Benjamin Mayo

The comedy Ted Lasso has been Apple TV+‘s biggest hit to date, and the streaming service is keeping executive Bill Lawrence in the family with his next project — a drama series — receiving an official series order today.

‘Bad Monkey’ is written and executive produced by Bill Lawrence, and stars Vince Vaughn in the lead role. The series is based off of the 2013 novel of the same name.

Update: This has now been officially announced: notably your phone will only be scanning photos uploaded to iCloud, in line with policies of all major social networks and web services. (Original story below for context.)

Apple is reportedly set to announce new photo identification features that will use hashing algorithms to match the content of photos in users’ photo libraries with known child abuse materials, such as child pornography.

Apple’s system will happen on the client — on the user’s device — in the name of privacy, so the iPhone would download a set of fingerprints representing illegal content and then check each photo in the user’s camera roll against that list. Presumably, any matches would then be reported for human review.

Apple TV+ has signed yet another major movie onto its slate of original film projects. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, ‘Argylle’ follows the word’s greatest spy around the globe. Deadline reports that Apple snagged the package for around $200 million.

The film will star Henry Cavill, Sam Rockwell, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, John Cena and Samuel L Jackson. Artist Dua Lipa will also feature, as well as providing music for the film’s score.

Some users are getting increasingly frustrated with the Apple TV app as they are paying money to buy or rent movies from the store, only to find that when they go to play the content, there is no sound at all.

This appears to be happening across platforms where Apple offers the TV app, including on tvOS, smart TVs, and third-party streaming sticks like Roku.

Apple today released the full official trailer for its post-apocalyptic drama series ‘SEE’. The second season of SEE debuts on August 27 on Apple TV+.

This season, lead character Baba Voss (Jason Momoa) must face off against his estranged brother Edo Voss (Dave Bautista), the latter of which is holding Baba’s daughter captive.

Apple today sent out an email to developers letting them know that a handful of Siri intents are no longer supported. If customers invoke these commands via Siri for a supporting app in iOS 15 or later, Siri will simply reply that the request cannot be handled.

Affected Siri domains include ride booking, configuration of vehicles via Siri over CarPlay, and third-party Photo Search. Many of these SiriKit intents were introduced when third-party Siri support was first added to the system back in iOS 10. Apple didn’t provide a reason for their abrupt removal.

As usual, Apple is not releasing hard numbers on how well Apple TV+ is doing. However, the company told Deadline that the premiere of Ted Lasso season two yielded new highs for viewership.

Apple TV+ set records for viewership on a single day and viewership across the weekend. The company says 6x more people watched on season two premiere weekend than when the first season launched last year.

Update: Although communication on this subject is still lacking, users are reporting that their grandfathered subscriptions are once again renewing correctly. So, this may have been a weird glitch after all. Original story below.

With seemingly no warning, Apple TV+ users are noticing that their grandfathered $9.99/mo Paramount+ and Showtime bundle subscriptions are now expiring.

Apple launched the 50% discounted bundle to much fanfare last year, before CBS All Access was rebranded as Paramount+. The bundle was discontinued for new subscribers in February ahead of the Paramount+ launch, but existing subscribers were able to continue taking advantage of the deal. Seemingly, no more.

Ted Lasso returns with its second season on the Apple TV+ streaming service, following the phenomenal success of season one. Season two will have twelve episodes in total, including a Christmas special debuting in August, with episodes releasing weekly from now until October 8. If you haven’t yet joined the Diamond Dogs, here’s how to start watching one of the funniest and heartwarming comedies of recent times …

Apple today commemorated its 40 year history in Singapore, where it first set up offices in 1981.

Singapore serves as Apple’s base for its Asia-Pacific operations. Today, Apple says it employs more than 3500 people and supports a further 55,000 Singaporean jobs with the iOS app economy. Tim Cook celebrated the occasion with a new interview with local radio, in which he discusses his first ever Mac experience.

The Wall Street Journal today reported that Apple is on the hunt for a production campus in Los Angeles, as it continues investment in original content production.

The site could exceed half a million square feet in area and would primarily contain soundstages for Apple TV+ productions to shoot on. The production hub would be in addition to the existing soundstage spaces it rents around the world.

A nice little feature of watchOS 8 that has gone a bit under the radar is the new Voice Feedback option in watchOS 8. The toggle can be enabled in the Settings app on the Watch itself or through the companion Watch app on the iPhone; go to Settings -> Workout and look for the Voice Feedback toggle.

An explosive report from Amnesty International interpreted device logs to reveal the scope of targeted malware attacks in active use targeting Android and iPhone devices, since July 2014 and as recently as July 2021. Exploited devices can secretly transmit messages and photos stored on the phone, as well as record phone calls and secretly record from the microphone. The attack is sold by Israeli firm NSO Group as ‘Pegasus’.

Whilst the company claims to only sell the spyware software for legit counterterrorism purposes, the report indicates it has actually been used to target human rights activists, lawyers and journalists around the world (as many have long suspected).

Ahead of the new season premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday, some Apple retail stores are giving out promotional sticker packs featuring Memoji of Ted Lasso.

Apple has made a few iMessage sticker packs for other TV+ shows like Snoopy in Space or Dickinson but this is the first time we can recall Apple distributing show-specific promotional materials at Apple retail stores.