 12-inch MacBook and gift cards.
The guide doesn't stop there as Apple's recommendations include a bunch of first and third-party accessories for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, as well as other popular items such as app-enabled toys, photography and music accessories and more.
Two days after it started selling refurbished iPhones through its online store, Apple has now added the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to the Special Deals section at Apple.com. Refurbished 12.9-inch iPad Pros are available as well. Prices of refurbished 9.7-inch iPad Pros range from $509 for a 32GB Wi-Fi model, a saving of $90, to $789 for a 256GB Wi-Fi + Cellular version, a $140 savings.
PayPal's iPhone and iPad application was updated on the App Store this morning with support for iOS 10's SiriKit integration for mobile payments, allowing you to send and request money in 30 countries around the world using just your voice.
With a simple voice command like “Send $20 to Dad using PayPal” or “Request $20 from John with PayPal”, Siri connects with the PayPal service and pulls up a custom sheet with details of your transaction before you authorize it.
Following an extremely divisive 2016 presidential election in which Donald Trump scored an upset victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Apple's boss Tim Cook issued a company-wide email to all employees, a copy of which was obtained by BuzzFeed's John Paczkowski.
In the memo, Cook urges employees to reach out to colleagues “if they are feeling anxious” about the election results and underscored that Apple celebrates the diversity of its employees regardless of “what they look like, where they come from, how they worship or who they love.”
A little more than a week following the public release of iOS 10.1.1 with bug fixes for Health data, Apple on Wednesday published a slightly revised build of the software update.
The Cupertino company admittedly has a good reason for replacing the existing iOS 10.1.1 installer on its servers with another one that shows a slightly bumped up build number.
We'll update the article when we learn more.
The new build of iOS 10.1.1 arrived two days after iOS 10.2 beta 2 was seeded to developers and less than 24 hours after its accompanying public beta launched.