MacRumors

Apple plans to close both of its retail stores within the Eastern District of Texas in a few months from now in an effort to protect itself from patent trolls, according to five sources familiar with the matter.

Apple Willow Bend in Plano, Texas and Apple Stonebriar in Frisco, Texas, both located in the northern suburbs of Dallas, are expected to permanently close in mid April. One source said each store's final day of business will be Friday, April 12. Employees were briefed about the plans earlier this week.

To continue to serve the region, Apple plans to open a new store at the Galleria Dallas shopping mall in Dallas, just outside the Eastern District of Texas border. One source said the store will open Saturday, April 13.

The plans are significant, as U.S. law states that patent infringement lawsuits may be filed "where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business." By closing its stores in Eastern Texas, Apple is ending its established place of business in the district.

Residency is also a factor in determining the applicable venue of a patent infringement lawsuit, but in May 2017, the Supreme Court shifted precedent by ruling that a U.S. corporation resides only in its state of incorporation. Apple is incorporated in California, not Texas, satisfying this clause.

The Eastern District of Texas has been a hotbed for patent litigation over the past few decades due to well-established rules for patent infringement cases, experienced judges, lower probability of cases being transferred to another district, and quicker jury verdicts, according to a SMU Dedman School of Law paper.

Patent infringement lawsuits against Apple will likely shift to U.S. district courts in Northern California and Delaware.

Fortunately, we're hearing that the plans, while inconvenient, are not too detrimental for employees. One source said Apple has offered employees opportunities to transfer to other stores, work from home for AppleCare, or severance to those who are not interested in working at another Apple location.

Apple has yet to publicly announce the plans. We reached out to Apple for comment late Thursday but have yet to hear back.

Update: Apple has confirmed the impending store closures in a statement issued to TechCrunch:

We're making a major investment in our stores in Texas, including significant upgrades to NorthPark Center, Southlake and Knox Street. With a new Dallas store coming to the Dallas Galleria this April, we've made the decision to consolidate stores and close Apple Stonebriar and Apple Willow Bend. All employees from those stores will be offered positions at the new Dallas store or other Apple locations.

Apple did not provide a specific reason for the store closures beyond consolidation.

Apple chipmaker TSMC will miniaturize its fabrication process to 5 nanometers in a bid to secure orders for Apple's processors in its 2020 iPhones, according to industry sources cited in a DigiTimes report.

TSMC recently confirmed that it plans to invest $25 billion towards volume production of 5nm chips by 2020, and today's report backs expectations that those chips are likely headed for Apple's smartphones next year.

Despite its dim business and industry outlook this year, TSMC claimed it is making progress in the development of sub-7nm process technologies with plans to move a newer 5nm EUV process to volume production by 2020 well on track.

Previous successes in miniaturization have seen TSMC remain Apple's exclusive supplier of A-series chips for the last three years, beginning with the A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7/7 Plus, and continuing with the A11 Bionic chip in the ‌iPhone‌ 8/8 Plus and ‌iPhone‌ X, and the A12 Bionic in the ‌iPhone‌ XR/XS/XS Max.

The A10 Fusion chip is 16nm, the A11 Bionic is 10nm, and the A12 is a 7nm chip. The "A13" chip destined for this year's iPhones is also based on 7nm technology, but is expected to be the first chip to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which allows for a more microscopic chip layering process.

The Taiwanese manufacturer has been gradually shrinking the size of its dies for several years now, allowing it to offer packages that are widely considered to be superior to that of other chipmakers, including Samsung and Intel.

End users can expect Apple's mobile chip designs and TSMC's continued packaging advancements to improve performance, battery life, and thermal management in future iPhones.

Adobe has released an update for Adobe Premiere Pro via the Creative Cloud app to resolve an audio issue that left some users with blown-out MacBook Pro speakers.

Earlier this month, we reported on an issue affecting a significant number of Premiere Pro users whereby the software suddenly caused loud, distorted audio to play through their MacBook Pro speakers, resulting in permanent damage. In many cases, the issue arose when users were editing the audio settings of video clips.

Adobe initially advised at least one customer to try disabling the MacBook Pro's microphone in Premiere Pro by selecting No Input under Preferences > Audio Hardware > Default Input, but the issue persisted for some users.

On February 19 Adobe told users on its community support forum that it was "aware of the issue" and "was working on a solution that will help users mitigate risk." This issue has now apparently been resolved in a version 13.0.3 update pushed to Premiere Pro users today via the Creative Cloud app. From the release notes:

Fixed issues with Premiere Pro that reduce noise interaction and help minimize possible impact.

While Adobe is urging all users to update their software, there's still no word on how affected users might be recompensed following damage to their Macs.

As a result of the bug, one user took his MacBook Pro to the Genius Bar at an Apple Store in Canada and was given $600-plus repair quote for his 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro. The price is so high because Apple has to replace the entire top case assembly containing the speakers, keyboard, trackpad, and battery.

We reached out to both Adobe and Apple for comment on the issue earlier this month but have yet to hear back. We'll update this article if we hear more.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is set to deliver Stanford's 2019 commencement speech on Sunday, June 16, the university announced today.

Stanford chose Cook because he has been a "prominent voice on ethics in technologies and businesses," with insights into the challenges facing corporations and society today.

According to Stanford, the issues that Cook has raised "dovetail" with the Stanford "Our Vision" planning process which advocates for research on the social and ethical impact of advances in science and tech and makes sure students have the tools to "address societal and ethical impacts of science and technology."

"Tim Cook has spoken forcefully of the challenges and responsibilities confronting corporations and our society today," said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. "In tackling these, he has led with vision and values - qualities that reflect the culture of our Stanford community, and that are top-of-mind for our students and our country. Tim was a natural choice to challenge and encourage our graduates as they leave our campus and find their own paths in the world."

Cook said that he was honored to be invited to deliver the commencement address at Stanford.

"It's an honor to have been invited by Stanford's students and faculty, and I look forward to deepening the remarkable relationship that Stanford and Apple have built together over many years," Cook said. "We share so much more than geography. The passion, interests and creativity our institutions have in common have helped to revolutionize technology and reshape the world, and I can't wait to join graduates, as well as their family and friends, in celebrating the even brighter possibilities of the future."

Cook will also be delivering the keynote address to Tulane graduates at the university's 2019 commencement event, which is set to take place on May 18.

In the past, Cook has given commencement addresses at several universities, including his alma mater Auburn University, Duke University, George Washington University, and MIT.

You may or may not know this, but there's a feature in Safari that's designed to let you select a portion of text and send it to a friend over Messages using the Share feature in Safari.

When researching one of our tips videos, we came across this handy trick, but soon discovered that there's another aspect to it -- one that you can use to create fake website headlines that can be sent to your friends and family.

As it turns out, there's a bug in the select text and share feature, and it involves the search function on websites. If you type text into the search bar on a website, highlight it, and then share it with the Safari Share Sheet, it will send your written text along with a website link that looks rather official. See the screenshot below:

Here are the specific steps to follow to create a fake website title:

1. Go to a website with a search function, such as MacRumors.com.
2. Make sure your iPhone is in landscape mode.
3. Tap on the search bar.
4. Enter your text and then select it.
5. Tap on the Share icon next to the address bar.
6. Select Messages and then type in the name of the person who you want to prank.

From there, the person will see the fake website header that you created, but it will look like text from the website itself because the text isn't sent separately due to the rich text feature in Messages.

This pretty much only works ‌iPhone‌ to ‌iPhone‌ and won't work if you're sending messages to your friends on Android devices. You can use this trick on the iPad too, but it doesn't work on the Mac.

If you want to use the feature as Apple intended you to do, you can select a bit of text on a website and then send it to a friend to highlight something specific that's worth pointing out. Like in our AirPods roundup, if you wanted to highlight the bit about a new color, you could select it and share the page with this text visible in the link.

It's actually a useful feature that's great for pointing out specific passages in blogs, news articles, and more.

We're pretty sure selecting search text through this feature and sending it over Messages is a bug that Apple will fix at some point, but in the meantime you can have a bit of fun with it and send unique website headlines to friends and family.

Apple is planning to ditch Intel and transition to Mac chips starting in 2020, based on multiple rumors we've heard in the past from Bloomberg. Axios today confirmed Bloomberg's reporting and said that multiple sources have suggested Apple will transition to custom ARM-based chips next year.

According to Axios, developers and Intel officials are expecting Apple to begin using ARM-based chips in 2020.

The move to ARM-based chips is said to be part of Apple's effort to make Macs, iPhones, and iPads work together and run the same apps. Bloomberg earlier this week said that by 2021, Apple wants developers to be able to create one app that will work on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

Apple's transition to a single app for all devices has already begun. Last year, Apple ported several of its iOS apps, such as Voice Memos, Stocks, and Home, to macOS. This year, Apple plans to let developers transition iPad apps to macOS, and in 2020, that will include iPhone apps. In 2021, then, developers will be able to make just one app that users can download on any of Apple's platforms.

This transition will greatly increase the number of Mac apps available, and it will cut down on the amount of work developers have to put in to create a Mac app. It will also better unify Apple's operating systems across all of its devices.

There have been rumors about Apple transitioning to ARM-based Macs for years now, and they have ramped up given the many Intel chip delays that have resulted in subsequent delays for Mac products. With its own ARM-based chips, Apple will not be tied to Intel's chip release cycles.

Apple already makes its own A-series chips for the ‌iPhone‌ and the ‌iPad‌, and there are also custom Apple chips in recent Macs -- the T2. The T2 chip, in the iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini models, integrates several components including the system management controller, image signal processor, SSD controller, and a Secure Enclave with a hardware-based encryption engine. It powers the Touch Bar in the MacBook Pro and the Touch ID feature in the MacBook Pro and ‌MacBook Air‌.

Apple is a major Intel customer, responsible for approximately five percent of Intel's annual revenue, so the transition to ARM-based chips will be a major blow for Intel, but a win for customers in the long run. Apple's modern A-series chips for ‌iPhone‌ and ‌iPad‌ are already more powerful than many Intel chips on the market.

Safari in the iOS 12.2 beta and Safari 12.1 for macOS High Sierra and Mojave includes an updated version of Intelligent Tracking Prevention, according to details shared on Apple's WebKit blog.

ITP 2.1, as Apple is calling it, caps client-side cookie storage to seven days. After this time period, cookies expire. As outlined by Apple, this offers improvements in privacy, security, and performance. From Apple's WebKit blog:

- Cross-site trackers have started using first-party sites' own cookie jars for the purpose of persistent tracking. The first-party storage space is especially troublesome for privacy since all tracker scripts in the first-party context can read and write each other's data. Say social.example writes a user tracking ID as a news.example first-party cookie. Now analytics.example, adnetwork.example, and video.example can leverage or cross pollinate that user tracking ID through their scripts on news.example.

- Cookies available in document.cookie can be stolen by speculative execution attacks on memory. Therefore, they should not carry sensitive information such as credentials.

- Cookies available in document.cookie can be stolen by cross-site scripting attacks. Again, therefore, they should not carry sensitive information such as credentials.

- The proliferation of cookies slows down page and resource loads since cookies are added to every applicable HTTP request. Additionally, many cookies have high entropy values which means they cannot be compressed efficiently. We come across sites with kilobytes of cookies sent in every resource request.

- There is a size limit on outgoing cookie headers for performance reasons, and websites risk hitting this limit when cross-site trackers add first-party cookies. We've investigated reports of news site subscribers getting spuriously logged out, and found that trackers were adding so many cookies that the news site's legitimate login cookie got pushed out.

The cookie storage limits will not log users out as long as websites are using the appropriate authentication cookies because it only affects cookies created through document.cookie.

ITP 2.1 also allows for just a single set of cookies per site rather than multiples, and third party tools with cross-site tracking capabilities need to use the Storage Access API to get cookie access.

Apple says this change simplifies cookie behavior for developers, lowers the memory footprint of Safari, and makes Intelligent Tracking Prevention compatible with more platforms.

A verified partitioned cache for cutting down on cache abuse for tracking purposes is also included, and as we covered earlier this month, support for Do Not Track has been disabled.

Apple says that it is removing Do Not Track because most websites never paid any attention to it since it was opt-in and could be ignored.

The DNT project recently ended without the publication of a standard, in part "because there has not been sufficient deployment of these extensions (as defined) to justify further advancement." Given the lack of deployment of DNT and Safari's on by default privacy protections such as ITP, Safari removed support for DNT so that users are not presented with a misleading and ineffective privacy control that, if anything, only offered additional browser fingerprinting entropy.

Additional details on the Intelligent Tracking Prevention updates being introduced are available via Apple's full WebKit blog post.

The so-called "Apple Car" may not be a car after all, but rather an electric van, according to German site Manager Magazin.

The report, loosely translated below, claims Apple's industrial design group has designed prototypes of the van with black and silver finishes:

After that, the Apple Car could come in the form of an electric van. Apple's engineers have designed specimens with black and silver paint, designed in the typical industrial design of the iPhone group. Apple also researches on its own batteries, electric motors, special seats and interior components.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Apple had signed a deal to use Volkswagen vans as self-driving shuttles to transport employees around its various campuses and office buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's possible the vans could be designed by Apple and manufactured by Volkswagen.

The context of this report really depends on how ambitious Apple's plans are. Early reports suggested that Apple was developing an electric vehicle under the codename Project Titan, but later reports have suggested that Apple may be focused on the underlying electric and self-driving technologies only.

Apple recently hired former Tesla lead engineer Doug Field to lead the project alongside longtime Apple executive Bob Mansfield. Last month, Apple reportedly removed more than 200 employees from the team, but Apple said "we continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems."

In any case, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple is unlikely to release a vehicle until 2023 to 2025.

Apple already uses a fleet of LiDAR-equipped vans to collect mapping data, as part of its efforts to improve Apple Maps. Each van is equipped with an iPad and a Mac Pro to assist the drivers with surveying streets and neighborhoods.

Via: Reuters

Apple and investment bank Goldman Sachs plan to launch a joint credit card later this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The report claims the card will be rolled out to Apple employees for internal testing in the next few weeks and officially launch later this year. The card would be accessible through the Wallet app on iPhone, potentially with unique features for setting spending goals, tracking rewards, and managing balances.

Executives have discussed borrowing visual cues from Apple's fitness-tracking app, where "rings" close as users hit daily exercise targets, and sending users notifications about their spending habits. There also could be notifications based on analysis of cardholders' spending patterns, alerting them for example if they paid more than usual for groceries one week.

The card will be issued by Goldman Sachs and use Mastercard's payment network, according to the report. The card is said to offer around two percent cashback on most purchases and potentially more on Apple products and services.

Apple has tweaked the Wallet app's interface in the iOS 12.2 beta, potentially foreshadowing the credit card's arrival.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on these plans last year, noting that the Goldman Sachs card could replace the Barclaycard Visa with Apple Rewards currently issued in the United States. Apple is expected to collect a higher percentage of fees from the Goldman Sachs card, boosting its services revenue.

Apple Music vice president Oliver Schusser spoke with German blog Macerkopf this week, revealing that European developers have now earned over $25 billion from the App Store since its inception in 2008.

Schusser also noted that customers have downloaded and streamed over 50 billion episodes of 650,000 active shows on Apple Podcasts.

Apple provided MacRumors with Schusser's full remarks in English:

Our services division which includes the content stores, Apple Pay and iCloud storage is on target to be a $40 billion business annually. In January we announced developer earnings on the App Store have reached $120 billion. Payments to European developers have just passed $25 billion. Apple Music now has 50 million paid users around the world since launching just under 4 years ago. We're the the #1 music streaming service in the US and the leading music service globally on iPhone. Our customers love the amazing content, whether it's through playlists, Radio, Beats 1, or suggestions in For You. Apple Music was the first place to hear great new music from Nicki Minaj, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean to name a few last year. Beats 1 also hosts exclusive and popular artist-led shows from Drake, Nicki Minaj, Ezra Koenig, Lars Ulrich and Elton John. The final update I'd like to share today is around podcasting where our customers have downloaded and streamed over 50 billion episodes of 650,000 active shows on Apple Podcasts.

Other figures mentioned in the remarks were previously known, including that developers have earned over $120 billion globally since the App Store launched and that Apple Music has over 50 million paying subscribers.

(Thanks, Andre!)