Billion is quickly becoming the theme of Apple’s holiday earnings quarter results. For starters, Apple has earned well over $100 billion in a single quarter for the first time in the company’s history. Apple has also hit new milestones with its active install base of devices. According to CEO Tim Cook, there are now more than 1 billion iPhones being used by customers around the world, and Apple’s total install base is at an all-time high....

Apple has recently filed a patent for a mixed-reality headset device that would “provide 3D virtual views of a user’s environment augmented with virtual content.” The patent was first detailed by Variety. Apple first filed this patent application back in March, but it was only published within in the last week. The patent describes how an augmented reality headset could capture the real world using outward-facing cameras, then present that to the user on a display....

Following the introduction of ResearchKit at this month’s Apple event, Apple executives Jeff Williams and Bud Tribble held a question and answer session with Apple employees regarding the new initiative, according to a source who provided a transcript of the conversation. Williams, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations, is the top executive in charge of Apple’s health engineering initiatives, including the Apple Watch, HealthKit, ResearchKit, and fitness software. Tribble is a Software Engineering Vice President with a medical background as a doctor, and he organized many of the partnerships for both HealthKit and ResearchKit…...

Apple has used its YouTube channel for debuting new ads and sharing other marketing videos for years now, and today the company has expanded into four more countries (via @setteBIT) with localized versions of their latest videos. Official Apple YouTube channels in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are now available with localized videos showcasing Apple’s latest products including iPhone 6s and Apple Watch as well as iPad Pro and Apple Music....

Apple appears to have hired yet another former Tesla engineer to join its ever growing automated car team. First noticed by Reuters, Apple has hired Jamie Carlson to likely join its car team. Carlson’s LinkedIn profile reflects that he has left Tesla and joined Apple, although his role at Apple is simply listed as a a member of a special projects group. While at Tesla, Carlson worked on its Autopilot self-driving program....

Roughly one year after spending $3 billion to acquire Beats, a speaker and headphone company cofounded by music industry veterans Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Apple has officially revealed its all-new streaming music service built on that massive acquisition. Apple Music, as we first reported the subscription music service would be called, is the company’s answer to on-demand music services like Spotify. As part of the 2014 acquisition, Apple gained its own subscription music competitor in Beats Music, although the new Apple Music service is the company’s first to be built by the Cupertino company....

The latest Apple patent filing tells us all about an ambidextrous mouse capable of recognising whether you are holding the thing with your right or your left hand. The mouse is able to work in either mode, and may even include “right handed buttons on the front side of the mouse and left handed buttons on the back side of the mouse. The user may change the handedness of the mouse by rotating the mouse about a vertical axis of the mouse such that the left hand can use the left hand buttons and the right hand can use the right hand buttons,” the patent abstract explains....

Here comes the importance of a build tool like Ant. It stores, executes and automates all process in a sequential order mentioned in Ant’s configuration file (usually build.xml). Benefit of Ant build Ant creates the application life cycle i.e. clean, compile, set dependency, execute, report, etc. Third party API dependency can be set by Ant i.e. other Jar file’s class path is set by Ant build file. A complete application is created for End to End delivery and deployment....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiBIT8Kgr4w Apple aired two new television commercials this evening to advertise its personal assistant feature Siri that introduced on the iPhone 4S last October. The commercials follow a similar pattern as the other Siri spots that featuring actor Samuel L. Jackson and aactorZooey Deschanel. They show Siri’s uses like finding the weather, getting calendar information, getting Siri to tell a joke, or even getting her to share some life advice. Both commercials feature popular actor John Malkovich who starred in the hit movie “Of Mice and Men”....

After introducing iOS 13 at WWDC and running its developer and public betas this summer, the new software is almost ready for all users. After its iPhone event, Apple announced that iOS 13 and watchOS 6 will all be officially released on Thursday, September 19. iOS 13 was unveiled alongside iPadOS 13, watchOS 6, tvOS 13, and macOS Catalina at WWDC in June. Now Apple’s PR has announced that the new software for iPhone users will be available next week on September 19 (via Federico Viticci) with watchOS 6 arriving at the same time....

Apple’s 2017 semiconductor spend increased by more than a quarter year-on-year, according to Gartner. It said that Apple spent $38.754B on chips in 2017, up 27.5% on the previous year. It left Apple as the world’s second-largest chip buyer after Samsung … Samsung boosted its own purchases by an even heftier 37.2% to more than $43B. The top 10 chip buyers were rounded out by Dell, Lenovo, Huawei, BBK, HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, LG and Western Digital....

[slideshow] Apple plans to build a new off-campus restaurant and recreation facility for employees to provide a place for discussion “without fear of competition sort of overhearing their conversations.” Mercury News reported today a planning request for the building that the Cupertino Planning Commission approved. (via TNW) The new facility will feature 70 parking spaces, even though it is located within walking/biking distance from the main campus. The 21,468-square-foot space will not just be a cafeteria; it will also house a courtyard, meeting rooms, and recreation areas....

This morning, Apple announced that the Apple Watch will arrive in new countries on June 26th and in Apple Retail stores across the globe in two weeks. The company also said that all orders placed through May will ship to customers within two weeks, with the exception of the 42mm Space Black stainless steel model. In an email to those who ordered at least that Space Black version, Apple has clarified that this model will not be in retail stores until all online orders have been fulfilled:...

An Apple report on the business impact of climate change shows how extreme weather conditions could have benefits for the company as well as downsides. The report was published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit which aims to encourage companies to make the right choices about their environmental impact. Its reports collate company responses to questions about their policies, targets and performance – but the most interesting section is on the ‘risks and opportunities’ …...

Update (15/10/2015): Apple services again experiencing outages across App Store, iTunes Store and more services as reported by their system status page. Not a good week for Apple’s cloud uptime. Following a similar outage yesterday, some iTunes users are continuing to experience service disruptions as Apple confirms the downtime. Apple recently updated its system status page tracking issues with its services, stores and iCloud to note the ongoing problem with the iTunes store for some users:...

Tim Cook and U2 announced that the band’s new album “Songs of Innocence” would be automatically gifted to Apple’s over 500 million iTunes users last week following the announcement of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but many iTunes users were not happy with seeing music from U2 added to their iTunes libraries (even for free). While iTunes supports a way to “hide” previous purchases, the complaints and confusion apparently grew loud enough to warrant a dedicated support site for permanently removing the free U2 album from iTunes purchase history....

Apple has announced that one of iOS 9’s big new features, App Thinning (or “app slicing”), has been delayed due to an issue with iOS 9. App Thinning was announced at WWDC as a way to help trim down the size of large applications by letting developers mark assets for each specific type of device. When users download the app, the App Store will determine which device they have and only require them to download the assets necessary to run on their device....

WWDC 2020 will begin next Monday, on June 22, and Apple is getting ready for its first totally virtual conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In preparation for the event, Apple has just released a new update for its official Apple Developer app, which will let users and developers watch the entire sessions online. Previously named as the WWDC app, the Apple Developer app offers access to videos and articles for developers, including technical videos of new features in recently released hardware such as new iPhones or iPads....

iPodtouch? Check (We’re getting a 16Gb yesterday). Video iPodnanos? Check. (Wife gets that one.) The new shuffle colors? :/ No comment The new iPod Classic? Reality distortion at its most profound? I guess the “We couldn’t sell enough of these things before the new ones were ready iPod” didn’t really have the Zing! 160GB is nice I guess but that screen is so..tiny… Cheaper iPhones? Really? We bet the early adopters are happy Apple snagged that $200 tax for 2 months of early adoption....

The Sacramento Business Journal is reporting that Apple has started work on a major new expansion at the company’s Elk Grove campus, which currently employs around 2,500 staff. As evidence for the jobs claim, the city’s economic development director Darren Doan says that Apple is adding 1,450 new parking spaces as well as working with the city’s transportation department on new bus services for employees … Construction work quietly underway at Apple’s campus in Elk Grove is for a major expansion that could mean several thousand new jobs, city officials say […]...