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....

Anthem’s been faced with many issues since the game launched in mid-February, but a new report suggests that one of the root causes of its poor reception is EA’s Frosbite game engine. The Frostbite engine is a suite of technology used to make EA titles, primarily as a method to both unify the technology each studio uses under the EA umbrella and to save on licensing fees. The Frostbite engine was originally created by DICE in order to create the Battlefield games, and has since been adopted by EA over the past decade....

Forget what you know about the latest Apex Legends Battle Pass. It’s clear that fans of EA’s latest Battle Royale are thinking solely of just one thing, and it’s definitely not the upcoming content. According to members of the community, what they really want is for Apex Legends ankle biting to be a thing. This activity has taken on a life of its own over the past day, as a throwaway comment in the Apex Legends Reddit spiraled out of control and into a popular thread spanning almost a thousand comments from players and EA fans expressing their wish for Apex Legends ankle biting....

Sleep tracking product Beddit — which was acquired by Apple last year — is officially killing off its cloud service on November 15, 2018. Starting today, new users will not be able to sign up for Beddit Cloud. As noted in the latest App Store update for the app, users will no longer be able to sign up or use the cloud service, and existing users have until November 15, 2018 to use it before the cloud service will completely stop functioning....

Apple has already honored Eilish this year with an Apple Music award and a concert at Steve Jobs Theater, and it is set to continue the trend. According to Billboard, Apple paid $25 million for rights to a documentary which follows the singer as she releases her debut album. What is particularly interesting in this case is that Billboard says the documentary will be released on Apple TV+, rather than Apple Music....

More from Apple CEO Tim Cook’s talk at the Goldman and Sachs conference this morning: When asked about the iPhone’s screen size, Cook noted size isn’t always everything and the company is more focused on delivering the best experience. Cook also said that consumers should think twice before shopping online with a device using an OLED display due to poor color saturation and lack of brightness. However, he didn’t rule out the possibility of a larger screen iPhone....

This past week, Chinese State TV called the iPhone a “national security concern” because of its location tracking capabilities. The iPhone’s operating system utilizes location for several applications, including Maps and Weather. iOS 7 also introduced a new feature that utilizes a customer’s location in order to provide improved traffic and route information. Now, Apple has quickly responded via a concrete and comprehensive message on its website for China. The message is advertised on the homepage, and is a direct response to the allegations from China State TV....

Research firm IDC is out today with its latest report on the smart-connected device market, and it includes worldwide shipments of desktop PCs, notebook PCs, smartphones, and tablets. IDC predicted the market in total grew 29.1-percent year over year in 2012, crossing 1 billion units shipped and hitting a total value of $576.9 billion. According to the report, Apple significantly closed the gap on Samsung during the last quarter of the year....

Apple’s SVP of Retail + People Deirdre O’Brien published a letter today detailing the company’s approach to reopening its 510 retail stores in a safe and careful way. All Apple Stores outside of Greater China closed on March 13 to slow the spread of COVID-19. O’Brien stresses at the outset of her letter that care has driven Apple’s decision-making throughout the pandemic, noting that Apple was one of the first major companies to close its retail stores....

Apple has today extended its AppleCare+ for Mac program, previously only available in the United States and Japan, to New Zealand and Australia AppleCare+ extends a Mac’s warranty period to three years from its original purchase date. The insurance also includes up to two accidental damage for the screen or external casing, costing AU$149 or NZ$169, or AU$429 or NZ$499 for any other damage. The insurance replaces the existing Apple Care for Mac plan which is essentially the same sans accidental damage....

Apple is closing in on finishing up work on OS X Mavericks ahead of its public launch, according to a source familiar with the new operating system’s development. This source says that the operating system will reach Golden Master status internally by the end of this week or early next week, and it will be labeled as a build number in the high 13A590s or low 13A600s. This will be a slight increase over the current developer build that is version 13A584....

Apple has inexplicably removed the iCloud Activation Lock status page, which used to exist at iCloud.com/activationlock, but that URL now leads to a 404 error instead. The utility let anyone type in the IMEI or serial number of an iOS device to find out if Activation Lock had been turned off, handy to verify the authenticity of a seller when buying a used iPhone online. References to the web page have been removed from Apple’s support documentation, indicating this is not a temporary issue and the page has been intentionally pulled from service …...

Following the October surprise bankruptcy filed by GT Advanced Technologies—a key sapphire supplier for the iPhone—Apple today announced plans to invest $2 billion over the next 30 years in the failed plant. The Mesa, Arizona-located plant will become the central command center for its various data centers around the globe. Shortly after the bankruptcy announcement from GT Advanced Technologies, Apple described the decision as surprising while adding that the company would focus on job preservation....

AppShopper AppShopper is a universal app for finding apps. Download it directly to your iDevice to find new apps and when they’re on sale. When you launch AppShopper, you get a list of the most popular apps that got a price drop, have been updated or are new to the iTunes App Store. A feature I really like is the Wish List. It lets you add apps to the list and will notify you if there is a price drop or sale on it....

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....

Update: According to Apple, the problem has already been solved. The Apple Support account on Twitter suggests that users who are still experiencing the issue should restart the devices. Apple’s System Status webpage indicates today that some users may experience problems with the App Store. The company says that App Store users “are experiencing a problem with this service,” and that they are “investigating this issue.” According to developers, it’s not currently possible to successfully get in-app purchases....

During a call with investors for its Q4 2015 earnings report today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company saw its highest rate ever of Android switchers last quarter with a record 30% of new iPhone buyers coming from the rival platform. Apple reported sales of 48 million iPhone units for the quarter, which would mean around 14.4 million Android switchers in the last three months. Cook noted that the switcher number comes from those who purchased an iPhone last quarter and also upgraded from a smartphone....

Fortune is out with its latest Global 500 today ranking the world’s largest 500 companies by revenue and Apple has once again landed at #15 on the list. Apple comes in behind #1 Wal-mart, a long list of petroleum companies, Volkswagen, Toyota, and #13 Samsung. After a bumpy start to 2014, Apple’s stock finished the year up 40%, adding nearly $200 billion to the company’s market value. A product pipeline that’s gotten Apple fanboys lining up all over again has certainly helped reenergize revenue growth: In addition to unveiling new categories like Apple Pay and Apple Watch, the company launched the iPhone 6, selling a record-breaking 10 million units in the first three days....

Apple and Google introduced a new COVID-19 Exposure Notification API in May this year, which allows public health authorities to offer apps that can alert users when they have been exposed to the virus. The API is now getting more improvements to allow more flexibility in how the data obtained by these apps is managed and more. The update to the COVID-19 Exposure Notification API was announced by Google today and it includes a number of changes to make exposure notifications even more capable and flexible....