Ben Lovejoy

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has already supported claims of illegal Apple union-busting tactics, and now two members of Congress have said that this appears to be a recurring pattern.

Democratic representatives Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO) and Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) have jointly written to the NLRB asking for a wider investigation into Apple’s response to the growing unionization movement within its retail stores …

Whether you are for or against the unionization of Apple’s retail stores, I think few would begrudge the staff many of the things they are seeking. But the call for Apple Store tips strikes me as unrealistic, unreasonable, unpopular, distracting, and likely to prove counterproductive.

The full list of things Apple Store workers are seeking is lengthy, but I think most of us could get behind the five main asks …

Therapy apps are proving increasingly popular, as people seek help with their mental health without the inconvenience and high cost of in-person counseling. But for the second year running, researchers have found that the majority of them are failing to meet expected privacy standards.

Of 32 mental health apps studied, some 19 of them were labeled as “privacy not included,” with the researchers stating they were shocked at how bad they were …

AAPL Q2 2023 earnings will be announced at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT today, and while the company hasn’t offered specific guidance, it has warned that it expects a year-on-year decline of around 5%.

Wall Street agrees, with analysts expecting a drop from last year’s record $97.3B – but Apple is expected to demonstrate its own continued confidence in the stock through a large buyback announcement …

Apple trade-in values certainly don’t match what you’ll get from selling privately, but they do offer a safe and painless way to upgrade to a new device. The company has today updated the amounts offered, with a mix of increases and decreases (and some unchanged sums).

In the case of the iPhone increases, the differences range from $10 to $30. The maximum trade-in available now for an iPhone is $630, while the minimum is just $40 …

A UK antitrust case against Apple has once again been thrown out, after an appeal tribunal ruled that the original decision was correct – that the UK’s competition watchdog had missed a legal deadline.

The ruling stands despite the fact that two Apple App Store policies were found to be anticompetitive, and even though the tribunal appeared to agree that its own decision was likely to have “undesirable or unfortunate results” …

Chipmaker AMD claims that its new laptop chip, the Ryzen 7840U, can outperform Apple’s M2 chip – though it provides no proof of this. The chip is destined to be used in upcoming laptops from Acer, Framework, HP, Lenovo, and Razer.

No benchmarks are provided by AMD to support its claims, and there’s no information on battery life, which is another major strength of Apple’s M-series chips …

Following last month’s rollout of the new Apple Maps features coming to Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, Apple is now testing them in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Slovakia.

This is the 19th time Apple has expanded coverage of the all-new mapping, which features both far greater detail and improved navigation …

It’s almost a decade since I first suggested that we might one day see an Apple Bank. Given that not even Apple Pay existed back then, I’ll be the first to admit that it seemed a pretty out-there idea at the time.

By 2015, it seemed significantly less of a stretch, and yesterday’s billion dollar news brought us even closer …

While both Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and display analyst Ross Young originally expected Apple to announce the upcoming 15-inch MacBook Air at a spring event, that’s looking less and less likely now that we’re into May – and WWDC is approaching.

Gurman now expects the new machine to be launched at WWDC, and it would certainly make for a solid keynote headline …

The Apple vs. Masimo court battle has ended in a mistrial, after six of the jurors found that Apple had not stolen trade secrets to create the O2 sensor in the Apple Watch – but the seventh juror disagreed.

The judge had already rejected half of Masimo’s patent infringement claims before handing the rest of them to the jury to decide …

While the MacBook Pro‘s now-vintage Touch Bar may have been a misstep, it still seems likely that Apple’s long-term vision is to replace physical keyboards with touchscreen ones – and Carnegie Mellon University’s flat panel haptics could be a better bet than the approaches Apple has patented to date.

Apple’s first step in this lengthy journey was of course the iPhone, replacing the physical keyboards which were the norm on smartphones of the time with a screen-based virtual one …

An Apple embezzler who was originally estimated to have cost the Cupertino company $10M has now admitted to fraudulently obtaining a total of $17M over a period of seven years. Dhirendra Prasad worked as a buyer in Apple’s global supply-chain division, and engaged in a mix of activities in order to steal the money.

27th April 2023: Prasad has now been sentenced to three years, and ordered to repay both Apple and the IRS – see update at the end

Year-on-year shipments in the global smartphone market fell by 13% in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest market intelligence data. This is the fifth consecutive quarter of decline.

Apple was the only major brand to buck the trend, growing its iPhone shipments by 3% while its competitors saw declines ranging from 8% to 22% …

The latest Apple rumors from Twitter account @analyst941 include iPadOS 17 features geared to larger iPads. They suggest the features are intended for a flagship 14-inch iPad Pro model with an M3 chip.

The same leaker echoes expectations that the USB-C port on iPhone 15 Pro models will support Thunderbolt 3, and says there will be a new display feature geared to using iPhones for video work …

A number of Apple small business initiatives have helped tiny companies become bigger ones, says the Cupertino company, in the run-up to National Small Business Week.

A number of business have shared how Apple products, apps, and services have helped them grow – and anyone wanting to follow their example can take place in special Today at Apple workshops, Grow Your Business With Apple …

The European Union has now confirmed that Apple is one of 19 tech giants to be subject to the Digital Services Act. Specifically, the online safety and transparency legislation will apply to the App Store.

Apple has four months to comply, which will likely require changes to App Store recommendations and ads – though it looks like pre-installed iPhone apps won’t be affected …