Zac Hall

Nokia has announced a new patent cross-license agreement with Apple that replaces the prior deal reached in 2017. The arrangement was set to expire later this year.

Speaking of the good ol’ pivot to video, Spotify may be taking a page out of the Apple Music playbook and investing in a music video catalog.

Twitter is testing new ways to kneecap itself this week while simultaneously attempting the pull off the classic pivot to video meme. This is apparently an emergency measure…

Speaking of unfathomable numbers, Ted Lasso has been blazing through the charts at Nielsen. During the week of the season 3 finale, more than a billion minutes were spent watching the Apple TV+ comedy.

6/30: Apple has made history, becoming the first publicly traded company to close with a $3 trillion valuation based on market cap – $3.051 trillion to be precise. This was achieved with a closing stock value of $193.97 per share after reaching an intraday trading high of $194.48 per share. Apple previously became the first company to touch $3 trillion in 2022, and today marks the first time it has closed at $3 trillion. Coverage of the run-up to today’s milestone below:

Apple stock (AAPL) recently bucked a year-long trend and set a new record-high closing price. Now investors are looking at a new intraday trading high as well as the highest closing price to date.

The company closed at $189.59 per share today after opening at $189.08 and reaching $190.07 during trading. That puts Apple at a $2.982 trillion valuation based on market cap.

Speaking of tech industry layoffs, the makers of Pokémon GO are proving that they’re not immune to growing too fast either. Niantic announced today that it is closing its LA studio and cancelling new and upcoming AR game titles.

It’s been a tough week at Plex where the company has decided to let go of 20% of its workforce. Plex CEO Keith Valory blamed an unpredictable advertising market for the need to downsize.

After launching a premium version of its platform, Snapchat reported a cool one million subscribers in just six weeks last summer. A year later, Snap is sharing a new milestone.

Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.

I’ve long considered Lutron Caseta the most elegant and user-friendly HomeKit lighting solution. Lutron makes the wall switch smart and works with standard dimmable bulbs; other solutions put the smarts in the bulbs then require remotes on the walls and never turning off the wall switch.

Lutron’s Fan Speed Control is the perfect complement to the existing line of dimmer light switches. Fan Speed Control works with the same Lutron bridge which supports Apple HomeKit smart home control, making the new wall switches the best way to retrofit existing ceiling fans with Home app and Siri control.

As Apple prepares to launch the iPhone 15 this fall, its key manufacturing partner Foxconn is cranking up hiring across its factories in China.

6/28: Public beta versions of each release are now available as well.

While all the action is happening around iOS 17 beta, Apple is continuing to prepare a more imminent iPhone software update for release. Apple has released the fourth iOS 16.6 beta for developer testing.

Palmer Luckey hasn’t been shy about his enthusiasm for Apple Vision Pro. In a new podcast interview, the cofounder of Oculus has nothing but good things to say about Apple’s $3,500 mixed reality headset and what it means for the future of virtual reality.

Once upon a time on Wall Street, Apple stock took a nosedive worth tens of billions of dollars for the company’s valuation. A few years later, Apple is fast approaching a $3 trillion valuation that it only briefly flirted with before.

Nevertheless, a class-action lawsuit blaming Apple CEO Tim Cook for defrauding investors refuses to go away.

Apple Vision Pro has officially been announced, and we’re still deep in the hype phase for the highly anticipated mixed reality headset. There’s a good reason for that.

For starters, we’ve been hoping that the past few years would finally be the year of the headset. It’s been in development that long. More importantly, the Apple headset launch is actually happening.

Apple is publicly opposing the current form of the Online Safety Bill currently being considered by Parliament in the UK. According to Apple, the proposed law risks putting “UK citizens at greater risk” from data breaches and digital surveillance.

Apple is currently in the process of readying the iPhone 15 lineup for launch this fall. Based on display supply chain analysis, Apple appears to be gearing up for especially strong demand this year.

Apple announced last month that it plans to discontinue its My Photo Stream service this summer. Today marks the deadline for media uploads using the free iCloud feature. This effectively ends the service after more than a decade of providing a basic sync solution at no cost to Apple device users.

Apple unveiled its mixed reality headset called Vision Pro earlier this month. As of this week, developers have been able to access the necessary tools to create apps for visionOS. Now the latest version of App Store Connect is out with support for visionOS apps.

Speaking of lost stuff, there’s one iPad feature that I hope Apple finds a way to deliver. There’s already a patent for it, and iOS 17 is a positive sign that it could actually happen.