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Six years ago Apple dropped $3 billion on its largest acquisition ever to acquire Beats Electronics. Music mogul Jimmy Iovine and hip-hop legend Dr. Dre built the consumer electronics brand into a household name, and Beats-branded headphones were flying off the shelves. Apple could tell. It sold Beats headphones and speakers in Apple Stores so the success of Beats was no secret. Beats also had a months-old streaming music service that Apple used to build Apple Music, but it’s clear in retrospect that Apple also saw continued value in Beats as a hardware brand....

Confirming speculation, Apple is introducing new model Mac minis. There’s three in all, including a 2.26Ghz and 2.53GHz model with 160GB and 320GB drives respectively. The third model offers a 1 terrabyte drive and is configured as a media server. Starting at £499 (inc. VAT), or XXX in the US, the entry level Mac mini hosts a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, a 160GB hard drive, five USB 2....

Apple announced today that it has invested $10 million to COPAN Diagnostics, as part of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund for US businesses. COPAN Diagonistics is a manufacturer of collection kits for coronavirus samples. The investment will help the company grow production levels to more than one million kits per week. In the past, Apple has used the Advanced Manufacturing Fund to invest in companies directly related to its supply chain, like Corning glass, or Finisar — the VCSEL laser manufacturer whose components form part of the Face ID TrueDepth camera system....

Like a light early Christmas, Apex Legends players on PlayStation 4 have a free pack of exclusive goodies sitting under the tree. Respawn is giving away a small bundle of skins dubbed the PlayStation Plus Play Pack. This marks the second instance of this bundle with the first being offered back in February. The surprise drop of content comes at the heels of larger shake-ups hitting the popular battle royale as of late....

The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) claims that the majority of Americans want to see App Store competition, alongside other antitrust legislation. CAF commissioned two polls which show strong support for antitrust bills, one of which would mean opening up Apple and Google app stores to third-party competitors and/or sideloading … About CAF CAF was formed back in 2020 by a small group of companies, led by Epic Games, Spotify, and Tile – each of which was battling with Apple at the time....

Apple bought keyboard app maker Dryft sometime last year and brought on talent from the company to lead development of its onscreen iOS keyboards, according to a new report from TechCrunch. The report points to the LinkedIn profile of Dryft’s CEO Randy Marsden, which confirms he joined Apple last September and now leads iOS keyboard development for iPhones and iPads. Marsden also happens to be the co-founder of popular keyboard app Swype....

According to Rapidus.se (via TechCrunch), Apple has purchased a Swedish firm called AlgoTrim for an undisclosed price. The small company specializes in image and video, specifically JPEG, compression techniques on mobile devices which allow faster processing of images on power-constrained mobile devices. Apple could use these codecs in its camera and image viewing and manipulation apps on iOS. It is probable that the cost of picking up the company and owning the technology outweighed the cost of licensing the technology over its hundreds of millions of devices....

Apple is continuing to heavily promote the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro’s new camera hardware in press interviews. This time around, Apple’s Jon McCormack (VP of camera software engineering) and Graham Townsend (VP of camera hardware engineering) sat down with GQ Magazine to go in-depth on the new features, the A15 Bionic chip, and more. One of the more interesting comments came from Townsend, when he shed some light on how far in advance Apple generally plans iPhone camera features:...

We’d heard back in 2012 that Apple CEO Tim Cook spent 80-90 percent of his time on an iPad, but the WSJ reports today that Cook thinks that’s the way it should be for all of us – and he believes the partnership with IBM can help make that vision a reality. “There’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t be like that. Imagine enterprise apps being as simple as the consumer apps that we’ve all gotten used to....

With the service launching in the United States last month, it may seem a little late, but Apple has very recently launched a website dedicated to iTunes Match. Previously, iTunes Match was given a slab of the iTunes in the Cloud website. The new iTunes Match website is very descriptive and tries to clear up much of the confusion that has surrounded the product since its announcement. Apple thoroughly explains the basics of iTunes Match with a paragraph worded similarly to their previous literature on the subject:...

If you’re eligible for education pricing, iGeneration noticed that the discounts available on Macs through the Apple Store for Education have now been extended to iPads. The discounts are modest, ranging from $20 to $30, but it all helps. Education pricing is available to pretty much everyone working or studying in higher education: students, faculty, staff – even parents of students – as well as employees of K-12 schools. Discounted iPad prices for the base spec 16GB wifi models are:...

A federal judge ruled that a lawsuit against Apple and several other companies can proceed as a class-action suit today after determining that a significant number of employees across the tech industry were hurt by “do-not-hire” arrangements between their employers and other companies. The policies in question were practiced by Apple, Google, Adobe, Pixar, and more as a way of keeping their own employees from defecting to competitors for higher pay....

As spotted by Patently Apple, Apple was today granted five patents covering the form factor and overall design of the Apple Watch. The patent images show the near-invisible bezel, Digital Crown, contacts button, rear sensors and strap attachment slots. The company was last month granted patents on three of its watch bands – the Sport Band, Classic Buckle and Link Bracelet – and we’re likely to see many more watch-related patents granted in the coming months … Apple last year filed a patent application that builds on the watch’s Force Touch feature, a flexible display deforming to provide tactile feedback, while a separate patent application for the Force Touch used in the latest MacBook trackpad covers similar ideas....

Apple has been granted patents on three Apple Watch bands, just a few days before pre-order customers are due to start receiving their watches, reports Patently Apple. The three patents cover the Sport Band, Classic Buckle and Link Bracelet, and are simply listed as “the ornamental design for a band, as shown and described” … Apple had already been granted a patent for the Modern Buckle that the company apparently sees as a women’s band, as it is available only for the 38mm watch....

Alongside the new iMacs, Apple has silently raised the prices of all Mac mini models in both Australia and Brazil. In Australia, the prices were formerly A$699 and A$899 for the standard configurations, and the Mac mini Server model was priced at A$ 1,099.00. Now, the machines are priced at A$749, A$999, and A$1249, respectively. Here are the new prices in Brazil (up R$ 300, 400, and 500 respectively): The prices for the Mac mini have also been raised in Portugal and Malaysia, multiple tipsters have noticed....

This year’s E3 was a big one for Electronic Arts. Major announcements took place, such as the reveal of gameplay for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as well as a wealth of new EA Originals. There was one game that was noticeable in its absence, though: BioWare’s Anthem. The fact that the title barely had a look-in was extremely disappointing. Although there were plenty of aspects of this year’s E3 that gamers felt underwhelmed by, such as the lack of a Sony presentation and a severe shortage of actual gameplay footage, the no-show of Anthem might be the worst of the lot....

Apex Legends, the popular battle game from Electronic Arts, will offer to its players a higher level cap and more rewards, starting from December 3. Despite the success that Apex Legends gained shortly after its release, the game has recently struggled to maintain its popularity, partially due to negative comments by Internet personalities who are relevant to the game industry. Last April, the Twitch streamer Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek threatened to leave the game forever because of its slow, laggy servers....

Apple at Work is bought to you by Jamf: Get complete management and security solutions for your organization that are enterprise secure, consumer simple, and protect personal privacy with Jamf. Plus you’ll get same-day support for the latest Apple OS upgrades, Today, over 62,000 organizations trust Jamf to manage and secure over 27 million devices. Apple recently released macOS Ventura to all eligible Macs. Typically, home users rush to upgrade to the latest release in order to enjoy the latest features of a new operating system....

Apple has acquired the machine learning startup Inductiv Inc., according to a new report from Bloomberg. The startup had been developing technology that uses artificial intelligence to identify and correct errors in datasets. The report explains that the engineering team from Inductiv has joined Apple “in recent weeks” to work on several different projects including Siri, machine learning, and data science. Apple issued its standard statement regarding the acquisition, saying it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans....

We previously reported that Apple would likely introduce a new 128GB iPad model, and today the company made things official with a press release on its website announcing the product. As predicted, Apple will make both Wi-Fi-only and cellular options for the new 128GB capacity fourth-generation iPad. Apple also confirmed that both black and white models of the device would be available starting Feb. 5 through Apple’s online store, retail locations, and authorized resellers....