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Apple CEO Tim Cook has finally taken the iCloud leaked photos situation into his own hands. Cook today sat down with The Wall Street Journal for an interview regarding the breach, and the Apple executive shared details on key security improvements coming soon to iCloud. Cook first addressed what happened, confirming our own theories.

In his first interview on the subject, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said celebrities’ iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers correctly answered security questions to obtain their passwords, or when they were victimized by a phishing scam to obtain user IDs and passwords. He said none of the Apple IDs and passwords leaked from the company’s servers…When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece,” he said. “I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.

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Earlier this week, iOS users discovered that the App Store was experiencing some technical issues that caused every item for sale to become unavailable. Now, only two days later, the company’s status page indicates that the App Store on Mac and iOS, iBooks Store, and various iTunes services such as the music store and Radio, are all suffering from even more downtime.

According to the status page, the issues first cropped up around 4:30 PM and have persisted for about three hours so far. A notice on the page states that only “some users” are having difficulty accessing the store, but there’s no mention of exactly how many users could be impacted.

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Financial site Bank Innovation reports that Apple has negotiated lower transaction fees with American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase ahead of the debut of its mobile payment system expected to be announced alongside the new iPhone models next week. The report notes that the banks were likely willing to lower rates to ensure participation and due to Apple’s security measures including the iPhone’s Touch ID sensor.

The first thing Apple has done is convince these four FIs to consider transactions from Apple’s upcoming payments venture — said to launch with its forthcoming iPhone 6 introduction — as “card present” transactions, which carry a lower discount rate than “card not present” transactions, because of lower fraud risk.

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Apple has just announced that it will be live streaming its upcoming event later this month on September 9th. Its website also includes a countdown clock pictured above and a link for Apple users to add the event to their calendar. 
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Former Apple Senior Vice President of Retail (then ousted JCPenney CEO) Ron Johnson made a somewhat rare public-facing appearance on Andreessen Horowitz’s podcast. The discussion comes in at just under half an hour and features the former head of Apple Retail discussing his experience with leading the Apple Store as well as the challenge for up-and-coming startup brands to afford brick-and-mortar retail channels, but more interesting from an Apple perspective is Johnson’s praise for Microsoft’s retail stores and the Surface 3 tablet that the company heavily markets against Apple’s MacBook Air.

“I think the Microsoft stores have succeeded much more than popular opinion. […] I think it’s really helped, for instance, the Surface 3. It’s a really great product and we all know that. Everyone who has tried a Surface 3 is pretty blown away with the software, the interaction, how it can be a tablet and a computer, its part of the future. Without those stores that Surface 3 wouldn’t be where it is today.”

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A new report published today by non-profit organization Green America and industry watchdog China Labor Watch accuses Apple of various violations of Chinese labor laws at one of its suppliers in the country (via NYTimes). The investigation focused on Apple supplier Catcher Technology in Suqian, China and claims to have found violations similar to those found during an audit of the same supplier last year:
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KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, in a report this morning, states that both 4.7- and 5.5-inch models of the iPhone 6 will be launched next week and will both offer 128GB storage option. If Apple retains its usual three-tier structure this would suggest 32GB, 64GB and 128GB models – though it could be that 128GB would be a fourth tier, as with its iPad Air models. Or, as a previous report suggested, Apple could keep the 16GB option as a very low price tier and skip 32GB.

The same report predicts that the iPad Air 2 will be announced on the same day as the iPhone 6 rather than in a separate event in October. In this scenario, Apple would forgo any physical updates to the iPad mini line (perhaps price drops?). If true, this suggests that it could be a relatively minor refresh, perhaps simply with Touch ID added and a marginally thinner casing along with the RAM bumped up to 2GB for things like split window multitasking … 
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A new report from KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo sheds some interesting light on the iWatch specifications. Kuo believes the iWatch will feature 8 GB of internal storage, with 512 MB of RAM. Naturally, these stats are lower than current iOS devices (which have upwards of 16 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM), but still seems high for a wearable smartwatch. This may suggest the device can act more independently from an iPhone than most assume. 8 GB of storage space is quite a lot and could be used for things like caching maps, or perhaps enable offline voice recognition.

KGI also believes the iWatch will come in two sizes, with a 1.3 inch and a 1.5 inch screen. This reflects longstanding rumours that Apple is targeting two sizes, to make it appeal to both gender’s fashion preferences. Kuo seems less sure on what materials will make up the product, but ‘guesses’ aluminium based on Apple’s tendencies to use the metal across its products. There is also mention of a gold color option, which would match with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6’s gold varieties.

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More developers are stepping forward with early looks at upcoming third-party keyboards for iOS 8. Today, Ginger Keyboard is going public with a keyboard that focuses on customization. The actual keyboard itself while used across iOS 8 does not add much new functionality, but many users will likely enjoy being able to completely customize the design of their keyboard.

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Ahead of Apple’s September 9th event that will include the introduction of Apple’s first wearable computer, along new, larger iPhones, The New York Times has profiled the existing wearable market. The juiciest bit from the story? A purported quote from Apple design chief Jony Ive, relayed by another Apple designer. Said Ive, referring to the existing watch market, “Switzerland is in trouble.”

Here’s the full section:

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Update: Despite the speculation from U2 followers, a spokesperson for the music group said the band will not be performing at the iPhone event or launching an album on the device, according to Irish site Independent.ie: “They are not releasing their album on the iPhone, and they are not performing at the iPhone launch.”

Update 2: Not so fast. The article with the denial statement is interestingly no longer available. Google cache here.

We received a tip earlier today regarding a possible U2 and Apple tie-up for the iPhone 6. It seems to be mostly speculation at this point, but some local journalists claim that U2’s latest video shoot in Dublin last week starred a possible next-gen iPhone. They also claim the device will come preloaded with a U2 album:
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IDC’s latest forecast predicts that the new larger iPhone will help shipments of phablets surpass shipments of portable PCs by the end of the year.

IDC expects phablets, defined by the research firm as smartphones from 5.5-inches to less than 7 inches, to hit 175 million units by the end of the year compared to the 170 million portable PCs it expects will ship in 2014. It also said today that it expects phablet shipments to top 318 million units in 2015, which means the category is also on track to surpass tablet shipments by next year.

Apple is of course about to contribute to phablet sales with one of its two yet to be unveiled iPhone models expected to sport a 5.5-inch display when introduced later this month. IDC has factored Apple’s entrance into the category into its growth predictions for phablets:
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There are still many unknowns surrounding the leaked celebrity nudes. While Apple appears to have ruled out a theory that a Find My iPhone vulnerability allowed easy brute-force password attacks, some commentators are suggesting that the wording was sufficiently vague that this may indeed have been one route in. (Apple might be arguing that it’s not a breach if the correct password was required.)

But one thing does now appear clear: rather than a single hacker gaining wide access to iCloud, the photos were instead amassed over time by a number of different individuals likely using several different approaches. Phishing was doubtless one of them – some of the claimed emails from Apple are reasonably convincing to a non-techy person – but another was almost certainly to exploit one of the greatest weaknesses found in just about every online service, including iCloud: security questions.

[Update: Tim Cook has confirmed these were the two methods used] …

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