Benjamin Mayo

Apple today announced a major new sports streaming deal. Following on from its MLB Friday Night Baseball deal on Apple TV+, the company today announced that it will be the exclusive streaming destination to watch Major League Soccer games, in the US and internationally, starting with the 2023 season.

Unlike Friday Night Baseball, watching the games will require a separate subscription to an MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app.

The hero changes to iMessage in iOS 16 are the addition of edit button and undo send features. However, there’s also another enhancement that Apple didn’t mention on stage: the dreaded Tapback spam in SMS group chats has been resolved.

Apple is now using a very similar strategy to the hacky workaround that Google rolled out earlier this year to tackle the same problem for Android users receiving Tapback messages from iPhone users …

Catching up to feature request from at least five years ago, the Photos app will finally let you lock your Hidden photos album with your passcode or biometrics.

In previous versions of iOS, marking a photo as Hidden merely removed it from the main camera roll, and put it in a separate bucket available in the albums list. But prying eyes could just tap on it to reveal them.

Apple today announced its next-generation MacBook Air, starting at $1199, featuring the just-announced M2 chip inside. The new MacBook Air has a redesigned enclosure and comes in striking new case colors.

The new Air design comes in silver, space gray, starlight, midnight, and gold. The previous teardrop wedge shape has been replaced with a simpler, flat-edged chassis. Just like the 2021 MacBook Pro, the display has also been pushed closer to the edges with the addition of a display notch.

Apple launched Apple Silicon to much fanfare in October 2020, with the first generation chip named ‘M1’. Now, Apple is debuting its second-generation custom Mac chip architecture, unsurprisingly named M2. M2 chip arrives first in the brand new MacBook Air.

Apple says CPU performance is 18% faster. You can now get 50% more memory bandwidth than M1, with up to 24 GB total RAM. There are also now 10 total GPU cores, with up to 35% better graphics performance than M1.

iMessage in iOS 16 is getting a lot better. The company is adding new features in the Messages app for iMessage conversations including the ability to edit messages after they have been sent.

You will be able to edit sent messages, undo sending messages entirely and mark read conversations as unread. There are some limits to be aware of …

The Apple Store is down ahead of Apple’s WWDC 2022 keynote later today, with a new placeholder page that reads ‘Developing news’. The ceremonial store-going-down dance usually indicates that Apple is preparing to announce new hardware products.

Of course, the main star of the show today will be on the operating system updates; we expect Apple to unveil major new features for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, watchOS 9 and tvOS 16. Some new hardware announcements are also in the cards …

Apple authorized reseller B&H Photo has drummed up some speculation this morning about what new hardware we might see at the WWDC Apple keynote on Monday, alongside the usual iOS 16, macOS 13 and other software releases.

The reseller has set up placeholder product pages for an as-yet-unreleased M2 Mac mini (the M1 Mac mini debuted in October 2020) and a seemingly all-new ‘Mac mini tower‘ product, which may possibly be a reference to the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro …

European lawmakers are going to meet on June 7 as they look to finalize an agreement to enforce a single universal charging port law, which would see all mobile devices sold in the EU be required to offer USB-C ports for charging.

This idea has been circling in the minds of EU regulators for almost a decade, citing environmental e-waste benefits. The plans have previously drawn strong pushback from Apple, who intimated it would stifle innovation.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo pointed out on Twitter today that the public roadmap for TSMC’s silicon processes indicates that its 3-nanometer and 4-nanometer fabs will not be available for mass production until 2023.

This is another indication that the A16 chip coming with the iPhone 14 will continue to use a 5-nanometer fabrication process. This is on top of the fact that we believe that only higher-end models of the iPhone 14 will feature an A16 chip inside; the base models will continue to use the A15 chip.

Apple TV+ today premiered its new docuseries Prehistoric Planet. Prehistoric Planet combines big-budget CGI with the latest scientific knowledge about dinosaurs to bring a wholly new five-part series.

In the style of Planet Earth and similar nature documentaries, David Attenborough narrates the behavior of these stunning Cretaceous period species, as if they were actually being filmed.

Apple has apparently advanced its plans to expand manufacturing outside of China, telling contract manufacturer partners that it is aiming to diversify production. This is according to a report posted today by the Wall Street Journal.

Although some of Apple’s products are already produced in countries like Vietnam and India, the vast majority of Apple’s manufacturing takes place in China, at Foxconn and Pegatron facilities.

Display analyst Ross Young today tweeted that his latest supply chain analysis indicates that the rumored 27-inch external display with mini-LED has been delayed until October. He previously said it would arrive in June.

Young says the delay is due to the recent wave of COVID-induced lockdowns at the Quanta production plant. Production is reportedly being setting up at another facility.

According to a new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple has recently demoed its upcoming AR/VR headset device to the Apple company board of directors. This is a good indicator that the project is at an ‘advanced stage’ and that a public product launch is imminent.

Bloomberg previously reported that a consumer launch for the headset is planned for 2023 but an early announcement of the device is likely. Today’s report also said that the development of the headset’s operating system has ramped up in recent months.

In April, a large group of Final Cut editors signed their name to an open letter asking Apple to do more to promote the use of Final Cut in the TV and film industry, in addition to closing long-running feature requests.

Today, Apple publicly responded. The letter reads: “the creative community has always been so important to us at Apple,” and the company pledged to address “your important feature requests.” Apple also said that is adding new training products, expanding workshops, and setting up a consultation panel of experts.