Apple Inc

Apple has announced that it will power all of its operations in Singapore from solar energy, the first company in the city-state to do so. The scheme will also provide electricity to around 9,000 public-owned homes.

CNET reports that Apple is partnering with local clean energy provide Sunseap.

The Cupertino consumer electronics giant has partnered with Singapore’s largest clean energy provider, Sunseap Group, who will provide power to Apple’s 2,500-person corporate campus and retail store. Energy will be obtained from solar panels laid on the rooftops of 800 buildings.

Retail head Angela Ahrendts also confirmed to The Strait Times earlier reports that it is opening its first Apple Store in Singapore, with hiring underway …

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Apple CEO Tim Cook has ruled out the possibility of Apple merging iOS and OS X to create a single category of device. Speaking to the Irish Independent, Cook said that such a device would be too compromised.

“We feel strongly that customers are not really looking for a converged Mac and iPad,” said Cook. “Because what that would wind up doing, or what we’re worried would happen, is that neither experience would be as good as the customer wants. So we want to make the best tablet in the world and the best Mac in the world. And putting those two together would not achieve either. You’d begin to compromise in different ways.”

He said that some were reading too much into the way Apple has brought the two platforms closer together …

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Apple’s design chief Jony Ive told the Telegraph that while his own team has worked using paper sketchbooks for more than 20 years, they are for the first time starting to use the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil instead.

Many of us in the design team have worked together for 20 plus years. We’ve always drawn in our sketchbooks, and for the first time – despite flirting with some alternatives a couple of years ago – I’m seeing people starting to use the iPad and Apple Pencil. Our personal experience has been that there are definitely affordances and opportunities now that you have a much more natural and intuitive environment to make marks, there are clearly things you can do sketching and writing on the iPad which you could never dream of doing in the analogue world.

He said that while he’d started off demonstrating it, he’d then found himself using it for his work … 
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Update: Apple has since stated that Cook intended to describe the Microsoft Surface Book as “diluted” rather than “deluded.”

The Irish government has announced that Apple will be employing an additional 1,000 staff in Ireland, the country where the company declares much of its revenue from sales throughout Europe, reports Reuters.

Ireland’s main foreign investment agency, the IDA, said Apple was to add 1,000 jobs to its office in Cork by mid-2017 from 5,000 at present. It said the company had also added 1,000 jobs in the past year.

There had been some concern about whether Apple would maintain a significant presence in the country if the European Commission investigation into Apple’s tax dealings in the country went against the company … 
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Although Apple has yet to confirm the existence of “Project Titan,” it seems like every week brings a new clue that the company is indeed working on an electric car. We learned that Sixty Eight Research, a sketchy firm widely believe to be a front for Apple’s effort in the automotive business, recently attended the 17th Global Car Body Benchmarking Conference in Germany.
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I know, it’s almost a blasphemous headline, and I can feel the comments system bracing itself for impact even before anyone has read a word of my arguments. Especially as Apple has engaged in lengthy lawsuits against Samsung for copying its own features.

But while Apple doesn’t blindly copy, it does learn from other companies, and it does so all the time. Indeed, you could say it’s one of the key things that sets Apple apart in the tech world: it doesn’t scrabble to be first to market with new technology. Apple instead sits back and watches, looks at what other companies do and then figures out how to create a better version.

Touch ID is a classic example. Fingerprint readers have been around forever in laptops, and Motorola put one into a smartphone – the Atrix – way back in 2011. But early fingerprint readers were inconvenient, requiring you to scroll your finger across them, and unreliable. Apple waited until it could do the job properly.

So what are some of the things Android manufacturers have done that I think Apple could usefully learn from … ? 
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There have been an increasing number of reports from iPhone users running iOS 9.1 that Touch ID is proving slow or unreliable. The issue was first spotted by Forbes earlier this week.

The complaints are similar: users running iOS 9.1 find Touch ID either refuses to recognise a user’s fingerprint, has become highly unreliable or doesn’t even register a fingerprint pressed against it. Users have tried hard resets (holding in the power and home button for 10 seconds) and complete factory resets without any success.

The issue appears to be affecting a small minority of users, but enough to suggest that it is more than coincidence …

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The USPTO has today published a patent application by Apple to allow a specific fingerprint to activate a ‘panic mode’ on an iPhone, designed for use when the owner feels threatened, is in danger or is being forced to unlock their phone.

In its most basic form, placing a specific finger on the Touch ID button would place the iPhone into a special locked-down mode, blocking access to personal data store on the phone – perhaps simulating a brand new phone. In that way, if a street robber forced you to unlock your phone before handing it over, your data would be safe.

But the patent application goes far beyond this … 
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Security firm FireEye said in a blog post that XcodeGhost – a fake version of Xcode that injected malware into genuine apps – remains a threat. FireEye has identified a more advanced version of the compromised app development tool, XcodeGhost S, which has been designed to infect iOS 9 apps and allow compromised apps to escape detection by Apple.

XcodeGhost is planted in different versions of Xcode, including Xcode 7 (released for iOS 9 development). In the latest version, which we call XcodeGhost S, features have been added to infect iOS 9 and bypass static detection.

We have worked with Apple to have all XcodeGhost and XcodeGhost samples we have detected removed from the App Store.

The company said that by monitoring its customers’ networks, it identified 210 enterprises with infected apps running inside their networks – a third of them in the USA – generating 28,000 attempts to connect to the XcodeGhost Command and Control (CnC) servers … 
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For all I know, Apple may own my house. Like every other person on the planet, when faced with pages and pages of terms & conditions, I just click Accept and get on with my day.
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iOS 9 continues to outstrip all previous versions of iOS in terms of pace of adoption. Apple has updated its developer site to show that 66% of all iOS devices are now running iOS 9, up from 61% less than a fortnight ago.

For comparison, iOS 8 had only hit 60% by the end of November last year, took until late December to get to 64% and January to reach 68%. The latest numbers also represent good news for the security of iOS devices … 
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Apple has an Indoor Survey app on the iOS App Store, designed to help pinpoint locations inside a store, restaurant or other business – but it doesn’t show up in a search, and you need to register in Apple Maps Connect to download it.

By dropping “points” on a map within the Survey App, you indicate your position within the venue as you walk through. As you do so, the indoor Survey App measures the radio frequency (RF) signal data and combines it with an iPhone’s sensor data. The end result is indoor positioning without the need to install special hardware … 

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Apple plans to start selling the 12.9-inch iPad Pro on Wednesday, November 11th via both its physical retail and online stores, according to multiple sources. Apple previously only said that the large tablet would become available during the month of November, a couple of months after the introduction in early September. The iPad Pro’s marquee accessories, the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, will also become available for purchase on November 11th. The iPad Pro starts at $799 and comes in both 32GB and 128GB configurations with WiFi only. An LTE-compatible version comes exclusively in the 128GB configuration and costs upwards of $1000. We reported earlier this week that Apple’s support staff is scheduled to complete iPad Pro training by November 6th, less than a week prior to the launch.

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Apple’s famed obsession with secrecy in its product development process is hampering its work in the field of artificial intelligence, say academics working in the field. Bloomberg reports that AI experts believe that lack of two-way sharing of information slows development.

“Apple is off the scale in terms of secrecy,” says Richard Zemel, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. “They’re completely out of the loop.”

Apple Maps was cited as an example of what can go wrong when AI teams within Apple are cut off from other work being done in the field – and even from researchers in other teams within Apple. Worse, it is claimed, the approach makes it impossible for Apple to recruit the brightest people in the field …

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The old world was a simple one. Apple needed two things to succeed: a well-off market willing to pay a premium price for its products, and a low-cost manufacturing base to build them. The U.S. and Europe provided the former, China the latter.

The idea that China could become Apple’s biggest market in less than a decade would have seemed unimaginable back when the first iPhone went on sale in 2007. It now looks inevitable.

Let’s run the numbers … 
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Two separate market share reports show that Apple increased its share of the global smartphone market year-on-year, with Samsung’s share declining. Strategy Analytics estimates that Apple grew its market share from 12.2% in Q3 2014 to 13.6% in Q3 2015, while Counterpoint has the numbers at 11.9% to 13.1% … 
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A patent troll is currently suing Apple, Samsung and half the automotive industry – as well as other companies – over the use of a vague, decade old patent that covers operating certain functions of a vehicle, like starting the engine and locking/unlocking doors, through a “watch” – now known as a “smartwatch”.

Intellectual Capital Consulting (LCC), the plaintiff in the lawsuit (which we embed below), claims that the defendants are using patented technology in smartwatch products and software that they are selling or contributing to sell.
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