Apple Archive

Chinese authorities say they have uncovered a massive underground operation run by Apple employees selling computer and phone users' personal data.

Twenty-two people have been detained on suspicion of infringing individuals' privacy and illegally obtaining their digital personal information, according to a statement Wednesday from local police in southern Zhejiang province.

Of the 22 suspects, 20 were Apple employees who allegedly used the company's internal computer system to gather users' names, phone numbers, Apple IDs, and other data, which they sold as part of a scam worth more than 50 million yuan (US$7.36 million).

I'm not asking for an iPhone with replaceable RAM. I understand the value of a sleek, highly integrated, highly custom product. But if the most important and expensive part of the desktop computer you're looking to buy is the GPU, it's insane to choose one that's soldered to the motherboard.

The 27-inch iMac Pro includes a Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors, and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation achievable on the high-end configurations. The iMac Pro also marks the first time than a desktop Mac will come in Space Gray, including the iMac Pro's Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad 2, and Magic Mouse.

Apple is calling iOS 11 its biggest software release ever for the iPad, thanks to the myriad iPad features it includes, like a new dock that supports improved multitasking, a Files app for better managing files, improved Apple Pencil support, a new App Switcher, and system-wide drag and drop.

iOS 11 also includes many features for both the iPhone and the iPad. There's an incredible ARKit API that's going to let developers build all kinds of new augmented reality apps, and there's also a CoreML machine learning API that's going to allow apps to become a whole lot smarter.

Peer-to-peer Apple Pay payments are being introduced, Messages is gaining a new App Drawer that makes it easier to access apps and stickers, a Do Not Disturb feature that mutes notifications will make it easier for drivers to stay focused on the road, and Siri, Photos, and the Camera app are gaining huge improvements.

Long before the iPhone or even the Mac, Apple was a handful of people working in an industry that was only just beginning to take the idea of personal computing seriously. In the earliest days of those early days, Steves Wozniak and Jobs made their first device together: the Apple I. Few of these were sold, and fewer still survive - but the Living Computers museum in Seattle managed to get three. And one of them was Jobs' personal machine.

Apple Inc. is expected to report Tuesday that its stockpile of cash has topped a quarter of a trillion dollars , an unrivaled corporate hoard that is greater than the market value of both Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. and exceeds the combined foreign-currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined.

Apple has one of the most aggressive sustainability and recycling programs in tech, but it still pulls plenty of metals and toxic rare-earth materials out of the ground to make iPhones, iPads, Macbooks and other products.

That's about to change. The company is set to announce a new, unprecedented goal for the tech industry, "to stop mining the earth altogether".

After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984.

I've been fascinated by the cell phone parts markets in Shenzhen, China for a while. I'd walked through them a bunch of times, but I still didn't understand basic things, like how they were organized or who was buying all these parts and what they were doing with them.

So when someone mentioned they wondered if you could build a working smartphone from parts in the markets, I jumped at the chance to really dive in and understand how everything works. Well, I sat on it for nine months, and then I dove in.

As we learned this week, the 2013 trash can Mac Pro is going to... Well... The trash can. Apple has promised a new "modular" Mac Pro for sometime after 2017.

In the light of this news, I thought it would be interesting to look back a model, to the "cheese grater" Mac Pros Apple sold from 2006 until 2013.

Apple has used Imagination's technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units ("GPUs") in Apple's phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination's technology.

Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.

Further, Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights, accordingly Imagination does not accept Apple's assertions.

iOS 10.3 introduces a new Apple File System (APFS), which is installed when an iOS device is updated. APFS is optimized for flash/SSD storage and includes improved support for encryption. Other features include snapshots for freezing the state of a file system (better for backups), space sharing, and better space efficiency, all of which should result in a more stable platform. Customers updating to iOS 10.3 should first make a backup given that the update installs a new file system.

A few years ago, backstage at a conference, I spotted a blind woman using her phone. The phone was speaking everything her finger touched on the screen, allowing her to tear through her apps. My jaw hit the floor. After years of practice, she had cranked the voice's speed so high, I couldn't understand a word it was saying.

And here's the kicker: She could do all of this with the screen turned off. Her phone's battery lasted forever.

Ever since that day, I've been like a kid at a magic show. I've wanted to know how it's done. I've wanted an inside look at how the blind could navigate a phone that's basically a slab of featureless glass.

This week, I got my chance. Joseph Danowsky offered to spend a morning with me, showing me the ropes.

Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms, which technology companies have long used to hook students on their brands for life.

Over the last three years, Apple's iPads and Mac notebooks - which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 - have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google's Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.

Mobile devices that run on Apple's iOS and MacOS operating systems have now reached a new low, falling to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Microsoft Windows devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Futuresource Consulting, a research company.

Then there is the keyboard issue. While school administrators generally like the iPad’s touch screens for younger elementary school students, some said older students often needed laptops with built-in physical keyboards for writing and taking state assessment tests.