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After issuing WWDC scholarships to winning applicants earlier this week for its upcoming developers conference in June, Apple has now invited winners to a WWDC 2016 orientation on Sunday, June 12th. At the orientation, Apple says scholarship winners will get to “hear insights from Apple engineers, meet other scholarship winners, and get advice from Apple staff on how to get the most out of WWDC.” The orientation takes place one day before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference officially kicks off on June 13th at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco....

Apple has released a new version of its Apple Store app for iPhone and iPad with a new app icon included. Features include recommendations based on which Apple devices you own, better in-store alerts, and when favorited products are available in stores you’re visiting. Here’s what Apple says about the new Apple Store version: The new version is also supports multitasking on iPads thanks to a new design that scales up from the iPhone version:...

Apple’s at the top of the pack when it comes to choosing which browser you want to use with Windows in Europe – and Mozilla is furious at the deal done for detente in the EU’s spat with Microsoft. Microsoft has proposed inclusion of a ballot screen through which customers get to choose which browser from a list of five they want included on their Windows installation, ending the company’s insistence on bundling Internet Explorer with MS-powered ‘puters in Europe....

Apple has today updated its iOS version statistics for developers. The company says that 81% of all iPhone and iPod touch devices now run iOS 13, while 73% of iPads now run iPadOS. According to Apple’s website, 92% of iPhones introduced in the last four years are running iOS 13, while 7% are still running iOS 12 and only 2% are running previous versions of iOS. When considering all the iPhone and iPod touch models ever shipped, 81% of devices are running iOS 13, while 13% are running iOS 12 and 6% are running an earlier version of iOS....

Apple has started sending out invitations to AppleSeed users inviting them to take advantage of a new beta seed for Windows, as shown in the screenshot above. The beta will enable features that would normally be reserved for OS X Yosemite or iOS 8, such as iCloud Drive, on the Microsoft-built operating system. Developers were previously able to download this software for testing, but this is the first time that non-developer users have been granted access....

Apple just wrapped its Mac-centric event in Cupertino and as usual, the company shared a variety of videos during the keynote highlighting its new products. Now, Apple has uploaded those videos to YouTube so you can have a second look at them. Apple uploaded two versions of its Accessibility video that kicked off the keynote, one with audio descriptions throughout and one without. Apple today announced a revamped Accessibility website, as well....

Update: Apple has nearly finished the large outdoor white logo on Moscone West building and is also hanging ASCII-art theme banners on the opposite street at the Metreon. More photos below. Apple has started decorating its venues for WWDC 2016, which kicks off on Monday, with workers starting to apply a massive Apple logo onto the side of Moscone West. Apple will use Moscone West for all of the week apart from Monday; the WWDC keynote will be held at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium....

In mid-April we reported that due to constraints of replacement units for the discontinued white 16GB GSM iPhone 4, Apple Store Genius Bars were told to swap out these devices for a 16GB white iPhone 4S. Users facing hardware related problems with their 16GB iPhone 4s were essentially given free upgrades to the Siri, A5-chip, 8MP camera-packing iPhone 4S. This was until earlier this week: Apple has almost completely caught up with demand for the constrained white iPhone 4 16GB replacements units....

Adoption of Apple’s ‘Everyone Can Code’ curriculum, offered free of charge to schools and colleges, continues. The company today announced that 70 colleges and universities in Europe have opted to offer the program to their students … Apple first launched the curriculum in May of last year, when it was taken up by community colleges and high schools. The program was developed from an earlier ebook course offered by Apple....

Like it does every year, Apple has just kicked off its Back to School sale in both Australia and New Zealand ahead of the new school year. On top of the usual education pricing on Macs, iOS devices and more, Apple is offering a $100 App Store Gift card ($125 in NZ) on qualifying Macs and a $50 card ($65 in NZ) on qualifying iPhones and iPads. Apple notes that in order to qualify for the Back to School sale “you must be a uni student, a student accepted to a uni, a parent buying for a uni student, or a faculty or staff member from any grade level....

We’ve received word that Apple is building another enormous data center—this time in Hong Kong SAR, China. Apple recently finalized a location in the New Territories region of Hong Kong near the Shenzhen China border for the data center. We spoke to a bidding contractor employee who, on the condition of anonymity, told us the planned data center’s scale is unprecedented for his business: “There is simply nothing to compare it to and therefore it is hard to make estimates on size based on the materials required....

The e-mail that customers will receive Earlier this week, a report surfaced with claims that Apple is preparing to roll out a new remote and URL-based iOS Diagnostics service. Since then, we’ve learned that Apple Stores across the globe are already using a similar tool. However, we’ve now confirmed that Apple is in fact rolling out a new online tool that enables retrieval of diagnostic information from iOS devices. This tool is fairly different than the one being currently used at Apple Retail Stores and is geared towards all of Apple’s support operations worldwide, according to sources....

SDK beta 2 is now available as a 1.36GB download from Apple’s developer website. The kit contains all the tools developers may need to build applications for the device, and now also includes an Interface Builder, a visually-based tool that lets us build application interfaces using drag-&-drop. Developers also gain access to new sample code and technical documentation, as Cupertino’s iPhone dev team respond to the first batch of developer feedback....

Due to a loss in a patent lawsuit that awarded patent holder VirnetX $368.2 million, we reported earlier this month that Apple would be changing the behaviour of its VPN on Demand features for devices running iOS 6.1 and up. The changes would mean a downgrade in functionality for users effectively forcing them to start the VPN client before they run an app, or before they open mobile Safari to access an intranet site....

One of the most interesting things Apple announced at WWDC was a new framework designed to allow developers to embed machine learning capabilities into their apps. One of the things Core ML can be trained to do is identify and caption real-world objects in real-time, which Apple demos via a sample app trained with 1000 objects … Developer Paul Haddad posted an amusing tweet testing the capability. While the screen recording showed the iPhone recognising a screwdriver, keyboard and carton, it didn’t seem to recognise one familiar object: a first-generation Mac Pro....

We’ve been hearing for a while that Apple is working on a new 13-inch Mac laptop with a Retina display, with entry-level prices set to dislodge the 12-inch MacBook and the MacBook Air in the lineup. In a new report today, Digitimes says that Apple has pushed back assembly of the new laptop into the third quarter. The price of the new 13-inch MacBook is expected to be around $899, although any plans for a WWDC release appear no longer to be in the cards....

Apple’s new senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts won’t be taking up the newly created position officially until Spring 2014, but in the meantime Ahrendts has already started the process of transitioning to a new CEO at Burberry. In a blog post on LinkedIn, Ahrendts talks in length about the following her intuition when deciding to take a new job at Apple, much like she had when first joining Burberry, and also outlines her plans for transitioning to new leadership....

Apple has found itself embroiled in yet another China-related controversy, as it appears to be sending user browsing data to Tencent, a Chinese company. That data includes the website visited and the IP address of the iOS user. Apple has the best of intentions here – the data sharing is done to help protect users from fraudulent websites – but the fact that the company now uses a Chinese conglomerate to do so is raising eyebrows…...

Apple is rolling out a new firmware update for AirPods Max users. The company does not provide many details on new AirPods Max firmware updates, but this new version brings the over-ear headphones to 3E756. This is the second firmware update to come to AirPods Max users since March. In March, Apple released version 3C39 for AirPods Max users to address concerns related to battery life and battery drain. As we reported at the time, this update made a change to how long it takes AirPods Max to enter the “ultra-low power mode” when in the Smart Case....

Apple has just released a new open source project on Github. FoundationDB is described as “a distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers”. The database system is focused on performance, scalability and fault-tolerance. Meaning projects that use the database for their backend are faster and less expensive to maintain. FoundationDB was originally founded in 2009 by Dave Rosenthal, Dave Scherer and Nick Lavezzo with the goal of making a NoSQL database that was ACID compliant, a set of properties for databases that are designed to guarantee the integrity of data even when errors occur....