MacRumors

Apple today launched a redesigned Jobs at Apple website, complete with a new video highlighting the company's culture.

The website now provides more detailed information about the various teams at Apple, grouped into the following categories: hardware, software and services, design, operations and supply chain, marketing, corporate functions, sales and business development, retail, and support and service.

Apple has profiled a handful of employees, including Divya, who manages a team responsible for developing the Apple Watch's sensors.

Apple has expanded its Students section with a list of opportunities for interns, undergrads, and graduates, ranging from the AppleCare College Program to the Apple Store Leader Program. The updated page includes a profile from a software engineer named Alexa, who describes her impact at Apple.

Apple's jobs search portal has also been updated with a cleaner design.

Apple says it has created over two million jobs in the United States, including those attributable to the App Store ecosystem. Apple also says it is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity.

Apple has added 2018 models of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to its refurbished store in the U.S. for the first time. Prices are discounted by roughly 15 percent compared to the equivalent brand new models.

Quantities are limited, so we recommend acting fast or using Refurb Tracker to monitor when inventory is replenished.

Apple says refurbished MacBook Pro models are thoroughly inspected, tested, cleaned, and repackaged, with all manuals and cables included in the box. In our view, a refurbished MacBook Pro is virtually indistinguishable from a brand new model, so this represents a good opportunity for savings.

Note that third-party resellers sometimes offer better deals than Apple's refurbished prices, so be sure to monitor our deals roundup.

A refurbished MacBook Pro comes with Apple's standard one-year warranty effective on the date the notebook is delivered. The warranty can be extended to three years from the refurbished purchase date with AppleCare+ for Mac, which costs $379 for the the 15-inch MacBook Pro in the United States.

Apple has also added refurbished 2018 models of the 15-inch MacBook Pro to its Canadian store at a 15 percent discount.

Apple began selling refurbished 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro models earlier this week.

(Thanks, Kevin Z.!)

For the first time since Bloomberg published a highly controversial story suggesting Chinese spies planted microchips in Supermicro server motherboards Apple used in its iCloud facilities, Apple CEO Tim Cook has gone on the record to vehemently deny the claims.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Cook said there is "no truth" to the story about Apple, before making the unprecedented move of calling on Bloomberg to publish a retraction.

Since the report went live earlier this month, Apple has refuted Bloomberg's claims in multiple clearly worded statements denying such an incident ever took place. Apple maintains that the story is "completely untrue," malicious chips were never found in its servers, and there was never an FBI investigation into the incident.

Bloomberg has continued to stand by its original report, which, based on info obtained from 17 unnamed sources, said that Apple, Amazon, and other tech companies had purchased and installed Supermicro servers that had been tampered with by the Chinese government. Small chips were allegedly implanted into server motherboards, allowing China to access corporate secrets and other information.

Apple did have an issue with Supermicro servers that led to the company dropping Supermicro as a supplier, but the relationship ended after malware was discovered on a single server in an incident unrelated to Bloomberg's claims.

According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, though he only spoke out publicly about the Bloomberg story this week, he's been involved in Apple's response "from the beginning."

"I personally talked to the Bloomberg reporters along with Bruce Sewell who was then our general counsel. We were very clear with them that this did not happen, and answered all their questions," said Cook. "Each time they brought this up to us, the story changed and each time we investigated we found nothing."

Cook went on to say that Bloomberg failed to provide Apple with specific details about the malicious chips the company supposedly found and removed, and that Bloomberg's claims are based on "vague secondhand accounts." Cook told BuzzFeed that Apple did a deep search through all of its documentation and could find zero evidence of malicious chips or an FBI investigation.

"We turned the company upside down," Cook said. "Email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There's no truth to this."

As BuzzFeed points out, Apple has never publicly called for a retraction of a story before, even in instances where incorrect information was published. Following Cook's discussion with BuzzFeed, the site again contacted Bloomberg, and Bloomberg once again refused to budge.

"Bloomberg Businessweek's investigation is the result of more than a year of reporting, during which we conducted more than 100 interviews," a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in response to a series of questions. "Seventeen individual sources, including government officials and insiders at the companies, confirmed the manipulation of hardware and other elements of the attacks. We also published three companies' full statements, as well as a statement from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources."

Along with multiple strongly worded denials from Apple, including one to Congress, several other sources and government agencies have supported Apple's claims that the information shared in Bloomberg's story is false.

The UK's Cyber Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, former FBI general counsel James Baker, and NSA Senior Advisor Rob Joyce have all questioned the veracity of Bloomberg's claims and have denied knowledge of such an investigation.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Apple's design chief Jony Ive sat down for an interview over lunch with Financial Times reporter Nicholas Foulkes earlier this month, discussing a wide range of topics, including the Apple Watch, Apple Park, and prospects of an Apple Car.

It wasn't late, it was always scheduled to be then. When you're moving 9,000 people, you don't do it in one day. We're one of the last groups. It's a loaded and significant event because it meant leaving a studio that has decades of history, where we designed and built first prototypes. This is the studio I went back to on the day that Steve died. And it's the place where we figured out the iPhone and the iPod.

Ive said his team's move to Apple Park has allowed for increased collaboration among different areas of creative expertise:

Moving to Apple Park represents the coming together, at last, of these different areas of creative expertise that are incredibly diverse. I'm fairly confident that this has never happened before, to have industrial designers next to font designers, next to prototypers, next to haptic experts. The best haptic experts in the world are sat next to a bunch of guys who have PhDs in material science.

On the prospects of an Apple Car, Ive remained tight lipped. In general, he said it's important to work on the associated issues and challenges with any new product, rather than talk about it and risk having the ideas and technologies copied:

We explore so many different thoughts and so many different technologies for products or services. Some companies use the fact that they are exploring lots of different ideas as a PR tool — we don't. If you are genuinely working on something, it's better to be working on it and struggling with the associated issues and challenges, rather than talking about it. Our capital, our equity, is our ideas and the technologies that we're developing. It's important that as long as possible that remains ours, to try and postpone that point when they will then be copied — which is what history suggests.

When asked if the Apple Watch is best described as a watch, Ive instead referred to it as a "very powerful computer":

No, I think that this is a very powerful computer, with a range of very sophisticated sensors, that is strapped to my wrist. That's neither very descriptive nor very helpful. You and I share the same perspective and we had this same challenge with the product that we called the iPhone. Clearly the capability of the iPhone extends way beyond the function of what we would traditionally call a phone.

Ive went on to say that Apple believes it has a responsibility to understand and mitigate the implications and consequences, both positive and negative, of the products it creates — i.e. Screen Time in iOS 12. "It keeps me awake," he said:

If you genuinely have a concern for humanity, you will be preoccupied with trying to understand the implications, the consequences of creating something that hasn’t existed before. I think it's part of the culture at Apple to believe that there is a responsibility that doesn't end when you ship a product… It keeps me awake.

Also See: Jony Ive Talks Secrecy, His Future, and More at WIRED Anniversary Event

iPhone XR pre-orders kicked off at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, and just a half hour after orders went live, some colors started selling out and became unavailable for launch day delivery in the United States.

Right now, some yellow and PRODUCT(RED) iPhone XR models from T-Mobile won't ship out for one to two weeks, delivering in November instead of on October 26. In the UK, iPhone XR supply is also starting to slowly sell out, with coral and yellow models starting to list a one to two week delivery estimate.

All other colors are still available for launch day delivery in the United States at this time, but available supply for in-store pickup has dwindled for some models in some areas.

It's not clear if yellow is a popular color choice or if Apple made fewer yellow iPhone XR models, but with one color selling out, the others could soon follow.

Apple did not provide SIM-free models of the iPhone XR for pre-order in the United States, which typically means that supplies are not quite as strong as Apple would like. SIM-free models are, however, available in other countries around the world.

Curiously, Apple has also not provided iPhone XR cases for the new device, which is unusual as new iPhone releases are typically accompanied by matching cases. iPhone XR press releases in some countries mentioned that Apple would debut a clear case for the iPhone XR to show off the colors of the device, but no such case is available as of yet.

If you're planning to get an iPhone XR, it's best to place an order right away if you want launch day delivery, because it's not clear if and when available stock will sell out. Apple will, as always, have some devices available for walk-in purchases on October 26.

Apple is now accepting pre-orders for the new iPhone XR through its online storefront on the web and through its Apple Store app on iOS devices.

The 6.1-inch iPhone XR is the third iPhone in the 2018 iPhone lineup, and the most affordable of the new devices.

Rather than an OLED display, a dual-lens camera system, a stainless steel frame, 3D Touch, and Gigabit LTE, the iPhone XR features more affordable components that include an LCD display with a resolution of 1792x828, a single-lens camera system, lesser water resistance, an aluminum frame, Haptic Touch, and LTE Advanced.

On the plus side, the iPhone XR has a longer battery life than the iPhone XS and XS Max, and it comes in six colors: white, black, blue, coral, yellow, and (PRODUCT)RED. Design wise, it looks similar to the iPhone XS and XS Max with an edge-to-edge LCD display that includes a notch and a TrueDepth camera system, but its bezels are slightly wider.

The iPhone XR adopts the same Face ID functionality as the iPhone XS and XS Max, with Apple eliminating the Home button in all of its flagship iPhones in 2018. The iPhone XR also supports dual-SIM functionality like the iPhone XS, and it has the same super fast A12 chip.

It also features a glass body that supports wireless charging functionality, and through software enhancements, it supports many of the same camera features including Portrait Mode, Depth Control, and Smart HDR.

Pre-orders for the iPhone XR are available in first wave launch countries including Albania, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guernsey, Herzegovina, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the UAE, UK, US and US Virgin Islands.

All of the major U.S. carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile -- are accepting pre-orders for the new devices, as are many other carriers around the world. Major online retailers including Best Buy and Target are also accepting pre-orders starting today.

Pricing on the iPhone XR starts at $749 for 64GB of storage, with 128GB of storage available for $799 and 256GB of storage available for $899. iPhone Upgrade Program customers can get the iPhone XR starting at $37.41 per month.

In the United States, customers can purchase iPhone XR models from any of the four major carriers using Apple's site. SIM-free models are not available at this time, suggesting supplies of the iPhone XR could be somewhat constrained.

Customers who successfully place an order for launch day delivery can expect to begin receiving their devices starting on Friday, October 26, the official launch date for the iPhone XR.