Major healthcare provider Aetna announced plans on Tuesday to "transform members' consumer health experience using iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch." As part of the initiative, the company will be subsidizing the cost of Apple Watch for select employers and individual customers, and will be supplying nearly 50,000 of its own employees with the wearable.
Spotify, the #1 music streaming service, today announced a new playlist updated daily with tracks that users mark as favorites as well as new music.
Now available in the updated mobile Spotify app for iOS and Android, Daily Mix differs from Spotify's existing Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists which get refreshed each Monday and Friday, respectively, in that Daily Mix won't be a complete refresh of songs each time the playlist is updated.
Apple and the graphics giant Nvidia have had something of a rocky relationship, with the Cupertino company switching between Nvidia's and AMD's graphics chips for Mac desktops. Most of the Macs currently shipping use either integrated graphics from Intel or discreet AMD chips, but that could change in the coming years.
As first spotted by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Nvidia is seeking software engineers tasked with helping produce “the next revolutionary Apple products.” According to the job post, the role would require “working in partnership with Apple” and writing code that will “define and shape the future” of graphics-related software on Macs.
Apple said on the Investor webpage that it has scheduled an earnings call to discuss fiscal 2016 fourth quarter earnings a month from today on Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET. The company's fourth fiscal quarter corresponds to the third calendar quarter. A press release will go out 30 minutes in advance of the earnings call.
The annual “Google for India” event kicked off in New Delhi this morning, where the search company announced a new mobile app called YouTube Go.
Inspired by India for the next billion users, it's designed to help people in areas with poor connectivity watch and share YouTube videos without burning up mobile data.
YouTube Go provides controls not found in the regular app to let users see the file size of videos before they download them to the device for offline viewing. And to save data, the app presents clips as slideshows.
The CEO of Pegatron, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer that assembles Apple handsets along with Foxconn, told Nikkei Asian Review he remained “cautiously optimistic” about iPhone 7 sales.
His comment targets a recent analyst report from KGI Securities' Ming-Chi Kuo predicting fewer iPhone 7 sales in 2016 than the iPhone 6s garnered in 2015. Analyst firm Piper Jaffray, too, downplayed Kuo's negative report in an interview with AppleInsider, saying it's seeing similarities to the monster iPhone 6 upgrade cycle.
iPhone manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known in the Western press as Foxconn, has obtained approval from the local government to repair iPhones at its subsidiary in Shanxi, China, according to a report in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News newspaper cited by Taiwanese publication DigiTimes. This marks a second Foxconn subsidiary that can now repair iPhones.
The business model helps Apple to “save 40 percent of its costs on its smartphone maintenance services,” added the paper.
In February 2016, IBM promised to bring Apple's new programming language Swift to the cloud. Today, the firm has made good on that promise with the introduction of Bluemix Runtime which allows developers to write server-side code for iPhone, Mac and Windows PC apps in Swift.
“Swift is now ready for the enterprise,” Mike Gilfix, IBM’s Vice President of MobileFirst and Smarter Process, said in an interview with Mike Gilfix of Computerworld.
Despite Note 7 fires and carriers suggesting iPhone 7 sellouts, top Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities isn't entirely convinced that strong consumer demand will offset slowing shipments. In a note to clients obtained by AppleInsider, Kuo predicted 70-75 million iPhone 7 sales in 2016—lower than that of the iPhone 6s in 2015.
Kuo cautions that strong iPhone 7 sales are not “not entirely due to market demand” because carrier promotions inflated sales numbers and a larger amount of launch countries led to depleted inventories worldwide.
Game publisher Niantic has published yet another update for its popular GPS-based Pokémon GO game on Friday that adds some new features and squashes bugs. Version 1.9.0 of Pokémon GO can now be downloaded by avid Pokémon trainers who want the latest features.
You'll soon be able to listen to news articles in iTunes, reports TechCrunch. The outlet says that in the near future, you'll be able to browse through a new category of podcasts that will allow you to listen to news stories from your favorite publishers.
These new podcasts will be labeled "Spoken Edition" in iTunes, and the format will be short-form programs that offer listeners an audio version of a publisher's articles. So you could essentially listen to the news while commuting or working out.
A mysterious low-powered wireless device from Apple has just passed testing by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and could be released in the United States in the next few months, according to an FCC filing that was first spotted by French blog Consomac.
It's designated by the model number “A1844”, includes both Bluetooth wireless functionality and built-in NFC and is rated at between 100mA and 700mA (from 5.5V to 13.2V).