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Apple announced Apple Arcade back in March when it held its special event dedicated to Services. Apple Arcade will allow iOS, Mac, and Apple TV users to pay a flat monthly fee and access a bundle of otherwise paid apps through the App Store. Apple is currently running an internal early access program for its employees, charging a small subscription of $0.49/mo, with one month free trial. It says the testing program ends with the launch of iOS 13....

Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund has provided a further $410M to optical tech company II-VI (formerly known as Finisar), following an initial advance of $390M back in 2017. The company makes the vertical cavity lasers used in the TrueDepth camera system for Face ID. Apple says that the payment will help to support more than 700 jobs across four US states … Background The Advanced Manufacturing Fund was first announced back in 2017....

As first promised back in August, Apple’s bug bounty program is now open to all. It was previously an invitation-only initiative, which attracted criticism as it incentivized non-invitees to sell vulnerability details to companies and governments who would exploit them to gain unauthorized access to Apple devices… Apple had previously increased the maximum payouts after complaints about low rewards making it more likely that even invitees would be tempted to sell security vulnerabilities on the black market for much higher sums....

The iCloud outage, which began Tuesday and affected roughly 2 percent of Apple’s 200 Million iCloud users, now appears to be over. However, some iCloud users wrote to tell us that Apple just dumped all of their email into the Inbox with 12/31/69 dates and jumbled Subject lines. One reader’s email now looks like this: . An excerpt from his frustrated email is below. I hate to say this about a company that makes the best hardware and OS software in the world, but it would be hard to trust my junkmail to iCloud at this point....

Apple announced earlier this month that it would be discontinuing its photo printing service by September 30, 2018. This means that users will need to look at other third-party solutions. However, today VentureBeat revealed that RR Donnelley was a partner for Apple’s first-party photo printing service. And with that, the company is also releasing its own app called Motif that lets macOS Photos users continue to purchase calendars and books similar to the ones Apple was offering....

Apple released a major update to the Apple Store app today with a redesigned Shop tab that completely overhauls the online shopping experience. Products are now presented with richer visuals, featured recommendations, and more. The latest update merges the Discover and Shop tabs into one unified interface with a series of cards and sections that highlight new products, devices you already own, and shopping categories. The design is similar to App Store stories, with fullscreen visuals and purchase buttons at the bottom of the display....

The never-ending saga over Apple’s European data center in Ireland appeared to be over when ‘final’ planning approval was granted back in August, but no: three residents have filed a new appeal that will now go all the way to the High Court. One resident, however, wants to demonstrate that these objections represent a minority view, with most locals glad of the jobs and money the center will bring to the area....

From 9to5Toys.com: Samsung today has announced that it will be adding a 2TB option to its 850 EVO and PRO 2.5-inch internal solid-state drive offerings. Previously, the largest sized capacity was 1TB for both models, which have been on the market since last year. These new models will ship with a hefty price tag to match the larger storage capacity. While these won’t fit in any recent MacBook/Pro/Airs, the new SSDs will allow you to upgrade older non-Retina SATA III MacBook Pros or Mac Minis/iMacs to 2TB drives....

Federico Ciccarese has done many iPhone and Apple product design mockups in the past, and today he gave us his take on Apple’s rumored wearable, curved-glass iOS device. In August 2011, we made the case for a wearable, Bluetooth 4.0-powered iPod nano. In December, The New York Times reported a small group of people at Apple had been “conceptualizing and even prototyping some wearable devices.” One concept described in the report was a “curved-glass iPod that would wrap around the wrist....

Ahead of the official release of tvOS 11 tomorrow, Apple’s first-party TV app has started rolling out to new countries. Apple touted at its iPhone X event earlier this month that the TV app would be coming to seven new countries starting this month… Starting tonight, the TV app is rolling out to Apple TV users in Australia and Canada. While the app is not fully functional just yet, that should change over the coming hours and with the full release of tvOS 11 tomorrow....

For the first time, Apple is endorsing an add-on accessory for AirPods: a new set of protective AirPods cases from Catalyst. The cases are waterproof rated up to 1 meter and offer protection against drops. They also feature a carabiner to clip the AirPods case onto your clothing. It’s a weird proposition for the first AirPods accessory to be stocked in Apple retail, given that the Catalyst case is only useful when you are not using the earbuds themselves....

Apple’s site confirms that its new store in Dusseldorf – its 13th German store – will open at 10am on Saturday. The first 1000 visitors to the store will reportedly receive an Apple t-shirt. German site Macerkopf first spotted job listings for the store back in February following rumors dating back to May 2011. The store is located in Dusseldorf Köbogen, a brand-new upmarket shopping center with stores featuring a number of luxury brands, at Königsallee 2....

As 2018 winds down, Apple plans to fulfill its promise of three retail store openings in Japan by the end of the year. After 11 months of renovation work, Apple Shibuya is set to reopen October 26th. When Shibuya’s store closed for remodeling last November, Apple reassured customers that it wouldn’t leave the city. Traffic to the Tokyo location was instead diverted to Apple Omotesando during construction. The modest, multi-level store has been in progress for an unusual amount of time for its size, so changes are likely to be significant and more in-depth than simply a Today at Apple Video Wall and new fixtures....

The latest episode of John Sundell’s podcast “Swift by Sundell” is out today, featuring the first-ever interview with Apple software engineers Holly Borla and Grace Kendall. The interview focuses on Swift, Mac Catalyst, and much more. Borla and Kendall both serve as software engineers at Apple, so they are able to provide a wide range of commentary on Apple’s software platforms. For instance, they go in-depth on the Swift Playgrounds application — which was just released for the Mac last month....

The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on Tuesday granted a new Apple patent related to advanced text-to-speech features that may or may not be fully realized in future mobile devices and computers or brought to the company’s existing lineup via a software update. Apple first filed for this patent back in February of 2006, almost a year before the original iPhone announcement. This suggests the company sought to improve the quality of machine-generated speech on its devices well ahead of this month’s introduction of Siri, whose text-to-speech and speech-to-text interfaces are outlined in Apple’s patent applications from 2009 and 2011....

Following redesigns of many of its other applications, Apple has completely redesigned its iBooks application for iOS 7. The new iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch app follows the design aesthetic of the bundled Newsstand application, and also includes a completely redesigned iBookstore. The free update is available via the App Store now. For fans of the page curl effect in iBooks, you will be happy to know that it has not been removed....

With an update for the BACtrack Mobile and BACtrack Vio smartphone-connected breathalyzers, iPhone users are now able to share blood alcohol content results with Apple’s new Health app in iOS 8. An update to the companion app for the breathalyzers, which we previously reviewed alongside the BACtrack Vio, allows users to sync data with the Health app on iOS 8 and tap into data from other health-related apps. So why would you want the Health app to know how drunk you are?...

Earlier this month Apple seeded the first beta versions of Safari 7.1 (for Mavericks) and 6.2 (for Mountain Lion) to developers. Tonight a second beta has been published. Interestingly, aside from the focus areas outlined with the previous beta, Apple is also requesting that developers taking this beta for a spin try out the password and credit card auto-fill feature. The 7.1 and 6.2 updates are expected to be the last big updates to those specific versions of Apple’s browser before the release of OS X Yosemite, which ships with Safari 8....

It’s hard to imagine just how much cash Apple brings in each second through its online store. So it can only mean one thing when Apple throws up the maintenance page…. New Apple Toys are being added to the site! A new iPhone will likely be hitting the site today along with a few other devices as leaked by a few blogs (gotta love those search results). If the data is correct, it looks like a few new iPods....

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook just talked about Apple’s services and numbers, as well as Maps, during its Q1 2013 earnings call. Cook said Notification Center sent more than 4 trillion notifications, and iMessages sent over 450 billion messages (about 2 billion per day). The Game Center also has 200 million registered users, while the App Store is at 40 billion downloads (2 billion occurred in December alone). The company even sold 2 million Apple TVs during the quarter (up over 60 percent year-over-year)....