In the chaos of iPhone 7 preorder night last week, one widespread complaint was Apple’s apparent neglect of customers signed up with the company’s iPhone Upgrade Program. As Zac noted last week, one of the biggest problems with the plan is that customers must buy from Apple in-store, not from a third-party store like Best Buy or even online from Apple. Now, Apple has been hit with a class action lawsuit because the issues surrounding the iPhone Upgrade Program....

Not even a week after being requested to pull The New York Times app from the Chinese Apple App Store, both Apple and Google will have to pull the LinkedIn app from their respective app stores. According to The New York Times, the removal comes after a court ruled that LinkedIn had violated Russia’s data protection laws. The specifics of the court ruling indicate that any company that keeps personal digital data of Russian citizens must do so on physical servers within the country....

The US Patent & Trademark Office published more patent applications today from Apple that indicated the company envisioned much more NFC capabilities than a Wallet app. The company apparently filed the applications between 2009 and 2010, and the graphics depict an iPhone interacting and controlling everything from a television and DVR to a standalone camera and a projector. Patently Apple detailed the patent applications: Related articles New iPhone prototypes have NFC chips and antenna – SlashGear (9to5mac....

Apple has published a Newsroom story today highlighting its Teacher Coding Academies and how the educators that are attending them are making an impact on their students and local communities. Apple’s Teacher Coding Academies are open to teachers from all levels and run during the summer. Apple notes that those who attended this year had a common goal of helping students learn to code and how to use the skill to make positive change....

The South China Morning Post is reporting that Apple is investigating reports that a Chinese flight attendant was fatally electrocuted when getting out of the bath to answer a call on her iPhone 5 while it was plugged into the charger. While the SCMP describes the phone as an iPhone 5, there are conflicting reports about the model. According to mainland media reports, Ma Ailun, a 23-year-old flight attendant with China Southern Airlines, was picking up her iPhone 5 to answer a call while the battery was being charged when she was electrocuted and killed … Although a report in Fortune says that “a cheap, third-party charger would seem to be ruled out by the report of Ma Ailun’s family that she was using genuine Apple parts,” we would observe that many extremely convincing counterfeit products originate in China, with numerous reports of electric shocks and fires resulting....

Apple’s brand continues to dominate mindshare for the festive season, according to a survey by Piper Jaffray. The company holds the top two spots for most wanted gift this holiday season with both iPhone and MacBook far ahead of any other product category. The iPhone was the clear leader, with 7.2 percent of people surveyed wanting a new iPhone, up from 5.2 percent in 2015. MacBook took second place on the chart (embedded after the jump), at 2....

Apple took their support discussions website down this morning and now it is back up. It’s not back up as support discussions, though. Apple has finally replaced their aging support discussions board website with Apple Support Communities. Products and services from Apple are now arranged by “community.” If you have questions, answers, or issues with a particular device, service, or anything Apple just find the related community and start doing whatever you came to do....

In an effort to keep up iPhone numbers ahead of a quarter in which Apple expects sales to drop year-over-year for the first time, Apple will encourage Apple Store employees to sell more iPhones through a new rewards program. Apple informed retail staff of the new program today, and it will take place between February 21st and March 26th, according to sources. The program’s goal is to push Apple retail employees to sell more iPhones by promising rewards and all-expense paid vacations to Cupertino, California to employees who sell the most iPhones in their region, according to sources....

Apple has made another valuable contribution to pandemic relief efforts with the ability to easily search for coronavirus testing centers on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac. Read along for how to find COVID-19 testing locations on Apple Maps. Apple has been contributing to COVID-19 relief from a lot of different angles including financial aid, creating and donating face shields, giving away masks, creating contact tracing software with Google, and more....

Apple Music executives are no strangers to public interviews and now, Trent Reznor has sat down with Vulture for a wide-ranging discussion. The conversation jumped between Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails life, his work at Apple Music and Beats, and more. Nine Inch Nails this week released a new EP called ‘Add Violence.’ Asked about whether his work with Beats and Apple had convinced him that “tech entrepreneurs are the new rock stars,” Reznor quickly put that idea to bed....

Update: Apple has now informed developers that they can submit iOS 9, El Capitan and watchOS 2 apps to the App Store. Three days later than the normal schedule, Apple is finally letting developers submit iOS 9 apps for review. Apple usually enables submission for apps built against the new SDK as soon as the Xcode GM is published but for unknown reasons, this milestone was delayed. Although there hasn’t been an official announcement, developers are now successfully uploading binaries through iTunes Connect and are ‘Waiting For Review’....

Alongside the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2, Apple at its event earlier this month quitely introduced a lineup of new Beats products. At the lower-end of the lineup were the BeatsX earphones, coming in at $149.95 with a launch this fall. Originally, Apple announced the wireless earphones in two color options of white and black, but Apple’s website now hints a trio of new colors that could be in the pipeline....

Apple @ Work is brought to you by Kandji, the MDM solution built exclusively for organizations that run on Apple. Kandji is a modern, cloud-based platform for centrally managing and securing your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV devices, saving IT teams countless hours of manual work with features like one-click compliance templates and 150+ pre-built automations, apps, and workflows. Request access. The transition to Apple Silicon is fantastic thus far....

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODmfmUWqlSA] Update: Apple has now posted an accompanying microsite for the ad, featuring the ads shown in the video. Apple has begun airing a new iPhone 5s ad this evening, first premiering on ABC during Agents Of SHIELD. This ad, featuring the interesting song ‘Gigantic‘ by the Pixies, takes a very different tone than the “Metal Mastered” ad released in October, which showed that gold really is best. The ad shows common and uncommon tasks people can accomplish with their iPhone, such as creating music, tracking their health, shooting videos and photos, and playing games....

Just as rumors ramped up earlier this year that Apple has been developing its own electric vehicle under Project Titan, battery maker A123 Systems filed a lawsuit against Apple for poaching five of its engineers. The two companies appear to now be finalizing a settlement over the dispute, The Boston Globe reports, helping Apple avoid the case going to court. The lawsuit cited unfair competition and non-compete contract violations after evidence revealed the employees were recruited to leave the battery firm....

While this afternoon’s Apple announcements didn’t focus on the Apple TV, the company today did take the first steps towards officially phasing out the third-generation Apple TV model. Apple has removed the third-gen Apple TV from its online store, while a source indicates to us that Apple retail locations are also pulling the device from shelves. Apple has not officially commented on its phasing out of the third-gen Apple TV, though it’s clear that the process has at least begun....

Apple has been cleared of infringing five wireless patents originally held by Nokia in its iPhones and iPads. The patents were later acquired by a subsidiary of Conversant Intellectual Property Management Inc, which sued Apple for $100M by calculating a per-device license fee. Apple argued that even if it had infringed the patents, which it denied, a fair license fee would be less than $1M. Reuters reports that a federal jury in Texas took five hours to deliberate yesterday before finding in favor of Apple....

All Apple Stores outside of China are closed until further notice due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and it’s preventing some customers from picking up their repaired devices. Business Insider reports that customers who didn’t pick up their devices before stores closed are now unable to do so. As we noted last week, Apple Stores remained partially open for two days following the shutdown announcement. During this time, Apple contacted customers with pending device repairs and asked them to come pick up their products....

Today Apple has updated the Apple Store app to version 5.12, bringing along a completely redesigned user interface on iPad. The new design takes advantage of the sidebars introduced in iPadOS 14 last summer. Apple has made a number of other changes to the app as well including updates to Today at Apple sessions and the iPad shopping experience. First and foremost, the new design has a sidebar on the left side of the screen that you can choose to hide or show....

The news was confirmed by Rep. David Cicilline’s aides and the report notes that next week’s hearing comes after federal regulators have been looking further into anticompetitive behavior from the major tech companies. Last month, the Department of Justice’s Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim stated: As we previously summarized, Apple is currently in the middle of three antitrust lawsuits, two in the US and one in Europe, all having to do with the App Store....