Benjamin Mayo

Apple is currently in the middle of a heated dispute with Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) over App Store terms, as the company sees the number of antitrust investigations targeting App Store policy continue to grow. Now, the news publishers are joining in too.

A letter signed by a trade group that represents top newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post says that Apple’s rules prevent them from investing in quality journalism. Among other changes, the letter asks for Apple’s cut of in-app purchases to be reduced to 15%.

Apple has become the first public company to hit the magic milestone of having a $2 trillion market capitalization, just two years after it crossed the $1 trillion mark.

Market cap is the value of a share multiplied by number of shares, thereby seen as the overall value of a publicly traded firm. Apple has seen its stock almost double this year off of COVID pandemic lows in March. Investor confidence rebounded as Apple delivered strong revenue growth in many business divisions last quarter, with its services division offering promising monetization opportunities over the next few years.

Apple today announced a revamp of its live radio strategy for Apple Music. The Beats 1 streaming service is being renamed to ‘Apple Music 1’, and Apple is launching two new stations: Apple Music Hits and Apple Music Country.

Apple Music Hits will feature the top songs spanning ’80s, ’90s and 2000’s, whilst Apple Music Country showcases the evolving nature of the country music genre.

Apple has today launched its first bundle partnership for Apple TV+ subscribers. With an active Apple TV+ subscription, you can now subscribe to CBS All Access and Showtime for $9.99 per month via Apple TV Channels, a 50% saving over buying both channels separately.

This offer is only available to TV+ subscribers in the United States. The news was first reported last week by Bloomberg.

Update: Epic Games filed legal papers attacking App Store policy.

The highly-popular battle royale game Fortnite has now been removed from the App Store, after the company added a direct payments feature that evaded Apple’s In-App Purchase system. Read Apple’s statement after the break.

App Store rules requires digital purchases to use In-App Purchase, sharing 30% commission with Apple. The direct payments feature was pretty clearly in violation of those rules. Many believe Epic went ahead with it as an intentional stunt to draw attention to Apple’s App Store policy, amidst growing anticompetitive pressures.

Apple is readying to launch a range of services bundles in October, with the working brand name ‘Apple One’, according to a report from Bloomberg. The bundle would offer a selection of Apple’s services at a discount, with a variety of packages and prices. Bloomberg suggests that Apple is also launching a services rival to compete with Peloton, with Apple virtual fitness classes being part of the bundle deal.

The bundle would arrive alongside the new iPhone 12 lineup, as Apple continues to grow its services revenue. On its latest earnings call, Apple publicly confirmed that the new iPhone series would debut a few weeks later than the usual September timeframe.

An iOS 14 feature that has gone a bit under the radar is the Precise Location toggle for Location Services. This new toggle gives the user more control over which apps can access your current location, and to what granularity.

Before iOS 14, you could grant an app access to your location whilst using the app, or always. However, if location access was allowed, the app would always get an exact coordinate. A lot of apps don’t actually need such precise location information, and iOS 14 offers that flexibility, including asking the user upfront in the permissions dialog.

With the COVID pandemic impacting production on pretty much all Hollywood projects, the second season release dates of Apple’s flagship shows (The Morning Show, For All Mankind, See, Servant, etcetera) have been pushed into 2021. To help plug the gap, Apple TV+ has acquired two Israeli series which it will stream exclusively.

The Trump executive order banning US companies from having a business relationship with WeChat has many ramifications, and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is concerned that the hit to iPhone sales will be significant.

If the order is implemented in full, it would see WeChat being removed from the App Store worldwide. WeChat is a critically important app for the Chinese market and if it’s no longer available on iOS, iPhone sales could decline by as much as 30%.

Apple released the Apple TV 4K in late 2017, along with annual updates to tvOS. There are rumors that a spec bump refresh is imminent, but an exact release date remains unclear.

Apple TV primarily competes against the Amazon Fire Stick and Roku’s range of streaming sticks. What’s funny is that the Apple TV has indirectly become the best option for consumers, at least in the US, despite Apple not releasing a new generation of hardware. And it all comes down to business contractual disputes between HBO Max and Peacock, the two major streaming services that launched this year …

In a left-field rumor, EverythingApplePro is reporting that Chinese accessory manufacturers believe that the iPhone 12 will include an intriguing new set of internal magnets.

The iPad Pro is packed full of magnets that aids attachment of the Magic Keyboard. For the iPhone 12, the utility is not immediately clear. As the new ring of magnets is positioned in the chassis in the same place as the wireless charging coil, it is speculated that Apple might be working on a new wireless charging mat to which the iPhone 12 could automatically snap.

Apple has today updated the iMac with a few tech spec bumps. Although the rumored redesign did not come to pass, Apple has updated the 27-inch models with new 10th-generation Intel CPUs, a higher-resolution 1080p webcam.

Apple has also standardized SSDs across the lineup for fast internal storage, finally adding the Apple T2 chip. The 21.5-inch iMac also gets the SSD chip, with Fusion Drive as a build-to-order option.

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Apple TV+ is now available on American Airlines for free. The airline and Apple are partnering to give customers more options for passing the time whilst in the air.

As first reported by The Points Guy, Apple TV+ content is now available on American Airline entertainment systems. The exact roster of shows varies per flight, and American Airlines will mix up the offerings every few months, but it currently includes Apple’s flagship originals like The Morning Show and Defending Jacob.

Apple impressed investors last night with strong quarterly earnings, reporting its best June quarter ever, despite the global economic uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt daily life worldwide.

AAPL stock opened today at ~$409, a new all-time high for the company, and up 6.5% from market close yesterday. Apple made headlines in August 2018 for becoming the first public company to hit $1 trillion market cap, and it is now well on its way to becoming the first public company to cross the $2 trillion mark.

We haven’t much about this year’s hardware update to the Apple Watch so far. A report from Digitimes today suggests that Apple has made a manufacturing deal with supplier ASE Technology, as it prepares up the production lines for Apple Watch Series 6.

Most notably, the report claims that the Watch will include a blood oxygen sensor for the first time. 9to5Mac previously found evidence of forthcoming blood oxygen monitoring support in an early build of watchOS 7.

As part of the big tech monopoly judicial hearing yesterday, the court has released many pages of documentation to support its claims against Apple’s alleged monopolistic App Store practices. One of these emails shines a light on Apple’s dealing with Amazon.

During the proceedings, Apple CEO Tim Cook said they treat every developer the same, but the details of the Amazon Prime Video deal seems to fly in the face of that …

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Pushing back from the coronavirus-fuelled slump at the start of the year, Apple’s iPhone was the fastest growing smartphone brand in China in Q2, according to data from Counterpoint Research.

The resilience of the iPhone 11 popularity and the launch of the new iPhone SE saw Apple sell about 7.4 millions from April to June, up 32% year over year. Rival Huawei sold 36.6 million units there, up 14%.

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