Benjamin Mayo

Threads launched to much fanfare in July, racking up 100 million signups in less than a week. The microblogging service launched as Twitter users were facing strict rate limits on usage, with Meta hoping to capitalize on the discontent of the Twitter user base — now called ‘X’ — and bring them onto their new text platform, based off the Instagram social graph.

However, usage of Threads has declined significantly in the weeks since the huge launch. One way to reignite growth is to make the service accessible to more users. Right now, Threads is only available on iPhone and Android … but that is about to change.

Apple TV+ today announced the title of its upcoming Godzilla universe TV series, alongside some first look photos. Entitled “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” the series stars Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell, and more in a story set after the events of the movie Godzilla (2014), as they uncover their connection to the Monarch organization.

The press photos confirm that Godzilla (and other monsters) will appear across the ten-episode series. Parts of this show have reportedly been filmed in Apple’s Immersive Video format, ready for a spatial 3D playback experience on the upcoming Apple Vision Pro headset.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman writes that Apple is preparing a major redesign for the Apple Watch, referred to as Apple Watch X. The Apple Watch X is scheduled to launch in 2024 or 2025, in line with the device’s 10th anniversary. The update will represent the biggest redesign of the Watch ever, following several years of minor changes. (The Apple Watch Series 9 this fall will also be a minor spec bump generation.)

Gurman says Apple is trying to make the Watch X thinner than ever, possibly including a new magnetic attachment system for attaching and swapping bands.

The Messi effect is real for MLS Season Pass: the total number of subscribers to the service has more than doubled since renowned soccer player Lionel Messi joined the league. That stat is via a tweet from Inter Miami club owner Jorge Mas.

Although Apple doesn’t release hard figures, Tim Cook did call out Messi’s contribution on last week’s earnings call: on the subject of MLS, Cook said, “We are beating our expectation in terms of subscribers, and the fact that Messi went to Inter Miami helped us out there a bit, and so we’re very excited about it.”

Nikkei is reporting that chip design company Arm is set to go public on the US Nasdaq stock exchange later this year, with an IPO valued at more than $60 billion.

Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, and other leading chipmakers will invest in Arm stock when it goes public. For Apple, this ownership stake will help secure a stable future for the chip architecture that forms the foundations of all of its Apple Silicon chips.

iMessage will now show rich post link previews for Threads, just like Twitter and Mastodon. This means that when a user shares a link to a Threads post via iMessage, the chat bubble now conveniently shows the text of the post inline, along with the avatar and username of the post author.

This preview is based on standard meta tags supplied in the HTML page’s source code, but Apple has to explicitly whitelist providers to show the text content in the bubbles. So that means Apple is at least somewhat endorsing Threads as a legitimate platform.

Apple today announced that its high-interest savings account for Apple Card has topped over $10 billion in deposits. Early indicators suggested that the savings account was a hit, and today Apple has given us firm official numbers to back that up.

The savings account launched in April, available to all Apple Card customers in the United States, in partnership with Goldman Sachs. The account offers a highly-competitive 4.15% interest rate.

Although a deal is not yet approved, Apple looks set to land the streaming rights for the Pac-12 sports conference. As reported by ESPN’s Pet Thamel, the Pac-12 hosted a meeting today with its conference schools, proposing Apple as their new TV rights partner.

The arrangement would materialize in a similar vein to MLS Season Pass, which sees all MLS games exclusively stream through the Apple TV app. Like MLS Season Pass, access to the Pac-12 channel would likely be a standalone subscription (separate to Apple TV+).

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reiterates the recent reporting around iPhone 15 pricing. Gurman says that consumers should expect “minor” price increases across the iPhone 15 lineup internationally, as well as in the US – particularly for the iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max that will include a new titanium chassis design and upgraded camera system.

For the Apple Watch, expect chip spec bumps for the Series 9 and Ultra, but no SE this year (as it appears to be on a two-year cycle). Interestingly, Gurman says Apple tested a dark gray titanium color option for the Apple Watch Ultra last year, but it was scrapped for the 2022 Ultra launch. However, Gurman suggests that the darker color may return for the 2023 Apple Watch Ultra hardware refresh.

Apple today announced that it had its 3 most-watched matches ever on MLS Season Pass in the past week, between July 19 – July 26.

Although Apple did not specifically attribute the growth in viewership to anything in particular, the timing is obvious: last week saw the arrival of football superstar Lionel Messi join Inter Miami, with his MLS debut taking place on Friday, July 21.

Via Hashmoji, Apple has just launched a marketing campaign for two hashtags relating to Apple Pay: Both #ApplePay and #PayTheAppleWay hashtags are now accompanied by the tick icon in tweets.

It is possible that Apple is simply taking the summer to market Apple Pay more aggressively, especially as we have seen the service roll out to a lot more countries in recent weeks. But the new hashmojis also fuel speculation that a major new Apple Pay-related product announcement is imminent.

Update: In an interview with The Daily Mail, Apple SVP Eddy Cue downplayed the suggestion that Apple would bid for British football rights, indicating he is only interested in sports deals with global scope that can apply to a significant majority of its worldwide customer base. Original story from March follows below …

Following initial rumored interest, Apple is again rumored to be looking at bidding for English Premier League football streaming. This morning, Bloomberg reports that Apple is considering rights to stream Premier League and lower league matches in the UK.

This follows the debut of MLS Season Pass this past February, MLB Friday Night Baseball, and many rumors of other Apple sports streaming initiatives in development including negotiations with the Pac-12.

Apple is considering raising the price of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, according to a new report from Bloomberg. As a reminder, the iPhone 14 Pro currently starts at $999 and the iPhone 14 Pro Max starts at $1,099. The price of the lower-end iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus would remain the same.

Overall, the publication says Apple expects to ship about the same number of iPhone 15 units as iPhone 14, with a target of around 85 million for this calendar year. Steady unit sales combined with a price jump for the Pro models will see overall iPhone revenue increase.

This weekend, Elon Musk has officially announced that Twitter will be rebranded as “X.” Musk announced that X.com now redirects to Twitter homepage. The new interim logo can be seen above, and will roll out across the Twitter platform today.

Somewhat awkwardly, X.com does not actually redirect to Twitter right now — instead users see a GoDaddy landing page due to a configuration error.

Via Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, Apple is gearing up to offer a new option for Apple retail store employees to offer customers when buying a product. Employees will now be able to make sales with home delivery instead of requiring that the customer carry the product home.

Gurman says the new EasyPay Online Ordering program will be available to stores in August. The move to offering home delivery shipments in store may signal a larger strategy shift.