Apple appears busy at leveraging the popularity of the iTunes Music Store to expand its reach further.
As previously reported, Apple has been bundling music videos with certain album sales and may plan to expand to sell individual music videos separately. Most recently offered is the Bonus Video Version of a 50 Cent album.
Also new is a partnership with Ticketmaster for pre-ticket sales. Depeche Mode's album Playing The Angel (also bundled with a video) is offered as a pre-order from the iTunes Music Store. Pre-ordering the album enters you into Ticketmaster's pre-sale for the 2005-2006 North American Depeche Mode tour. This entry does not guarantee a ticket sale, but does offer some interesting new potential income streams for Apple.
Meanwhile, the first Video Podcasts appear to be making their appearance in the iTunes Music Store. It's long been known that Apple's interface/intrastructure would allow for distribution of video podcasts, but the first actual Video podcasts are now becoming available. Choices are rather limited at the moment, but Video appears to be a direction that Apple is actively pursuing. (City Magazine TV Video Podcast). Apple also recently filed for trademark protection on the term "iPodcast".
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....