The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has received governmental approval to sell the iPhone in South Korea. The move appears to mark a substantial opening of one of the most closed mobile phone markets in the world.
The commission's action comes after months of consumer pressure. For much of this year, the commission's reason for blocking the iPhone was that its built-in mapping capabilities violate a South Korean rule requiring the use of domestic technology for location-based services in cellphones. In its decision Wednesday, the commission created an exemption in the rule for iPhone.
"This is a big strike for the government in saying that this is an open market," said Chung Yun-ho, managing partner of Veyond Partners, a telecom consulting firm in Seoul. "Many people regard Korea as an advanced telecom market but they are acknowledging that we are lagging behind in smartphones. They wanted to pressure the telecom companies to embrace new things."
An Apple job posting in July 2008 suggested that Apple was looking to launch the iPhone in South Korea, although it has clearly taken considerable time for the company to work through various regulatory obstacles there to gain approval. Last month, claims of a deal with wireless carrier KT again sparked interest in the market. KT, however, has backed away from that statement, noting only that it continues to be in talks with Apple.
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 ...
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...
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 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...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
