Apple

Apple first launched its Shot on iPhone 6 ad campaign earlier this year to showcase photographs taken by users with their iPhone. The shots were shown in Apple’s World Gallery and were taken from various areas around the world. Now, Apple’s World Gallery campaign has taken the top prize in the Outdoor Lions category at the Cannes Grand Prix festival. The World Gallery images were shown off on billboards around the world. 

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Apple’s App Store should join Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others in boycotting the Confederate Flag

[Update 6/25/15: Apple has begun removing apps that “use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways” without removing apps with “educational or historical uses”.]

Apple’s Tim Cook added his voice to the chorus of CEOs speaking against displaying the Confederate Flag on Sunday, indirectly referencing it as a symbol for racism. In a tweet, Cook called to honor the lives of the victims in last week’s tragic South Carolina shooting by “eradicating racism & removing the symbols & words that feed it.” An Alabama native like myself, Cook has been a strong proponent for equality during his tenure as CEO, often speaking out against the South’s tarnished history and the changes we still need to address.

With major physical and online retailers including Walmart, Target, Sears, Amazon, eBay, and Etsy now publicly supporting the boycott against the Confederate flag by removing merchandise that displays it, I believe it’s time for Tim Cook’s Apple to join the campaign by removing digital goods that display the Confederate flag on the App Store.
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Update: Reports of the outage are slowing down, although it’s unclear if issues are entirely resolved. Apple has yet to update its status page.

It appears that Apple’s iMessage is suffering from widespread issues this evening. While Apple has yet to acknowledge the issue on its system status page, users on Twitter have been reporting issues for the past hour, so much so that iMessage is trending on the social network right now.

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AppleHQ-HD from E3VFX on Vimeo.

Apple’s under construction Campus 2 in Cupertino is making good progress despite recently switching up contractors working on the project, and today we get our latest look at the site courtesy of a new video from Skycore.
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Update: Apple has responded to Swift’s blog post.

Earlier this week, it was confirmed that Taylor Swift’s latest album ‘1989’ will not be available on Apple Music, Apple’s streaming music service launching on June 30th with iOS 8.4. She has written a blog post on Tumblr explaining her position.

We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.

Swift explains that she respects Apple for their innovation but says the terms associated with the Apple Music free trial are ‘unlike this historically progressive and generous company’. Swift says that under the 3 month free trial period, artists and rights holders are not paid at all for the duration and notes Apple has plenty of money to reimburse the artists for their work. Swift says that she is holding back 1989 not because she cannot support herself but as a retaliation for ‘the new artist or band that has just released their first single’.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has today published its rankings of technology companies regarding how they handle user data. Apple this year has received praise from the EFF for how transparent it is when it comes to handling requests form government agencies and standing up for user rights and privacy.

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Apple this evening has launched a new Reserve & Pickup system for Apple Watch customers in the UK, Australia, and other countries as they change to June 17th. Earlier today it was reported that Apple Watch would soon be available in retail stores and this development is a step towards that for customers. Apple’s webpage for Reserve & Pickup says that Apple Watch models are available by reservation in retail stores, although availability will still be sparse and limited to select variants of Apple Watch.

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Justin Bieber <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3oStEyoXT8" target="_blank">wearing Monster-branded Spider-Man Beats headphones</a> in 2010

Years before Apple bought Beats Electronics, the Beats by Dr. Dre-branded headphones were produced in part by audio and video equipment maker Monster. After Beats decided to let its contract with Monster expire in 2012, however, the cable maker saw Apple’s $3 billion purchase of the company as reason to sue. Now Monster claims, after filing its lawsuit in January, that Apple is pushing it out of the MFi program that allows manufacturers to advertise compatibility with and use the iPhone maker’s licensed technology when producing and selling accessories…
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Earlier this month, Apple added videos to its “Shot on iPhone 6” website and today the company has added four new videos to the section. Today’s additions include videos from Australia, the United States, Norway, and the Netherlands. The videos, in addition to being added to Apple’s website, have also been uploaded to its YouTube videos.

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Apple hasn’t talked about it publicly, but the company is hiring human editors that will curate content for its upcoming News app and work with publications to quickly surface breaking stories.

When Apple showed off its News app coming to the US, UK, and Australia with iOS 9, it didn’t say much about how the content would be curated beyond publishers submitting their own RSS feeds. At first Apple is just pulling in news from RSS feeds ahead of rolling out publishing tools for creating rich content specifically for the platform, but how will the company present the news to readers? Who will get front-page billing? How will categories and breaking stories be presented? We get a few of those answers in a new job listing from the company seeking human editors for the platform, but there are still questions regarding how Apple will overcome the curation issues it deals with on the App Store for the News platform.
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According to a new report from Variety, Beats was developing a line of Sonos-like speakers before it was acquired by Apple. When the Apple acquisition occurred, development of the connected speakers was stopped, according to the report. Some of the engineers that were working on the project were moved to other teams, while others have since left the company.

The line of speakers that Beats had planned was originally slated to launch before the 2014 holiday season. While the company already offers several Bluetooth-based speakers, the company wanted to develop a new line that combined Bluetooth, WiFi, and NFC technologies to allow for more seamless playback. Beats was planning a large, living room speaker that was reportedly going to be priced at around $750, as well as several smaller, more affordable options.

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Twitter announced today that it will be effectively removing the character limit on Direct Messages between users sent through the social network. Previously DMs shared the same character limit as tweets which cap out at 140 characters before being unable to be sent.
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