With litigation between the two companies in California still underway and a trial date set for July 30, FOSS Patents today reported Apple and Samsung filed a joint statement with Judge Lucy Koh outlining the “evidence-related issues” they hope to discuss in the months leading up to trial. Perhaps the most interesting piece of information in the filing is a request from Apple to obscure Samsung’s logo on televisions and video displays being used in the U....

TomTom has announced that Apple will continue sourcing data from the company as one data provider for its Maps app on iOS devices and Mac: Amsterdam, 19 May 2015 – TomTom (AEX: TOM2) has renewed and extended its global agreement with Apple for maps and related information. Reuters notes that TomTom shares jumped 7 percent to an almost six-year high following the announcement. Apple has been sourcing data from TomTom for its in-house Maps application since first ditching Google Maps back in 2012....

Bloomberg has a lengthy piece illustrating just how great a challenge it is for Apple and other multinational companies to ensure the fair treatment of workers in complex supply chains. When one of Apple’s suppliers like Flextronics wins a new contract, it needs to take on additional workers – lots of them, and fast. Those workers are recruited through employment brokers, which are required to adhere to Apple’s rules. But many of them are brought in from other countries, like Malaysia and Nepal....

Apple last year requested a delay in the App Store changes that were required as a result of the Epic Games vs. Apple ruling. We now have access to Apple’s filings with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the case. Back in September 2021, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued a permanent injunction saying that Apple can no longer forbid developers from directing users to third-party payment options. The injunction was set to take effect in 90 days, but Apple wasn’t satisfied with the decision....

Apple’s autonomous vehicle program is one of the biggest known secrets in the tech industry. While the company has yet to confirm anything, information about the project has been leaking out sporadically over the past several years. Today, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has confirmed (via macReports) that Apple now has 55 vehicles and 83 drivers permitted to test autonomous vehicles. One important thing to note here is that Apple has yet to apply for a separate driverless testing permit, which would allow the company to test autonomous vehicles without a person in the car....

For the longest time, the App Store did not allow users to rate or review Apple’s built-in iPhone and iPad apps, like Mail, Music, News, Stocks and Calculator. However, seemingly since the release of iOS 15 earlier this month, Apple has now lifted that restriction. It is now open season for App Store feedback on Apple’s stock apps. As you might expect, customer feedback is already flooding in for Apple’s apps, with the Podcasts app currently faring the worst statistically with a 2....

Apple has been sending some developers an email titled ”App Improvement Notice,” warning that the company will remove from the App Store apps that haven’t been ”updated in a significant amount of time.” As first reported by The Verge, developers have been complaining over social media about this new policy, as this could be harmful for indie and game developers. One of them, Twitter user Protopop Games, shared a screenshot of the email sent by Apple:...

Following the arrival of the M1 MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air in the Apple Refurbished Store, Apple today began selling the refurbished M1 Mac mini. Customers can now get all three Macs with M1 chip in the Refurbished Store at a discounted price. The cheapest model of the refurbished M1 Mac mini currently available has 256GB SSD storage and 16GB RAM. While this model is priced at $899, you can now buy the same model in the Apple Refurbished Store for $759 — a $140 discount....

As previously rumored, U2 announced today that its new album Songs of Innocence will be available for free. The news came in an announcement on stage with Apple CEO Tim Cook and the band following a performance at the company’s iPhone and Apple Watch event earlier today. Rather than bundling the album with new iPhone models as rumored, Apple is making the album available for free to download on iTunes for all users....

Updated with Widiba, below Customers of the Spanish bank CaixaBank can now use Apple Pay, the bank confirming in a blog post that the service is already live. As you’d expect, this includes its mobile banking brand, ImaginBank … CaixaBank is one of Spain’s largest banks, with more than 6,000 branches serving 13.2 million customers. It’s the third company to offer Apple Pay support for its payment cards, after Santander and American Express....

Following Apple’s announcement of a new podcast subscription offering yesterday, the Apple Podcasts directory appears to be having some issues. In other cases, the shows are still being listed in the directory but their feed URL is missing in the catalog. This means the API isn’t reporting where to find the actual podcast episodes. This is important as the large ecosystem of third-party podcast clients relies on the iTunes Store API for their data....

Apple is pushing yet another silent update to macOS to resolve the Mac webcam hijack vulnerability in RingCentral and Zhumu. These two apps are powered by Zoom, and it was discovered this week that they are also susceptible to the same web server vulnerability as Zoom. When the Zoom vulnerability was first discovered last week, Apple pushed a silent macOS update to remove the web server. Now, The Verge reports that Apple has deployed another silent security update to remove web servers installed by RingCentral and Zhumu....

Apple has released the fifth watchOS 3.1.1 beta for developers testing the pre-release software update for Apple Watch. watchOS 3.1.1 includes support for new Unicode 9.0 emoji as well as the ability to change skin tones when picking certain emoji characters. watchOS 3.1.1 is a minor release that follows the major release of watchOS 3.0 in September. watchOS 3 is a major speed boost to Apple Watch with a simplified navigation structure and new, faster apps....

With wireless charging rumored to be included in the new iPhone 8 later this year, Reuters has reported new details about the scope of Apple’s focus on wireless charging at the company. Apple already uses inductive wireless charging on the Apple Watch, but Reuters says there are multiple teams at Apple working on the technology. We first learned that Apple had joined the Wireless Power Consortium earlier this month, which Apple later confirmed in a boilerplate statement:...

Rumors about the Apple Car have slowed down over recent weeks, except for the company expanding its California self-driving test fleet. Now, according to the Korea Times, Apple is seeing developments in its car talks with Korean partners. As told by industry sources, Korea Times reports that Apple has made contact with multiple Korean EV component manufacturers. In the past few months, Apple has been reported to have discussed a possible partnership with a wide range of established carmakers....

Apple’s ad business generated around $4B in the company’s last fiscal year. That’s a lot of money, of course, but I think there’s a risk that ad sales are doing more than $4B’s worth of damage to the company. Let’s start by putting that number into context. By most standards, it’s a huge sum of money. It’s as much as AstraZeneca made from a year’s worth of COVID-19 vaccines, for example....

Apple quietly released an updated version of its sleep tracking hardware last month with Beddit 3.5. While it looked to offer a very slightly updated design alongside a new app, we noticed it also dropped Android support. However, that’s not the only feature the latest Beddit product has dropped. After going hands-on with the new sleep tracker, DC Rainmaker found it has cut at least eight features that came with Beddit 3....

Apple currently supports over 50 languages and varying script systems with its system-wide keyboard in iOS, but a new job listing hints that it is working to add support for additional languages and writing systems. Apple is looking to add engineers to its iOS keyboard and text team, and its UIKit Frameworks team, to “work closely with international teams and native speakers to accommodate all the world’s script systems.” Apple has done a lot of work on the iOS keyboard in terms of language support in recent years, and most recently announced that “improved Chinese input including handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters” would be arriving in iOS 7....

Apple News+ debuted in March, and Apple was quick to tout that the service attracted over 200,000 subscribers at that time. A new report from CNBC today details that since then, Apple has struggled to add Apple News+ subscribers. The report cites people familiar with the matter and says that the number of Apple News+ subscribers hasn’t “increased materially from its first couple days.” What’s also unclear is how many of those 200,000 initial subscribers converted from the free trial to paying customers....

Apple has curated a new App Store section today highlighting Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which is observed on May 21st each year with the goal of “raising the profile of and introducing the topic of digital (web, software, mobile app/device etc.) accessibility and people with different disabilities to the broadest audience possible.” The featured App Store section includes 15 apps for iPhone, iPad, and even Apple Watch including Proloquo2Go and Proloquo4Text augmentative and alternative communication apps, Instapaper which features a font that makes text easier for dyslexic readers, and other apps with support for Apple’s accessibility features including the popular Workflow and djay 2 apps among several others....