Apple may be playing its gatekeeper card a little too closely where Spotify is concerned.
The audio streaming provider said Apple is making it harder for the streaming music company to compete by blocking a new version of its iPhone app.
In a letter sent this week to Apple’s top lawyer, Spotify says Apple is “causing grave harm to Spotify and its customers” by rejecting an update to Spotify’s iOS app.
The letter stated that Apple had turned down the new version of the Spotify app while citing “business model rules” and demanded that Spotify use Apple’s billing system if “Spotify wants to use the app to acquire new customers and sell subscriptions.”
Posted by: Chris Barylick
Date: Thursday, June 30th, 2016, 07:06
Category: News
One month after his last drone flyover of Apple’s under construction Apple Campus 2 site, Matthew Roberts has sent over an update for July that gives an up-close look at progress in recent weeks.
The work continues on the Spaceship.
Per drone video, it looks like Apple is making progress towards completing its new campus building by the end of 2016.
The video shows significant progress on the solar panels and fuel cells and it’s also continued installing the massive glass panels and canopies— the world’s largest— that make up the interior and exterior of round ‘spaceship’ structure.
The campus is expected to generate around 75% of its own power using the solar panels and biogas fuel cells on-site, and it will get the rest of its renewable energy needed from third-party supplier First Solar.
It’s looking less likely that the next-gen iPhone will feature a traditional 3.5 millimeter headphone jack.
Amidst rumors that Apple will remove the headphone jack, supplier Cirrus Logic this week announced the release of a new development kit that will enable companies to make Made for iPhone-certified Lightning headphones.
The development kit is geared towards helping to transition products away from the legacy 3.5-millimeter headphone jack toward Apple’s digital Lightning connector. Using the kit, manufacturers will have an easier path to migrating existing products to deliver audio over Lightning.
Apple may be looking to introduce Force Touch features to the home button on the next-gen iPhone.
Citing a report released by analysts at Cowen and Company, a number of supply chain “field checks” have indicated that Apple may do away with a physical home button, instead adopting a home button that sits flush with the phone.
Apple’s Force Touch technology will reportedly be built into the home button to provide haptic feedback when pressed, much like the Force Touch trackpad on Apple’s most recent MacBooks. With haptic feedback, iPhone users would still feel the sensation of pressing on the home button even without a button to actually depress.
This could be either an Apple mapping van or a self-driving car prototype.
During a drive over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday, a modified van was spotted.
Among the collection of gadgets on the roof are the spinning Lidar laser sensors often used for self-driving cars. There are also cameras on the roof. And there’s a large antenna above the rear wheel. Yet this car has no obvious markings or insignia to identify it – not even a license plate.
It’s unclear as to which company’s van this might be, but a special web site Apple keeps tracks the movements of its mapping vans. The site lists San Francisco as one of many locations for the period of June 20 through July 3. Still, the list of locations has been virtually unchanged for the past year, so this is up in the air.
Developer Johnny Ixe has released DataMan, an iOS app designed to help you track your data plan usage on your iOS device.
The app, which also runs on the Apple Watch, can monitor your data cap, give real-time stats as to usage, be configured to follow your specific plan and monitor your assorted activities with a Stopwatch widget feature.
In the latest round of leaked images, a new series of iPhone 7 camera components show a new dual-camera that will be exclusive to the 5.5 inch iPhone 7 Plus screen size. There appears to be about a one centimeter gap between the two inner cameras enclosed in a pill-shape protruding component.
The smaller 4.7 inch iPhone 7 will also receive a camera upgrade, according to these leaks. The hole is substantially larger and the entire component has been aligned closer to the corner of the device, indicating some kind of upgrade.
An blog posted over on Adam Leventhal’s blog and picked up by the mighty Ars Technica describes a talk about the new Apple Filing System given during a Q&A session over at WWDC. During the session, Dominic Giampaolo and Eric Tamura, two members of the APFS team, gave an overview to a packed room, wherein, with the help of other team members, they patiently answered questions about the upcoming file architecture.
Apple may opt for micro-LED displays come the second half of 2017.
Sources within the supply chain have suggested that that the much-rumored Apple Watch 2 lineup expected to debut in the second half of 2016 will continue to have OLED displays, with the move towards micro-LED panels liking occurring in tandem with the tentatively named Apple Watch 3.
Micro-LED displays can be thinner and lighter and allow for improved color gamut, increased brightness, and higher resolutions. The panels do not require backlighting like traditional LCD displays, but they can be difficult and expensive to mass produce. Micro LEDs range in size from 1-micron to 100-micron.
