Apple is reportedly planning to include NFC in the iPhone 6 for secure wireless payments using chips sourced from a Dutch company called XNP, the Financial Times reported today. It’s not the first time this rumor has cropped up before an iPhone launch, but other recent reports seem to indicate that this year it might just be happening. In fact, earlier this year Apple was said to have reached a deal with China UnionPay, the nation’s only domestic mobile payment processor, to include NFC support at countless retailers in the next iPhone....

Apple VP Guy ‘Bud’ Tribble is to testify at a Senate hearing into potential federal privacy legislation, set to take place on September 26. Discussion about a possible federal privacy law was prompted by Europe adopting the strongest protections ever seen for customer and user data, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With even Apple forced to increase its privacy protections for European Union citizens in order to comply with GDPR requirements, questions have been asked about why US citizens shouldn’t receive the same guarantees....

Apple is beginning a campaign today to win back the video-editing community that abandoned its flagship video-editing software after the release of its controversial Final Cut Pro X. The LA Times reported that following several updates to the software over the last two years to fix some of the criticisms, Apple is launching a number new ads on its website today that feature professionals using Final Cut Pro X. The campaign is apparently timed to lined up with upcoming National Association of Broadcasters convention and aims to win over professional video editors by featuring professionals such as editors at the Globe and Mail newspaper:...

Apple has quietly made a big change to Apple Music this week, reducing the initial free-trial offer from three months. The three-month free trial helped set Apple Music apart from competitors like Spotify when it initially launched in 2015, but the service is now offering the industry-standard of one month free. The reduction in the free-trial period applies to all countries in which Apple Music is available. The service is available in over 150 countries worldwide....

Apple News+ was officially announced earlier today, allowing users to pay $9.99 per month for access to 300 magazines and select newspapers. One of those newspapers is The Wall Street Journal, but there are a few details worth noting about its inclusion. The Journal reports this evening that its involvement in Apple News+ is largely due to its goal of hoping to expose additional people to its journalism: Meanwhile, Robert Thomson, News Corp chief executive, said that The Wall Street Journal’s partnership with Apple is an example of it making sense to partner with a tech company....

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says Apple employees will be getting a 50% discount on Apple’s upcoming HomePod, and we have been able to corroborate this. The company has only given out such a discount to employees once previously, and that was for the original Apple Watch. While some may jump to the conclusion that this means Apple is struggling to sell the smart speaker, these sort of discounts are often rather in an effort to familiarize Apple employees with new product categories....

Former Apple iPhone marketing executive Bob Borchers One of the most critical aspects of Apple is its public relations team— the team that puts out press releases, deals with the press, runs keynote presentations, Apple events, and more. Adam Lashinsky’s upcoming book “Inside Apple” provides detail on Apple’s public relations team by noting its secrecy, thoroughness, and tactics with the upper echelon of the technology-reporting world. According to the book, Apple’s public relations department is divided up into product categories, with certain staff assigned to specific Apple products and services....

After taking a beating by Motorola over FRAND patents this month, Apple issued a letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute asking the body to establish consistent royalty fees for patents deemed essential to wireless standards, reported the Wall Street Journal. The body has a role in setting the standards related to GSM, 3G UMTS, and 4G LTE radio technologies. Apple is involved in nasty patent disputes with Motorola, HTC and Samsung in courtrooms around the world, and it previously asserted in court documents that handset maker Motorola refused to license its essential patents on “Fair, Reasonable, and Nondiscriminatory” (FRAND) nature at rates offered to Nokia, Samsung and other vendors....

Update: Fresh Apple statement added The immunity of iMessages from government surveillance has been cast into doubt by QuarksLab security researchers presenting at the Hack in the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur. A leaked DEA document had pointed to the impossibility of intercepting iMessages even with a court order, a point that was confirmed by an apparently categorical Apple statement: The researchers reverse-engineered the iMessage protocol and confirmed that the claim was true....

Apple has seeded the second beta of iOS 9.2.1 for developers and pre-release testers, a minor enhancement and bug fix release for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The new seed has a build number of 13D14, a small bump over the previous seed. iOS 9.2.1 was released to developers on December 16th. The same build is also available to Apple Beta Program members. As always, we’ll update this post if we spot anything new and notable …...

Apple developers have been receiving emails today inviting them to try out Apple’s new Bug Reporter beta. Bug Reporter, also known as Radar, is a bug filing tool used by developers to share feedback with Apple on the latest software. Spotted by Steven Stroughton-Smith, the invitation also includes notes that feedback about the beta version of Bug Reporter should be shared within Bug Reporter. The Bug Reporter beta announced today comes with an overall visual change bringing a focus to filing bugs quicker....

Apple (AAPL) has officially reported its earnings for fiscal Q1 2022, covering the months of October, November, and December (aka calendar Q4). This is Apple’s ever-important holiday quarter, and it reported a revenue record of $123.95 billion, up 11% year over year. The company reported profit of $34.6 billion and earnings per share of $2.10. Analysts had high expectations for Apple’s holiday quarter, predicting a record revenue and profit. It’s important to note that Apple itself had warned that it would be negatively impacted by supply constraints during the holiday quarter, but it appears to have weathered that storm quite well....

Apple has released an official company statement in response to the recent controversy surrounding Apple’s decision to remove apps that relied on MDM systems to provide features similar to those introduced by Apple in iOS 12 as Screen Time. Echoing comments made in an email from Phil Schiller, the statement directly refutes the claims made by The New York Times this week: ‘Contrary to what The New York Times reported over the weekend, this isn’t a matter of competition....

Apple announced Apple Arcade back in March when it held its special event dedicated to Services. Apple Arcade will allow iOS, Mac, and Apple TV users to pay a flat monthly fee and access a bundle of otherwise paid apps through the App Store. Apple is currently running an internal early access program for its employees, charging a small subscription of $0.49/mo, with one month free trial. It says the testing program ends with the launch of iOS 13....

Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund has provided a further $410M to optical tech company II-VI (formerly known as Finisar), following an initial advance of $390M back in 2017. The company makes the vertical cavity lasers used in the TrueDepth camera system for Face ID. Apple says that the payment will help to support more than 700 jobs across four US states … Background The Advanced Manufacturing Fund was first announced back in 2017....

As first promised back in August, Apple’s bug bounty program is now open to all. It was previously an invitation-only initiative, which attracted criticism as it incentivized non-invitees to sell vulnerability details to companies and governments who would exploit them to gain unauthorized access to Apple devices… Apple had previously increased the maximum payouts after complaints about low rewards making it more likely that even invitees would be tempted to sell security vulnerabilities on the black market for much higher sums....

The iCloud outage, which began Tuesday and affected roughly 2 percent of Apple’s 200 Million iCloud users, now appears to be over. However, some iCloud users wrote to tell us that Apple just dumped all of their email into the Inbox with 12/31/69 dates and jumbled Subject lines. One reader’s email now looks like this: . An excerpt from his frustrated email is below. I hate to say this about a company that makes the best hardware and OS software in the world, but it would be hard to trust my junkmail to iCloud at this point....

In what many might call a long overdue move, Apple finally ported the photo management application iPhoto to iPad. The release of the software completes a trio of the most important iLife apps that are now available on the iPad: iMovie, GarageBand, and now iPhoto. The app supports images up to 19-megapixels. It also sports many familiar and popular features, including the auto-enhance tool, social sharing through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, email, and more....

Earlier this week Apple stated that Apple Pay is off to a “great start” following its launch nearly a year ago, seeing double-digit growth in transactions every month. Now, it looks as if Apple has inked a deal that will greatly expand the presence of its mobile payments solution. Speaking at Re/code’s Code/Mobile conference today, Apple Pay head Jennifer Bailey announced that Starbucks will soon begin accepting the payment method in its 7,500 locations....

The world renowned iPhone maker Apple Inc is receiving criticism from a China consumer group over reports of a data security break that has affected a big number of Chinese Apple consumers who have had to suffer financial loss due to their Apple Id being hacked. Apple excepted earlier this month of a security break that affected a “small amount of consumers”. They also confirmed an internal investigation is taking place to know how this phishing scam was not detected in time, at the same time telling the consumers affected were the ones who didn’t have their two-factor authentication enabled....