Stating what's pretty close to the obvious, the New York Times reports the teams at Apple and Beats are working on a digital music service to directly compete with Spotify, one year after the Cupertino-based company paid $3 billion for the headphone maker. It won't bring lower prices than its competitors, the publication says, and is currently being planned for launch this year.
Publisher 2K Games is having a killer Spring Sale deal on its premium 2014 releases in the App Store, reports TouchArcade. Avid gamers can now grab triple-As at a sharp discount, for a limited time. iPhone and iPad titles like BioShock, NBA 2K15, NHL 2K and others are now available starting at just three bucks each.
BioShock for iOS, for example, can be now yours in exchange for $2.99, down sharply from its usual asking price of $10.99. This is actually the first time BioShock has been discounted below five bucks since its release on the App Store.
9to5Mac has learned from several Apple employees that try-on appointments for the Apple Watch will begin on April 10, the same day the pre-ordering process is scheduled to kick off. You'll be able to book an appointment through Apple's website or via the company's free of charge shopping app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
Google is going to announce a new YouTube-branded live video streaming service with an emphasis on gaming, according to the British newspaper The Guardian on Wednesday citing a scoop by tech blog The Daily Dot.
The Internet giant is reportedly prepping to introduce its live-streaming service under the YouTube Live moniker. YouTube Live will apparently relaunch later this year, re-focused on game streaming and e-sports.
Such turn of events wasn't entirely unexpected. A year ago, Google wanted to buy Twitch but has failed to seal the deal and got outbid by Amazon, which paid a cool $1 billion for the popular game-streaming service.
A growing number of users are taking to Twitter this morning to complain of yet another outage affecting Apple's App Store and the iTunes Store. Several folks around the world have reported problems purchasing new applications, with the App Store and iTunes returning a "The item you've requested is not currently available” error message.
Others complain about not being able to conduct searches for content on the iTunes Store and App Store and download apps and other content.
UPDATE 11:35am ET: all systems seem to have become operational again following a brief outage that lasted about an hour or so.
Apple's upcoming Campus 2 building, nicknamed by the press iSpaceship due to its appearance resembling a flying saucer that has just landed in a field, will be more environmentally friendly than initially thought with news Wednesday that the facility will take full advantage of recycled water.
As reported by The San Jose Mercury News, the Santa Clara Valley Water District board last night approved a $17.5 million project that will deepen the use of recycled water in the parched South Bay “and make Apple's futuristic new campus a little bit greener.”
Apple is building a futuristic looking, large-scale technology development center in Yokohama, Japan, home to nearly four million people, reports the NHK News website. The city of Yokohama held a press conference today to announce the project.
City officials have even provided renderings depicting the scope of the project and Apple's unusual design for a massive, environment friendly R&D building.
As it looks to build out its web services, Apple has acquired FoundationDB, a company that specializes in speedy, durable NoSQL databases, Apple essentially confirmed to iDownloadBlog after TechCrunch first reported the news.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a boiler plate statement it gives when it acquires smaller companies.
It's too early to tell whether or not Apple's latest one-port Mac notebook spells doom for MagSafe, Apple's proprietary magnetically attached power connectors. Be that as it may, a duo of entrepreneurial engineers is taking a page from Apple's book to implement magnets on the types of connectors we use the most.
Magzet, a new Kickstarter project by Jon Hallsten and Jeff Russell, is aiming to do for standard 3.5mm audio jacks what MagSafe has done for Apple notebooks.
Apple has seeded the fourth beta of iOS 8.3 to developers, close to two weeks after seeding the third iOS 8.3 beta and roughly a month and a half after releasing the first iOS 8.3 beta.
The new build of iOS 8.3 carries the build number 12F5061, and is available to download over-the-air or from Apple's iOS Developer Center. Apple also released Xcode 6.3 beta 4 with Swift 1.2 and an update for the Apple TV beta.
9to5mac is out with a report on Tuesday detailing how Apple Store employees will help customers select the right Apple Watch for their lifestyle, when it becomes available to purchase on April 24. The publication, often providing some of the best Apple scoops, details that retail employees will initiate conversations to build trust, enabling the employee to essentially take the place as a fashion advisor during the purchase process, rather than pushing a new consumer electronic.
Apple's improved Force Touch trackpad on the new 12-inch MacBook and early-2015 MacBook Pro models has pressure sensors that make possible all sorts of new interactions, among them pressure-sensitive drawing with your finger.
In OS X Yosemite, for example, you can press lightly on the trackpad for a thin stroke or harder for a thick one when marking up a Mail attachment or creating a signature for forms in Preview.
And now, a Mac application called Inklet has been refreshed with superior pressure-sensitive drawing capabilities, basically turning the Force Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook into a powerful drawing tablet.