MacRumors

Apple and Amazon will join Foxconn in a bid to win Toshiba's NAND memory chip unit, which has been on sale since March and was previously said to finally conclude bidding sometime in June. Nikkei quoted Foxconn chairman Terry Gou as saying that Apple and Amazon will "chip in funds" to help Foxconn win the final bid (via Reuters).

Gou left out the exact amount of the funding that Apple and Amazon would provide, and it was also mentioned that Japanese manufacturer Sharp, which Foxconn acquired last year, will also take place in the bidding. In an official statement, Foxconn referenced Apple and Amazon by calling the U.S. companies "strategic partners" in the bid for Toshiba's memory chip unit, while mentioning that more details would come "at the appropriate time."

Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc will join Foxconn's bid for Toshiba Corp's semiconductor business, the Nikkei business daily quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying on Monday. The two U.S. technology giants plan to "chip in funds", Gou said in an interview, according to the newspaper.

"Of course Apple and Amazon are offering money together, but I cannot comment on how much funds each company is putting on the table," Gou said at a hotel in Osaka.

The sale of Toshiba's chip unit has been riddled by a legal battle with Western Digital over the past few weeks, making it uncertain who -- if anyone -- would end up winning the bid for the unit. Following the announcement of the initial sale, Apple was reportedly looking into spending several billion dollars for a "substantial stake" in the Toshiba memory chip unit, as well as potentially partnering up with Foxconn in the bidding war.

Foxconn has already been suggested as an unlikely winner of the unit due to its deep ties with China, with the Japanese government likely to oppose any winning bid that would take key Toshiba chip technology out of the country. Foxconn's previous bid of $27 billion was reportedly rejected by Toshiba, so now it appears that the manufacturer will beef up its offering for Toshiba's unit with the help of Apple, Amazon, and Sharp, although it's unclear if more money will be enough for the China-based company to win.

According to Gou, if Foxconn would win Toshiba's chip unit it plans to keep the Japanese leadership in place, which it hopes is a way to appease the Japanese government ahead of the end of bidding.

"We will definitely not undermine nor interfere with [Toshiba's existing management]. We will treat them like the way we have been treating Sharp," Gou said, adding that he was confident that Foxconn stood a good chance of winning the bid.

"We let Japanese [managers] run Sharp ... we are also hoping that Toshiba's memory unit will survive into the next 50 to 100 years at least, like Sharp."

Other bidders include Broadcom and South Korea's SK Hynix, and the winner is expected to be announced sometime this month, ahead of Toshiba's next shareholder meeting.

Update: Terry Gou has said that, "Apple is in for sure," in regards to the Foxconn-led group aiming to win Toshiba's memory chip unit. According to a Reuters report, Tim Cook and Apple's board of directors approved the decision to participate in the bidding.

As we get closer to Apple's WWDC 2017 keynote, which is set to kick off today at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, several developers have taken to Twitter to share the swag they've received at the conference this year. The items include a Levi's denim jacket with a custom WWDC17 logo and a collection of Apple-themed enamel pins.

The Levi's trucker jacket comes in black, includes fits and sizes for both men and women, and has two interior pockets large enough to fit an iPhone 7 Plus.

The pins handed out to WWDC attendees this year include a collection of six Apple designs, including the old rainbow-themed Apple logo, the "hello" Mac greeting, the Swift logo, an emoji with sunglasses, the original Macintosh, and the Metal logo.

A few developers have noted that the pin packs include different designs, with separate collections including an iMessage heart bubble, thumbs up emoji, Activity rings, and more. In addition, each developer has received personalized pins that represent their home country.

WWDC scholarship attendees at the conference are also taking away an Apple TV dev kit, as one 9to5Mac reader pointed out. Students and STEM organization members who won a scholarship got free tickets to WWDC, normally priced at $1,599, and received free lodging as well this year at the San Jose State University dorms, located approximately 15 minutes away from the venue when walking.

MacRumors will be providing live coverage of the WWDC keynote in a live blog on the MacRumors.com front page, as well as via the MacRumors Live Twitter account. Any reader interested in avoiding spoilers for this year's keynote can check out our spoiler-free video stream, which will be updated with a direct link to the presentation once it becomes available from Apple.

With the flood of full-featured Thunderbolt 3 docks about to hit the market, it's time to take a look at Belkin's Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD, one of the major contenders users have been waiting for in addition to the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock and CalDigit TS3 that we've also recently reviewed. As with the other docks we've looked at, Belkin's offering includes a variety of ports and even charging capabilities all over a single Thunderbolt 3 cable, making it a great option for turning the new MacBook Pro into a robust desktop setup.

Belkin's Thunderbolt 3 Express Dock HD is launching this Monday, June 5 (exact time still to be determined), and will be available directly from Belkin and through Apple, as well as from other select retailers, but we've already had a chance to spend a little time with it to see how it compares to the competition.

➜ Click here to read more...

Apple's WWDC keynote will be kicking off at 10:00 am Pacific Time on Monday, and as is tradition, some MacRumors readers who can't follow the event live are interested in avoiding all of the announcements and waiting until Apple posts the recorded video of the event so as to experience it without already knowing the outcome.

For those individuals, we've posted this news story, which will be updated with a direct link to the presentation once it becomes available from Apple. No other news stories or announcements will be displayed alongside this story.

Apple has become quicker about making event videos available for replay over the past several years, and videos are now frequently available within an hour of an event's conclusion.

Users waiting for the video to be posted are welcome to gather in the thread associated with this news story, and we ask that those who follow the events refrain from making any posts about Apple's announcements in this thread.

Video Posted: A direct link to the video file is now available, with no spoilers.

Apple recently opened up a limited-time sale within iTunes for a selection of movies dating back to the 1950s, which the company has grouped into "Iconic" and "Essential" collections (via Variety). The bundles include movies like Dr. Strangelove, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and many more.

The sale starts with a group of $19.99 "Iconic" movie bundles for each decade, beginning with the 1950s, each including ten movies.

All of the movies included in every collection are listed below:

• 1950s: The Country Girl, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sabrina, Sunset Boulevard, To Catch a Thief, War and Peace, Houseboat, A Place in the Sun, The Greatest Show on Earth, Funny Face
• 1960s: The Odd Couple, Alfie, Barbarella, Hud, Barefoot in the Park, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Harm’s Way, True Grit, The Italian Job, The Nutty Professor
• 1970s: Paper Moon, The Great Gatsby, Love Story, Grease, The Out-of-Towners, Harold and Maude, Heaven Can Wait, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Bad News Bears, Plaza Suite
• 1980s: The Naked Gun, Airplane!, Footloose, Urban Cowboy, Clue, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Terms of Endearment, Crocodile Dundee, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• 1990s: Wayne’s World, Clueless, The Truman Show, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Galaxy Quest, Ghost, Kingpin, Superstar, Runaway Bride, Tommy Boy
• 2000s: Zoolander, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Tropic Thunder, Almost Famous, School of Rock, I Love You, Man, She’s the Man, Mean Girls, Old School

The "Essential" films aren't bundled under one price point, and instead iTunes has accumulated popular films from each decade and marked them down to $4.99 each. The amount of movies included in each decade's Essential sale ranges from 26 to nearly 100, although the 1950s are not included.

Some of the $4.99 films in each decade's sale are listed below:

• 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia, The Graduate, Psycho, West Side Story
• 1970s: Rocky, Carrie, Apocalypse Now, The French Connection, Serpico, Marathon Man
• 1980s: Back to the Future, Die Hard, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, WarGames, The Thing
• 1990s: The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, American Beauty, Jerry Maguire, Reservoir Dogs, The Silence of the Lambs
• 2000s: Shaun of the Dead, Juno, (500) Days of Summer, Cloverfield, Ghost World, Legally Blonde, Bring It On

iTunes has also marked down specific categories of Essential films, including "Summer Blockbuster Essentials," "Based on a True Story Essentials," "Essential Actors + Directors," and more.

Apple regularly runs sales within the movies section of iTunes, most recently giving the storefront a LEGO-themed makeover and placing some DC movies on sale to coincide with the digital release of The LEGO Batman Movie. Last year, the movies section of iTunes turned ten years old and in celebration Apple debuted bundles of ten films for $10 each.

Although Apple Park has opened to a small group of employees, the site's buildings and landscaping remain in ongoing construction around the campus. In a new interview with Backchannel, Apple Park's senior arborist, David Muffly, has provided insight into the work it's taken to choose, locate, and plant 9,000 trees at Apple Park, as well as detailed his first interactions with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs discovered Muffly's work during walks he would take around a large satellite dish on Stanford’s campus, admiring as he went hundreds of native oak trees along the path. He made Apple headhunters find the arborist responsible for planting the trees, leading to Muffly, who at the time was working a job pruning lemon trees in Menlo Park.

The two were said to have hit it off "within 20 minutes of meeting," where Jobs described what would see a grand opening seven years later as Apple Park. Muffly and Jobs met in 2010, and in 2011 Muffly was granted the official title of "senior arborist" at Apple.

Within 20 minutes of meeting, it was clear that the arborist and the technologist were on the same wavelength about trees. Jobs told Muffly that he wanted to create a microcosm of old Silicon Valley, a landscape reenactment of the days when the cradle of digital disruption had more fruit trees than engineers.

In one sense, the building would be an ecological preservation project; in another sense, it’d be a roman a clef written in soil, bark, and blossom. Muffly, who had been sensitive to the native growth of the region for years, got it immediately. “That’s what I’ve been doing — planting fruit trees, oak trees,” he said.

Eventually, Muffly was shown early design drawings of Apple Park and the arborist realized the full scope of the project. While thousands of workers would be focusing on the construction of the campus' architecture, he and a small team of landscaping experts would face the full brunt of responsibility for what Jobs considered one of the most important parts of the site: the trees.

And he began to get a sense of the massiveness of the project — hundreds of architects and untold numbers of contractors would wind up working on the building, an edifice that might well become as iconic to California as the pyramids are to Egypt. But the campus itself was meant to be a statement on nature. And that would be his job.

Yeah, there’s that building, he thought. But there’s a lot more trees than buildings. There’s going to be, like, 5,000 people making that building. And it’s going to be just me and my friends doing the trees. “So right off the bat, I was like, Whoooaa. This is as real as it gets.”

Muffly eventually began working with Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm The Olin Studio to make Jobs' vision a reality at Apple Park. The team agreed that Apple Park should be stocked with trees and greenery "that might thrive in drought conditions brought about by climate change," as well as diversifying the variety of trees on the campus with native trees as the backbone of the ecosystem and then less common genetics dispersed throughout Apple Park.

As Muffly worked with Jobs in the early planning of Apple's new campus, before the late CEO's passing in 2011, he was impressed with Jobs' knowledge of trees. "He had a better sense than most arborists," Muffly said, and at his official pitch to the Cupertino City Council, Jobs promised an increase from the 3,700 trees on the site to 6,000 before the project's completion.

To fill the revised goal of 9,000 trees on the site, Muffly eventually scoured Christmas tree farms across California.

...When Muffly began his work, he realized that nearly all the (non-indigenous) existing trees would have to go. “It was all junk trees and parking lots here,” he says. “So it was a long process. Over the next year or so. I surveyed the trees and picked out about a hundred of them that I felt were worth moving. And we had to stretch to get a hundred out of the [roughly 4,000] existing trees.”

Muffly looked at the redwoods at some abandoned Christmas tree farms up on Skyline, but the soil was too rocky to grow them to Apple’s specifications. “So I sent all my little tree elves to help me, telling them we need big trees we can transport to the site. Next thing I know we’re finding these in two abandoned Christmas tree farms in the Mojave Desert, Yermo, and Adelanto. Who knew there were Christmas tree farms in the Mojave?” Apple actually bought the Yermo site.

All of the landscaping work for Apple Park eventually created shortages for other companies attempting to buy trees in the area, with a report by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year stating that, "Buying trees is a surprisingly cutthroat business."

In a behind-the-scenes look at Apple Park last month, one architect reminisced about Jobs' particular fondness for trees: to the late CEO, "trees were the most beautiful bits of art," said architect Stefan Behling. "He used to say, 'The most amazing thing about trees is it doesn't actually matter how rich you are: You can never buy a really old, beautiful tree.'"

You can read the full Backchannel interview with David Muffly right here.