Back in September, Re/code learned that Apple was looking to unveil a reworked, re-branded Beats Music service in early February of this year, possibly even in time for the Grammy Awards.
Now 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman casts new light on Apple's plans for Beats Music, revealing in his Wednesday morning report that a yet-to-be-named music service will be paid for, entirely Apple-designed and based on Beats’ technologies and music content.
If the rumors pan out, we could see both an iPad Pro and a Retina upgrade to the MacBook Air some time in the following months, possibly as soon as April.
Both are thought to include an ultra high-resolution screen measuring about twelve inches diagonally, run quietly thanks to fanless design and the latest power-savvy chips and redefine portability with an even lighter and thinner appearance. True, you'd be hard-pressed to call a twelve-inch tablet ultra portable.
But given Apple's obsession with thinness and lightness, I suspect a larger iPad could be easier to carry around than you'd think. And assuming that rumored creative stylus accessory is indeed in the works, Apple would be wise to create a vastly improved iOS version with true multitasking, side-by-side apps and other productivity features.
With a proper OS, powerful chips, a screen to die for and an optional accessory, the iPad Pro could be the ultimate productivity tablet you've been waiting for.
On the other hand, the twelve-inch Air is said to be almost as light and thin as the iPad. It's poised to blur the line between the notebook and the tablet even further. Therefore, why bother struggling with an oversized tablet if the new Air will be just as light and thin, while offering a built-in keyboard and OS X?
I rarely, if ever, publish videos on Instagram, but those who do should know that the latest version 6.5 update, which rolled out this morning to Instagram's iPhone app, has quietly enabled looping videos.
Previously, you had to tap on videos to pause and resume playback. And as first spotted by AppAdvice, the option to set sound to play when the device’s ringer is on or to be always off has been removed as well.
Although Instagram videos now automatically replay in your feed, the company insists that this won't affect how much data the app uses.
The Mac continues to be a success story. During the last three months of 2014, Apple moved 5.52 million Macs around the world, a fourteen percent annual increase from the 4.84 million units shipped in the year-ago quarter. Apple now sells more Macs than iPods and, more importantly the Mac has been outpacing the rest of the PC industry for years now, consistently posting a double-digit growth.
Exhibit A: Mac shipments for all of 2014 were up 14.43 percent from a year earlier.
During the same periods, global PC shipments were on a downward spiral and declined 2.1 percent versus the previous year. The Mac momentum is expected to go unabated throughout 2015, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers who spoke to DigiTimes.
Wednesday, TechCrunch relayed a new survey by market research firm Kantar Worldpanel which underscores a small victory in Apple's global rivalry with Android as the company overtook Android vendors in terms of units shipped in the United States during the last three months of 2014.
Driven by the introduction of its larger-screened iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple took a 47.7 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market. Android grabbed a 47.6 percent share and Windows Phone accounted for just 3.8 percent of smartphone sales.
A handful of unmarked minivans have been spotted driving around California over the past several days with what appears to be roof-mounted camera equipment. No one seems to know what the vehicles are up to, but CBS' Bay Area affiliate was able to confirm with the DMV that at least one of the vans is leased to Apple.
More specifically, the minivans feature custom X-shaped frames atop their luggage racks, fitted with what appears to be 12 cameras. It also has a pair of cylindrical antennas, which the news outlet speculates could be LiDAR sensors—a laser-based technology used in self-driving vehicles, as well as high-resolution mapping.
Apple's patent filings are usually more indicative of the company's aspirations in terms of the technologies they seek to protect rather than possible future products.
With that in mind, The United States Patent & Trademark Office on Tuesday granted Apple an interesting patent on advanced automotive control by linking your iPhone to your vehicle through Bluetooth.
Tuesday, BGR said it's learned from its own sources that Apple is shooting to release iOS 8.2 around March, ahead of the Apple Watch launch in April. “A trusted source” privy to Apple's most recent roadmap told the technology blog that Apple isn’t planning to release iOS 8.2 this month.
In addition to general improvements and fixes, the headline feature of iOS 8.2 is official support for Apple's wrist-worn device, which in all likelihood entails a companion iPhone app for installing apps onto the Watch and managing various device settings.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, said on Tuesday that it will be pursuing ads outside of Twitter for the first time, with plans to sell Promoted Tweets on the popular news reader app Flipboard as well as on the Yahoo Japan website.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the company will permit advertisers who are already buying ads on the service to start running Promoted Tweet ad units on other people’s apps and sites that display tweets, with undisclosed revenue sharing between Twitter and partner websites/apps.
According to the official App Store Distribution data as of yesterday, iOS 8 is now running on 72 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in the wild.
That's up notably over the 69 percent figure recorded just two weeks ago, when iOS 8 adoption rates were slowing in the post-holiday season.
By comparison, Google’s own Developer Dashboards webpage was refreshed yesterday and now shows Android 5.0 Lollipop as finally making a blip on the radar, with the operating system recording a tiny 1.6 percent share of the current Android install base.
If your iPhone or iPad is running out of space, manually removing unwanted photos, videos, songs, apps and stuff like Safari's Reading List is a good way of freeing up some store space. But more often than not, this isn't enough.
The devil, as they say, is in the detail — in this case, the mysterious ‘Other’ category that iTunes displays after connecting your iOS device to a computer.
‘Other’ storage is a section iOS uses to store temporary data, cache files inside apps and items retrieved through the iOS Background Refresh feature to make apps load faster. ‘Other’ storage balloons over time and can quickly add up to anywhere between a few hundred megabytes to a couple gigabytes of wasted on-device storage.
Aside from performing a clean install of iOS or restoring your device as new, there's no easy way of manually reclaiming your ‘Other’ storage. But thanks to a brilliant new Mac app in town, created by Nice Mohawk, anyone — even novice users — can free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad in minutes. Not only does the app let you reclaim your ‘Other’ storage, but also delete caches, back up your photos and videos, as well as remove large apps and music.
Somebody thought a rap music video about HTC would be a nice excuse to blast Samsung and Apple. In what could quite possibly mark the worst Apple ad attack ever, the cringeworthy hip hop anthem titled “Hold the Crown” sings praise to the HTC M8 handset while dissing competition.
“Your phone was all glass, why you changed your tune now?,” hip hop artists Greg Carr aka “Doc G” of the musical group P.M. Dawn raps in the video.
“Your chip is slower, but you'll never touch our BoomSound,” the lyrics continue. Accusing “more than a few clowns” who stole “what we originated”, the music video goes on to proclaim HTC as the master of the universe and paint “your Galaxy” as “overrated”.