Apple now has more than 1 billion paid subscriptions across all of its services, including Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and more. From a report: Apple has methodically executed a long-term strategy of offsetting slowing hardware sales growth with revenue from software services -- and that now accounts for more than a quarter of the company's sales. Apple's advertising business is expected to reach $6 billion by 2025, which would make it larger than both Snapchat and Twitter's ad business. [...] The quarter also represented Apple's biggest ever for software sales.

Apple's Screen Time controls are failing parents. From a report: The company's cloud-based Family Sharing system is designed in part for parents to remotely schedule off-limits time and restrict apps and adult content on their children's iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch models. Trouble is, parents are finding that when they use their iPhones to set restrictions on their kids' devices, the changes don't stick. "We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset," an Apple spokeswoman said. "We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation."

Downtime, found in Settings under Screen Time, is the tool parents use to define the hours each day that a kid's device is limited or completely unusable. But when they check the setting lately, they often see the times they scheduled have reverted to a previous setting, or they see no restrictions at all. This can go unnoticed for days or weeks -- and kids don't always report back when they get extra time for games and social media. Apple previously acknowledged the bug, calling it "an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices." However, the company had reported the issue fixed with iOS 16.5, which came out in May. In our testing the bug persists, even with the new public beta of iOS 17.

An anonymous reader shared this story from CNN: Barry Sherry was traveling from his home in Virginia to Europe for the cycling trip of a lifetime: a week riding through the Swiss Alps, followed by another in Luxembourg, where his cycling group was riding with two former Tour de France competitors, and then a third week cycling in Finland with friends. It was, he says, to be his last cycling trip to Europe. "I'm 68 — I'm getting old," he says... While his suitcase arrived on the carousel, his [$8,000] bike — zipped up in its carrier — had become one of the 7.6 out of every 1,000 items of luggage to be, as the industry coyly terms it, "mishandled." In other words: lost...

The "Find My" app, which traces Apple devices including AirTags, showed the bike at Heathrow... British Airways has up to six flights per day from Heathrow to Zurich, but as each day came and went, none of them had Sherry's bike on board... Each day, he updated his location on the British Airways website, and each day, his bike failed to arrive — or move from Heathrow, according to the AirTag. By this point Sherry was tweeting the airline daily, showing them screenshots of the mapped location of the bike, but getting generic responses from British Airways that he believes were bots... That evening, he tweeted the location of the bag again, tagging American Airlines (who'd sold him the ticket) and Heathrow Airport, too. "AA seemed to have a human at the other end, and I thought maybe they could reach a human at BA," he says.

Was it that final tweet, tagging AA and Heathrow, that did it? Sherry will never know — though he suspects the daily tweets showing screenshots of the bike's location were the key. After his tweet on Thursday night to all three accounts, on Friday morning he checked his Find My app, and saw his bike was on the move... "Had I not started an annoying Twitter campaign, I do think it would have remained at Heathrow until I could have talked to someone face to face."
CNN reports that Sherry's week in Luxembourg "went ahead as planned, with Sherry adding that he was particuarly attached to his bike because "Fourteen years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and the only time I wasn't thinking about it was when I was riding my bike."

He'd put the AirTag with his bike "after hearing other cyclists rave about them."

Apple will soon start cracking down on apps that collect data on users' devices in order to track them (aka "fingerprinting"), according to an article on its developer site. Engadget writes: Starting with the release of iOS 17, tvOS 17, watchOS 10 and macOS Sonoma, developers will be required to explain why they're using so-called required reason APIs. Apps failing to provide a valid reason will be rejected started in spring of 2024. "Some APIs... have the potential of being misused to access device signals to try to identify the device or user, also known as fingerprinting. Regardless of whether a user gives your app permission to track, fingerprinting is not allowed," Apple wrote.

"To prevent the misuse of certain APIs that can be used to collect data about users' devices through fingerprinting, you'll need to declare the reasons for using these APIs in your app's privacy manifest." The new rules could increase the rate of app rejections, some developers told 9to5Mac. For instance, an API called UserDefaults falls into the "required reason" category, but since it stores user preferences, it's used by a lot of apps.

Apple's increasing use of "serialization," which pairs hardware components with the logic board using proprietary software locks, is making simple repairs on devices like iPads and iPhones harder and more expensive. In a recent Forbes article, a repair expert claims the Apple Pencil won't work properly on the iPad Pro if the display is replaced with a non-genuine Apple part, or even a screen from another iPad. From the report: This has now been extended to the displays of fifth and sixth generations of the iPad Pro 12.9-inch and third and fourth generation 11-inch tablets, repair expert Ricky Panesar, founder of iCorrect.co.uk, told me. While repairing a customer's device, Panesar found that the Apple Pencil wasn't delivering straight lines when the iPad display was replaced with a screen from another Apple iPad. "We found with the newer versions of the iPad that when you put a new screen on, even if it's taken from another iPad, the pencil strokes don't work perfectly." Panesar explained to me.

"They have a memory chip that sits on the screen that's programmed to only allow the Pencil functionality to work if the screen is connected to the original logic board." He continued. In practice, Panesar found that lines drawn on the replaced display (Panesar says he doesn't use aftermarket parts for repairs) with the Apple Pencil aren't completely straight. He demoed this in the video [here]. Panesar isn't the only person to discover this, a Reddit post from May complained about the same issue. The poster claimed to have bought a sixth generation iPad Mini from a reseller, which is having the same squiggly line problem. Commenters pointed out that the issue is likely related to serialization and linked to Panesar's video.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google announced that trackers would be able to tie in to its 3 billion-device Bluetooth tracking network at its Google I/O 2023 conference, it also said that it would make it easier for people to avoid being tracked by trackers they don't know about, like Apple AirTags. Now Android users will soon get these "Unknown Tracker Alerts." Based on the joint specification developed by Google and Apple, and incorporating feedback from tracker-makers like Tile and Chipolo, the alerts currently work only with AirTags, but Google says it will work with tag manufacturers to expand its coverage.

For now, if an AirTag you don't own "is separated from its owner and determined to be traveling with you," a notification will tell you this and that "the owner of the tracker can see its location." Tapping the notification brings up a map tracing back to where it was first seen traveling with you. Google notes that this location data "is always encrypted and never shared with Google." Further into the prompts, you can make the tracker play a sound, "without the owner of the tracker knowing," Google says. If you bring the tracker to the back of your phone (presumably within NFC range), some trackers may provide their serial number and information about their owner, "like the last four digits of their phone number." Google indicates it will also link to information about how to physically disable a tracker. Finally, Google is offering a manual scan feature, if you're suspicious that your Android phone isn't catching a tracker or want to see what's nearby. The alerts are rolling out through a Google Play services update to devices on Android 6.0 and above over the coming weeks. Google is working to finish the joint tracking specification "by the end of this year."

The company added: "At this time, we've made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS."

The tech giant and the Wall Street titan went from "the most successful credit card launch ever" to Goldman trying to exit the partnership. From a report: Apple and Goldman Sachs were in test runs before embarking publicly on one of the biggest-name partnerships ever between tech and finance. Engineers from the Silicon Valley giant and the Wall Street titan were pulling an all-nighter a few months before launch, scrambling to find a solution to a problem that had cropped up: Tim Cook couldn't get approved for an Apple Card.

Apple and Goldman had struck the powerful alliance as they set out to build a revolutionary digital-first credit card with designs on expanding into other consumer finance products. For Goldman, it was a key opportunity to grow the consumer business it had jumped into as it sought to diversify away from the old-school Wall Street revenue model of trading and advising on deals. For Apple, it was a way to bolster its services business, broaden its finance offerings -- which began with Apple Pay -- and, maybe most importantly, prompt people to buy more iPhones.

In October 2019, a couple of months after customers began signing up, Goldman CEO David Solomon described it as "the most successful credit card launch ever." Less than four years later -- and only a handful of months after the two companies extended their contract through the end of the decade -- the Apple-Goldman deal is teetering. Some of the partnership's shortcomings have blemished both companies' world-class reputations, and a falling-out could threaten future collaboration between Wall Street and tech at large. Goldman has been trying to get out of the pact because it won't be profitable enough for the bank in the near term, according to people familiar with the matter, and it has shopped the relationship to credit card issuer American Express.

By 1983 there were a whopping 2,000 pieces of software for Apple's pre-Macintosh computer, the Apple II — more than for any other machine in the world. It turns out this left a trail for one historian to understand The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal.

The new book (by New York University academic Laine Nooney) argues that it was the first purchasers of that software who are the true overlooked pioneers during the seven years before the Macintosh. And (as this reviewer explains, with quotes from the book), collectively they form the most compelling story about the history of Apple: It's about all those brave and curious people, the users, who came "Not to hack, but to play... Not to program, but to print..." And you can trace their activities in perfect detail through the decades-old software programs they left behind. It's a fresh and original approach to the history of technology. Yes, the Apple II competed with Commodore's PET 2001 and Tandy's TRS-80... [But] this trove of programs uniquely offers "a glimpse of what users did with their personal computers, or perhaps more tellingly, what users hoped their computers might do."

Looking back in time, Nooney calls the period "one of unusually industrious and experimental software production, as mom-and-pop development houses cast about trying to create software that could satisfy the question, 'What is a computer even good for...?'" The book's jacket promises "a constellation of software creation stories," with each chapter revisiting an especially iconic program that also represents an entire category of software...

[T]he book ultimately focuses more heavily on the lessons that can be learned from what programmers envisioned for these strange new devices — and how the software-buying public did (or didn't) respond... The earliest emergence of personal computing in America was "a wondrous mangle," Nooney writes, saying it turned into an era where "overnight entrepreneurs hastily constructed a consumer computing supply chain where one had never previously existed."
Vice republished an excerpt in May which describes the "roiling debate" that took place over copy protection in 1981.

Gizmodo reports: Thousands of top Russian officials and state employees have reportedly been banned from using iPhones and other Apple products over concerns they could serve as surreptitious spying tools for Western intelligence agencies...

Russia's trade minister, according to a Financial Times report, said the new ban will take effect Monday, July 17. The move affects a variety of Apple products from iPhones, iPads, and laptops, and builds off of similar restrictions already put in place by the digital development ministry and state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec. Kremlin officials also advised staff working on Vladimir Putin's 2024 presidential re-election campaign against using a variety of US-developed smartphones over similar espionage conveners earlier this year...

Russian intelligence officials last month accused the US National Security Agency of hacking into thousands of Russian-owned iPhones and targeting the phones of foreign diplomats based in Russia... To be clear, Russian officials still haven't provided any clear evidence proving the alleged US conspiracy. Apple has also publicly denied the claims and recently told the Times it "has never worked with any government to build a backdoor into any Apple product, and never will."
The Financial Times got a skeptical response to that from Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council and one of the country's fiercest hardliners. "When a big tech compan...â.âclaims it does not co-operate with the intelligence community — either it lies shamelessly or it is about to [go bust]."

Thanks to Slashdot reader dovthelachma for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: Apple's processor manufacturer TSMC says that it can't find enough skilled workers to open its Arizona facility on time, and mass chip production will have to wait until 2025. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) began work on a first factory in Arizona in 2021. Since then, the plant has seen safety concerns, complaints from TSMC about US taxation, and a claim that US staff don't work hard enough. Most recently, the company announced that it was sending more Taiwanese workers to the US to manage the final stages of making the plant operational. Now according to Nikkei Asia, that move has proven insufficient.

"We are encountering certain challenges, as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with the specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility," said TSMC chair Mark Liu. "Consequently we expect the production schedule of N4 [4-nanometer] process technology to be pushed out to 2025," continued Liu. The news comes alongside TSMC's latest earnings report, which shows that the firm's profits have fallen, though they are expected to recover when the iPhone 15 range launches. TSMC blames the results on a slow economic recover in China, and a downturn in the consumer electronics market.

Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. From a report: The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public.

Under the update, this would have to be immediate. Currently, there has to be a review, there can also be an independent oversight process and a technology company can appeal before taking any action. Because of the secrecy surrounding these demands, little is known about how many have been issued and whether they have been complied with. But many messaging services currently offer end-to-end encryption - so messages can be unscrambled by only the devices sending and receiving them.

Apple is quietly working on artificial intelligence tools that could challenge those of OpenAI, Alphabet's Google and others, but the company has yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers. From a report: The iPhone maker has built its own framework to create large language models -- the AI-based systems at the heart of new offerings like ChatGPT and Google's Bard -- according to people with knowledge of the efforts. With that foundation, known as "Ajax," Apple also has created a chatbot service that some engineers call "Apple GPT."

In recent months, the AI push has become a major effort for Apple, with several teams collaborating on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The work includes trying to address potential privacy concerns related to the technology. [...] Apple employees say the company's tool essentially replicates Bard, ChatGPT and Bing AI, and doesn't include any novel features or technology. The system is accessible as a web application and has a stripped-down design not meant for public consumption. As such, Apple has no current plans to release it to consumers, though it is actively working to improve its underlying models.

Apple Pay is launching in Morocco today -- almost nine years after the service was first announced. MacRumors reports: CIH Bank is launching Apple Pay in the country as of Tuesday, according to the bank's Twitter account. It's not clear if other banks in Morocco will be coming on board with support for Apple's digital payment method, but it's likely. The support means that CIH Bank's customers will be able to add their Mastercard credit cards and bank cards to the Wallet app by tapping the plus button in the top-right corner. Apple has yet to update its regional website to officially confirm the launch.

Spain's antitrust watchdog imposed fines worth a total 194.1 million euros ($218.03 million) on Amazon and Apple for colluding to limit the online sale of devices from Apple and competitors in Spain. From a report: The two contracts the companies signed on Oct. 31, 2018 granting Amazon the status of authorized Apple dealer included anti-competitive clauses that affected the online market for electronic devices in Spain, CNMC, as the watchdog is known, said in a statement. "The two companies restricted without justification the number of sellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain," it said.

More than 90% of the existing retailers who were using Amazon's market place to sell Apple devices were blocked as a result, CNMC added. Amazon also reduced the capacity of retailers in the European Union based outside Spain to access Spanish customers, the regulator said. It also restricted the advertising Apple's competitors were allowed to place on its website when users searched for Apple products, CNMC said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: It's not a misprint. Telecom Italia SpA, Italy's beleaguered former telephone monopoly, once pitched a plan to buy Apple. About 25 years ago a group of executives from the carrier flew to California to meet Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, with an audacious plan to buy the tech company at a time it was struggling to make headway against rivals like International Business Machines Corp. Telecom Italia, on the other hand, was flying high, ranking as the world's sixth-largest telephone company by sales. Worth about $100 billion, it had minimal debt, held stakes in dozens of tech groups around the world and employed more that 120,000 people.

Although Apple's rise back from the ashes is well documented, the fate of its would-be buyer is less well known outside Italy. Today, the carrier is burdened by more than 30 billion euros in gross debt, it controls just one company outside its domestic market -- Brazil's No. 3 phone operator -- and it employs only a third as many people as it did when its executives made their pitch to Jobs. Most tellingly, Telecom Italia now finds itself in the position of needing to sell off its landline network just to get its debt pile under control. The sale would be a transformational deal and, if successful, the first such divestiture for a European carrier.

In a small twist of fate, the likely buyer is a US company, though it's not a tech giant like Apple but private equity powerhouse KKR & Co. With progress being made toward a disposal of the network, Telecom Italia's one truly valuable asset, now seems as good a time as any to ask, what happened to this once-promising company? [...] Regardless of the outcome of the network battle, the carrier won't look the same after the dust has settled. "Telecom Italia's future will now be mostly linked to its capacity of being more agile and luring new customers with more profitable services," said Laura Rovizzi, chief executive at Rome-based strategy and regulation consultant Open Gate Italia. And the carrier's service unit, basically all that would remain of Telecom Italia after a network selloff, would itself probably need to weigh a transformational deal with a tech company to guarantee its competitive footprint, she added. With so many uncertainties ahead, there's probably only one safe bet for Telecom Italia. The carrier won't be trying to buy Apple again.

Apple is preparing to launch its first M3 Apple Silicon Macs in October, according to Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. 9to5Mac reports: Following the usually new iPhone launch event in September, where we are expecting the iPhone 15 and Apple Watch Series 9 and new Apple Watch Ultra, Apple is reportedly lining up new Macs for an October debut. Likely models include a new M3 iMac, M3 13-inch MacBook Air, and M3 MacBook Pro. For the M3 chip, we are expecting similar core counts to the M2 but with enhanced performance and efficiency thanks to the move to a new 3-nanometer silicon fabrication process.

It may seem weird for the first M3 Macs so soon after the M2 cycle wrapped up â" with products like the M2 Ultra Mac Studio and 15-inch MacBook Air only debuting last month â" but there has been much speculation that the latter parts of the M2 lineup were delayed due to supply chain issues. And while an M3 MacBook Air may be ready to go in October, M3 updates for products like MacBook Pro and Mac Studio are further out. Gurman does not specifically say Apple will hold an October event, or whether new Macs would arrive via press release. The decision on whether to hold a formal event has probably not yet been finalized, but you can imagine Apple would want to hold an event for a significant new Mac launch.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac's webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been heading in since (arguably) Big Sur. Every so often, other splashy features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never end up using ever again. So, good news for Continuity fans: that's basically what's going on with Sonoma. Ventura looked a heck of a lot like iOS, and Sonoma looks even more like iOS. I turned my office's Mac Studio on after installing the developer beta and thought, for a second, that I might be hallucinating my iPhone's lockscreen. It's remarkably reminiscent.

But in case that wasn't enough of an iPhone vibe for you, the other big update that comes with this public beta is that you can now put widgets on your desktop. Widgets! They intelligently tint based on the color of your desktop, and they're available for various Apple apps, including Safari, Contacts, and Podcasts. Now, this is neat. It also strikes me as one of those iOS carryovers that doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a computer. Personally, I find the benefit of widgets on iPhone largely to be that you glance at them while you're grocery shopping or waiting for the bus or whatever and don't have time to open the actual app. The use case for having them on a computer desktop is not as clear to me -- I don't have the occasion to quickly glance at my computer's blank desktop while doing something else nearly as commonly. I suspect that the primary impact of having widgets on the desktop is that it makes your Mac look a lot more like your iPhone. I have hope that third-party developers might figure out fun and exciting use cases for desktop widgets by the time Sonoma is fully released (but honestly, you never really know with that).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: The macOS Sonoma update that is in testing allows Mac owners who opt to use Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or another browser to use Apple's Password Manager for filling passwords. Developers and public beta testers running macOS Sonoma can use their iCloud Keychain passwords with non-Safari browsers at this time, autofilling passwords and one-time codes. Third-party browsers can also save new passwords.

Apple has made an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension available for macOS Sonoma users, and it can be downloaded and installed to access Apple passwords on the Chrome browser or any Chromium-based browser. Apple plans to release a similar extension for the Microsoft Edge browser in the near future. Google and other browser developers are also working on implementing support for Passkeys, the password alternative that Apple introduced last year.

Tencent's WeChat said on Tuesday that iPhone maker Apple had opened a store on its social media platform, marking an expansion of the U.S. firm's retail channels in the world's second largest economy. From a report: The announcement by WeChat, China's dominant messaging app which also provides e-commerce, livestreaming and payment services, said users would be able to buy Apple products including iPhones, iPads and Macs from the store. The move by Apple comes as Chinese consumers increasingly turn to social media platforms such as WeChat and ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to shop.

Apple plans to launch its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset in select US markets early next year, with designated sections in Apple stores offering demos, seating, and tools for sizing accessories. Bloomberg reports: The company will designate special areas in the stores with seating, headset demo units and tools to size accessories for buyers. While the device will be sold at all of Apple's roughly 270 US locations, the company is planning the sections for the Vision Pro initially at stores in major areas -- such as New York and Los Angeles -- before rolling them out nationwide, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

Apple said it will offer the headset in other countries at the end of 2024. The company is discussing the UK and Canada as two of its first international markets with Asia and Europe soon after, although a final decision hasn't been made, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. Apple engineers are working to localize the device for France, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, the people said. Apple will also sell the Vision Pro through its US web store in early 2024 before expanding online elsewhere.