Late last week, Apple, Aetna, and various chief medical officers met to discuss bringing the Apple Watch to millions of the healthcare company’s customers. Today we’re hearing more specifics about the main topics of discussion. Aetna first announced it would be giving Apple Watch subsidies to its 50,000 employees at the end of last year, along with a program to do the same for a limited portion of its customers. At the time, Tim Cook said, “Aetna’s new initiatives will be a powerful force toward creating better customer experiences in health care, and we look forward to working with Aetna to make them successful....

At WWDC today Apple has also announced a variety of new features coming to tvOS this year. The update comes on the heels of tvOS 9.2.2, which is currently in beta for developers. New features include Single Sign-On, Live Tune In, and more. Eddy Cue introduced a variety new third-party apps coming to tvOS soon, including new games and video streaming apps: Fox Sports Go Molotov Sling NBA 2k MineCraft Story Mode SketchParty There are also a handful of improvements to search with Siri on the fourth-gen Apple TV....

Early reviews of Apple Arcade started surfacing this morning, and now some iOS 13 users have been granted early access to the service. Apple Arcade is officially set to launch on Thursday, September 19th. If you’re running the iOS 13 or iOS 13.1 beta, you can head to the App Store and tap the “Arcade” tab along the bottom. If you’ve been chosen to access Apple Arcade early, you should see a “Try it free” button....

Ahead of the iPhone 5s’s launch later this week, Apple has put up a notice for developers to start submitting 64-bit compatible App Store apps. One of the iPhone 5s’s marquee features is a new 64-bit A7 processor that improves gaming and speed performance across the system and apps. Apple’s notice to developers: Notably, it appears that 64-bit apps will (currently) need to be separate applications from those that are 32-bit and iOS 6 compatible....

Two reports on claimed Apple Car production plans have emerged today. One suggests progress on the rumored $3.6B Hyundai deal to make up to 100,000 cars per year at a Kia plant in Georgia, while the other indicates that other manufacturers are still in the picture. Apple is said to be in talks with at least six carmakers, with Japanese manufacturers seeing their share prices rise in response … The WSJ mostly echoes earlier reporting, but does say that Hyundai is ramping up preparation for Apple Car production....

As Tim Cook honors what would have been Steve Jobs’ 60th birthday, the Apple CEO has been spotted in Berlin, Germany. Specifically, Cook has made an appearance at the newsroom of BILD (Bild-Zeitung), the famous German newspaper, alongside the publication’s editors-in-chief Kai Diekmann and Julian Reichelt. Notably, BILD the newspaper is a sister publication to Computer BILD the technology magazine which famously said it lost access to review units and Apple events following their coverage of the iPhone 6 and ‘#bendgate’ last fall....

The Apple Watch is only shipping early next year, after being announced earlier this month, and Apple engineers are reportedly already sporting the wearable in the wild. According to reports on Twitter, Apple engineers have been spotted with the sport model at their usual bus stops en route to work: Of course, they were carrying the new iPhones, too. We’ll know how the battery life is if they’re still wearing the watches when they return to the bus stop tonight....

After opening up 400 free spots at this year’s Apple Developer Academy in Italy last week, Apple has now announced its first developer academy in Asia. As reported by The Jakarta Post, Apple is opening its newest developer academy in Jakarta… Similar to other countries around the world, Indonesia has a 30 percent local content requirement for “all 4G gadgets.” This number is based on manufacturing, software, and innovation development, thus part of the reasoning for Apple’s decision to choose Jakarta as its latest developer academy....

Update: Tim Cook has retweeted a link to an ABC News piece on the partnership. Inspired by the work of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, Apple has announced that it is supporting her work to provide educational opportunities to girls in developing countries. Apple says its funding will enable a ‘significant expansion’ of the work of the Malala Fund, and help it reach a goal of providing secondary education to more than 100,000 girls who would otherwise be unable to attend school …...

Apple today released a firmware update for the Mac mini to address a USB keyboard-related issue. Labeled Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.8, the update is intended for Apple’s previous Mac mini generation (late 2012) released before the most recent hardware refresh. Specifically, Apple says the update “addresses an issue that may prevent a USB keyboard from being recognized after the system wakes from sleep.” Owners of the late 2012 Mac mini desktop computer can find the firmware update available in the Updates tab of the Mac App Store....

Wow. As of January 31st, the Xserve will be no more. After almost a decade (it was introduced in 2002), Apple will no longer have a rack mounable server product unless you consider things like MacMini Colo a rack mountable solution. The Enterprise business really never took off for Apple and besides some brief notoriety for their G5 Supercomputers in the middle part of the decade, Apple’s Xserves never really stood out in the greater enterprise community....

Apple is introducing a new “Repair Vintage Apple Products Pilot” program that will extend the period of time customers can receive repairs for older devices, according to sources familiar with the initiative. The new program at first will include the iPhone 5 and other Apple products that are about to become obsolete, and in the coming weeks will add more products to the list for devices that previously lost repair support....

Apple had added yet another show to its growing list of to be produced original content. This latest addition will be Apple’s first animated show with an order from the creator of Bob’s Burgers. As reported by Variety, Apple has ordered two, 13 episode seasons of Central Park which is a musical comedy by Loren Bouchard and 20th Century Fox. The show is written by Bouchard, Josh Gad, and Nora Smith....

We exclusively revealed last month that Apple is developing its own mapping database, complete with 3D Street View imagery – and the company has now officially confirmed this on a new webpage. We first speculated back in February that this was the likely reason for the camera-equipped minivans leased by Apple, at a time when many were suggesting they were test beds for self-driving cars. Apple is driving vehicles around the world to collect data which will be used to improve Apple Maps....

Update: Apple says an OS X fix is coming soon. Yesterday Apple released iOS update 7.0.6 alongside new builds for iOS 6 and Apple TV that it said provided “a fix for SSL connection verification.” While Apple didn’t provide much specific information on the bug, it wasn’t long before the answer was at the top of Hacker News. It turns out that minor security fix was actually a major flaw that could in theory allow attackers to intercept communications between affected browsers and just about any SSL-protected site....

Anthem was always going to be divisive. For the devotees of BioWare’s back catalogue, the game is an ugly reminder that the studio’s parent company, EA, will always loom large over each development decision. What could have been a new Dragon Age or a renewed effort to salvage the disaster that was Mass Effect: Andromeda instead became a game that very clearly wanted to occupy the same space as Bungie’s Destiny....

Apple is aiming to sign up a massive 100M subscribers for its streaming music service, according to a source cited by the Associated Press (reproduced in the NY Times). This would be more than double the subscriptions for all other streaming music services combined. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says that existing worldwide streaming subscriptions total around 41M across all services. The market leader, Spotify, has around 4.7M subscribers in the USA … The same source confirmed the $10/month subscription we’ve reported previously, noting that existing Beats Music subscribers would be migrated to the Apple Music service before the Beats-branded service is closed....

The newly released character of Apex Legends is the deadly assassin, Revenant. Revenant provides avid Apex players with a stealth-oriented playstyle that reinforces elusive players to find even more success in the game. The titular character for Apex’s season 4, Revenant is both an aesthetically appealing design while providing some meta shifting gameplay implications to the Online landscape. The character’s breadth of abilities will surely be optimized by top players and will serve as an excellent offensive/support hybrid for competitive and casual players alike....

“We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped. Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running. “Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella....

Apple is experiencing some issues with some of its web based services as its system status page has now been updated to reflect multiple outages. While Apple won’t acknowledge it directly, only noting “slower than normal performance” with some of its services, users and third-party developers are reporting that they are not able to access their iCloud data. The company’s status page is reporting issues with Back to My Mac, Documents in the Cloud, Find My Friends, Find My iPhone, and a slew of other iCloud services, noting that only “some users are affecting”....