The European Commission's investigation into Ireland's tax deals for multinational corporations could have a "material" impact on Apple, the company said in a 10Q filing to the S&E Commissions this week. If it's determined that Dublin's tax policies represented unfair state aid, the Cupertino firm could suffer significant losses.
Faulty Taptic Engines may be behind the extremely limited availability of the Apple Watch, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the publication says that after mass production of the Engines began in February, quality testing found some of them to be unreliable.
The component, which Apple uses in its Watch to produce the sensation of being tapped on the wrist, is made by two suppliers: AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. and Nidec Corp. Apparently some of AAC's Taptic Engines were found to break down overtime, so Apple has moved a majority of its production over to Nidec.
Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes is "pretty confident" Apple is working on a subscription TV service. ABC's Jon Erlichman reports on Medium today that during Time Warner's quarterly earnings call, the CEO said that the Cupertino firm is "very forward thinking" on the future of television.
Bewkes' comments are interesting because Apple and Time Warner recently partnered up to launch 'HBO Now' on Apple TV, and rumors have been bouncing around for years that the two were looking to do TV together. In July 2013, Bloomberg reported they were "close" to reaching a deal.
Your Apple Watch can wake to the watch face, or your last activity, when you raise your wrist. Called Wrist Raise, this handy feature uses the heart rate sensor, which requires skin contact.
But according to users on social media channels like Twitter and Reddit, tattooed wrists fool the Apple Watch into thinking it's not on a wrist in the first place, causing all sorts of issues.
For starters, the Activate on Raise Wrist function may stop working or may perform erratically. More problematic than that, people with tattooed wrists may stop receiving notifications. In addition, inaccurate heart rate readings have been reported, too, as dark tattoos can throw off Apple Watch's heart rate sensor and cause the Workout app to pause every now and then.
And because the sensor interferes with dark-inked tattoos, the device will request your passcode after mistakenly thinking it's lost skin contact. Another side-effect: Apple Pay, another feature that requires skin contact, gets disabled, causing you to re-enter the security PIN.
Griffin Technology's curious WatchStand, which holds both an Apple Watch and your iPhone, is now available to order from the company's webstore for $29.99 a pop, or with a 10 percent discount via iDownloadBlog Deals. The Nashville, Tennessee headquartered accessory maker will start shipping first WatchStand units to customers in two weeks.
The sleek accessory docks your Apple Watch and iPhone while charging them at the same time, with the Watch cradle conveniently keeping your device at a viewable angle.
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter content such as tweets and accounts are coming to Apple's Spotlight search engine on Macs and iOS devices, allowing for an even tighter integration between the iPhone maker and the popular micro-blogging service, MacWorld reported Wednesday. Apple added Twitter to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad as the inaugural third-party service integration in iOS 5 three years ago.
Pixelmator for Mac received a sweet update last evening, adding a trio of noteworthy features and a plethora of bug fixes. A free update to existing users of the app, Pixelmator 3.3.2 brought out an even more remarkable — and way faster — Repair tool.
It also added support for pressure-sensitive drawing on Macs with the new Force Touch trackpad and importing photos from the Photos app on OS X Yosemite 10.10.3. In addition to these perks, the app contains other tweaks and bug fixes.
After experiencing a slowdown following a record-smashing Christmas quarter, the rate of iOS 8 adoption is notably picking up speed again.
According to the official App Store Distribution dashboard, publicly available on Apple’s portal for developers, about 81 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in the wild are now running iOS 8.0 and later. Jut two weeks ago, the pace of iOS 8 adoption stood at 79 percent of active devices.
A notable uptick could be explained by the Apple Watch, which requires the iPhone 5 and later running iOS 8.2 and later. For those wondering, Apple measures active devices by monitoring iPhones, iPads and iPods that access the App Store.
Apple on Tuesday updated the official App Store Review Guidelines, officially taking a stance against third-party applications for the Apple Watch whose sole purpose is to tell the time, as first discovered by developer David Smith.
A newly added clause of the agreement guiding third-party development now explicitly states that Watch applications which simply tell the time will be flatly rejected.
“Watch Apps whose primary function is telling time will be rejected,” reads the document. Moreover, the same principles appear to apply to custom watch faces and flatulence apps.
It's worth mentioning that these rules have been enforced since the onset as there has never been a single time-telling Apple Watch app, or a fart app, (or a custom face for that matter) available on the App Store.
After putting the stainless steel Apple Watch through a barrage of excruciating screen benchmarks, display expert Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies has determined that its sapphire protection actually degrades image quality.
But it's not Apple's fault, really. Even though sapphire is the second-hardest transparent material after diamond, the substance suffers from a higher reflectance versus a less expensive ion-strengthened glass utilized on the entry-level aluminum Apple Watch Sport as well as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices.
After quite literally subjecting the Apple Watch Sport’s Ion-X glass to the knife in a recent scratch test video, YouTuber 'Unbox Therapy' is back with another cool test.
This time around, he's evaluating the Apple Watch's sapphire-coated screen with a diamond tester and comparing it to the Apple Watch Sport, LG's G Watch R, the iPhone 6 and a high-end analog watch by Tissot, which uses sapphire for protection.
He came away fairly impressed with Apple's sapphire, concluding it does match those of classic sapphire watches. Sapphire, for those wondering, is the second-hardest transparent substance after diamond. Have a look at the video and tell us what you think in the comment section.
Red-hot cloud-storage startup Dropbox on Tuesday announced a new commenting system which permits anyone to provide some context and give helpful feedback on that shared presentation, photo, movie or other upload of yours.
The new feature is now accessible by everyone after Dropbox for Business early access users have been trying out commenting for the past month.
The ability to comment on shared files includes such perks as Twitter-like @mentions, reply notifications and more. The feature is currently available in Dropbox's web interface and should be accessible from mobile apps “soon”.