MacRumors

Ahead of the rumored debut of Apple's upcoming streaming music service, Re/code has shared several details on the initiative, sourced from industry insiders. As we've learned previously, Apple will charge $9.99 per month for the service and will not offer a freemium streaming tier as other music services like Spotify do, but the company is aiming to introduce ways to let people listen to some content for free.

First and foremost, Apple hopes to offer listeners a free trial period, which lasts between one and three months, letting them sample the music service for an extended period of time before opting for a full subscription. The length of the trial will depend on what Apple is able to negotiate with music companies.

Apple is also working on a feature that may let artists and music creators upload samples of songs that could be listened to without subscribing to the service. Re/code's sources are describing this as "something akin to SoundCloud." SoundCloud is a music sharing platform that lets users upload and share originally-created music, and a similar feature within Apple's new music service would give indie artists an easy way to share music while providing listeners with free content.

The third way Apple plans to potentially get music to listeners for free is through a revamp of iTunes Radio. We've heard hints of this previously, but the new version of iTunes Radio may feature stations that are curated by humans rather than computers, with different content available in different locales. New Apple hire BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and other recently hired radio staff may spearhead this initiative.

Re/code's report also shares some details on the streaming music negotiations that have already landed Apple in a bit of hot water with various regulatory bodies, including the FTC and the Department of Justice in the United States and the European Commission. Apple has been attempting to convince music labels that ad-supported free streaming music does not generate enough revenue.

But as we have previously reported, Apple doesn't intend to provide free, unlimited on-demand streaming, as competitors Spotify and YouTube do. In private meetings with label executives and other music industry figures, Apple has been arguing that free streaming won't generate enough money for the industry via advertising, and doesn't give enough people incentive to pay for subscriptions.

Apple is still working to complete deals ahead of the launch of the streaming service, but it is said to be on track for a WWDC debut. According to a report earlier this week, the streaming service will be introduced during the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and released later in the month alongside the public launch of iOS 8.4.

Apple's streaming music service is built on its existing Beats music service, and will continue to focus on curated content. To draw in additional customers and to distinguish itself from competing services, Apple is planning to offer a range of exclusive content. There are also plans to rebrand and revamp the music service, deeply integrating it into iTunes and the newly revamped Music app introduced in iOS 8.4.

In Nintendo's financial results briefing posted today, which relays the company's past fiscal year ending in March 2015 and looks ahead to the future, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata provided a few more details regarding the company's future release plans with mobile gaming partner DeNA.

Essentially, the first game in the lineup will launch "by the end of this calendar year," with the current long-term plan to release five games in total by the end of the company's next fiscal year ending in March of 2017, just under two years away. Iwata promises that while that estimation for a release schedule seems low, the company hopes to retain its well-known degree of polish and customer satisfaction when transitioning to mobile, and taking a quality over quantity approach is its way of doing that.

You may think it is a small number, but when we aim to make each title a hit, and because we want to thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases, this is not a small number at all and should demonstrate our serious commitment to the smart device business.

During the briefing, Iwata also went further into detail regarding the actual strategy for creating games on a mobile device, such as an iPhone and iPad. While the initial announcement of the deal with DeNA had fans excited, Nintendo was quick to specify that the experiences provided on mobile wouldn't simply be ports of existing franchises and would be more tailored for a smaller, bite-sized experience.
Although that dashed most fan hopes for full-fledged Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, and Animal Crossing experiences on the iPhone, it does provide hope that the sometimes fumbling company is at least aware of what makes mobile games work in the first place.

As we confirmed on March 17, all of our IP can be considered for a smart device game. On the other hand, since the game business on smart devices is already severely competitive, even with highly popular IP, the odds of success are quite low if consumers cannot appreciate the quality of a game.

Also, if we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result. If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all. Accordingly, we are going to carefully select appropriate IP and titles for our smart device deployment.

Iwata last mentions the company's hope to "expand this business," in regards to the mobile games, to global markets so more and more fans will have a chance to experience Nintendo games on mobile. "We are aiming to make this one of the pillars of Nintendo’s revenue structure," Iwata said.

Since the deal with DeNA, the company has begun slowly relinquishing its stranglehold over its precious characters and IPs, after first being burned by various motion picture and CD-i partnerships in the past. Most recently, this week Nintendo announced a partnership with Universal to include the former company's popular characters as various attractions and locations in a theme park expansion of the latter's well-established park experiences.

Ericsson has filed lawsuits against Apple in Germany, United Kingdom and the Netherlands after failing to reach a global licensing agreement with the company over both standard-essential and non-standardized patents.

Ericsson claims that Apple continues to sell the iPhone, iPad and other products that infringe upon its patented technologies, some related to 2G and 4G LTE standards, even though its licensing agreement expired in January.

Ericsson has been attempting to license its standard-essential patents with Apple on terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND), but the two companies have failed to reach an agreement following over two years of negotiations. Unable to resolve the situation outside of the courtroom, Ericsson has since filed patent lawsuits against the iPhone maker in the United States, and now Europe, for mediation by the courts.

"Apple continues to profit from Ericsson's technology without having a valid license in place," said Kasim Alfalahi, Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Ericsson. "Our technology is used in many features and functionality of today's communication devices. We are confident the courts in Germany, the UK and the Netherlands will be able to help us resolve this matter in a fair manner."

Ericsson, the world's largest provider of mobile network equipment, originally filed two complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission and seven complaints with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against Apple earlier this year. In late March, the ITC agreed to investigate the patent infringement claims, involving 41 wireless-related patents.

Apple originally filed suit against Ericsson in January, arguing that it was demanding excessive royalties for patents not essential to LTE standards. Ericsson, which holds over 35,000 patents, countersued in a Texas courtroom just hours later, seeking an estimated $250 million to $750 million in royalties per year for Apple to continue licensing its patented wireless technologies.

Since the Apple Watch was released on April 24, several teardowns from iFixit, Chipworks, and ABI Research have divulged information on the inner workings of the device, detailing everything from battery capacity to the manufacturers who created the miniaturized parts for the device.

A report last week took a deep look at the S1 package that runs the Apple Watch, pointing towards 512MB of RAM, a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip, an accelerometer/gyrometer from STMicroelectronics, and today further investigation from Chipworks (via Ars Technica) has revealed 30 individual components inside the 26mm x 28mm S1 package, a feat Chipworks calls "quite an accomplishment."

Apple and/or their suppliers have designed and manufactured a 26 mm x 28 mm package that is very unique. Let's consider its construction for a moment. We have a common motherboard to which all of the components (wafer scale packages, PoPs, BGAs, etc.) have been attached. The entire motherboard, with all of its components, is then overmolded with a packaging compound containing silica or alumina spheres suspended in a resin. We see this same type of material in conventional IC packaging, but we have never observed this being used over a 26 mm x 28 mm motherboard.

Among the more interesting discoveries Chipworks has made is the manufacturing process for the APL0778 application processor (CPU/GPU) on the S1. It was made with Samsung's 28 nanometer LP process, which, as Ars Technica points out, is no longer cutting edge technology. A 28-nanometer processor was also used in the iPhone 5s, while the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus used 20-nanometer A8 processors.

A 28-nanometer chip in the current-generation Apple Watch suggests Apple could size down to a newer process in future devices, bringing a jump in performance alongside a reduction in space to make room for additional components. Samsung's chip technology has progressed to a 14-nanometer process, which we may see in the next-generation iPhone, among other products.

In short, the use of a 28-nanometer processor suggests there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to processing power in future Apple Watch devices. Though the Apple Watch has only been available for two weeks, we've already heard some rumors about the next version. According to reports, health sensors that did not make it into the first-generation device may be added to the second-generation version, perhaps allowing it to track health-related metrics like stress levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.

We've also seen rumors suggesting the first update to the Apple Watch will come in the form of additional casing options, perhaps later this year. A second-generation device with upgraded internals is not expected until 2016.

App developer Sam Soffes today published a blog post detailing the early monetary performance of his new app Redacted [Direct Link], which allows users to easily obscure sensitive information on personal photos.

Yesterday, Soffes tweeted out a question, asking his followers to guess how much profit the app received in its first day on the market. While the guesses averaged $12,460.67, Soffes revealed his app had achieved just 87 paid downloads, earning him a mere $302 worldwide for the eighth top paid app in the U.S. Mac App Store.

There were 37 guesses. I threw out the lowest and highest guesses which were both hilarious. The average guess was $12,460.67. 7 of those units were promo codes I sent out. Only 59 of those units were in the US. It's pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.

In response to Soffes' blog post, Dan Counsell, a developer of popular organizational app Clear, shared a few numbers on the app's profits over a single day. Counsell tweeted that Clear earned $453 the day before the tweet, noting the list app is third in productivity and fifteenth overall in the top paid app list for the United States.

The top paid ranking is a measure of download volume (with some tweaks to account for sales momentum), not profits, so developers of higher-priced Mac App Store apps are in some cases certainly doing better than Redacted. Even so, with a drop in sales following the launch surge, Redacted is currently the #81 top grossing app in the U.S. Mac App Store while sitting at the #19 spot in paid apps.

Towards the end of his blog post, Soffes mentions that he nearly decided to continue working on another indie app, Whiskey, in an attempt to make a living off of that app. "I'm glad I didn't," he states honestly. He now is employed at mobile payments solution Venmo as of early this week.

AT&T has quietly updated one of its policies to reflect that it will now only throttle customers that are connected to a cell tower experiencing network congestion, reports Ars Technica. The carrier previously throttled all grandfathered customers with unlimited data plans that exceeded 5GB of 4G LTE data usage in a single monthly billing period, regardless of network congestion.

The updated policy reads as follows:

"As a result of AT&T's network management process, customers on a 3G or 4G smartphone or on a 4G LTE smartphone with an unlimited data plan who have exceeded 3 gigabytes (3G/4G) or 5 gigabytes (4G LTE) of data in a billing period may experience reduced speeds when using data services at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion. All such customers can still use unlimited data without incurring overage charges, and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle."

Last October, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a federal court complaint against AT&T, accusing the carrier of misleading its smartphone customers by charging them for unlimited data while reducing their data speeds by up to 90 percent. The FTC claimed that AT&T did not adequately inform its customers that they would be throttled for using more than a certain amount of data during a billing cycle. AT&T could still face penalties from the FTC if it loses the case, despite changing its policy.

AT&T customers with unlimited data plans have experienced speeds as low as half a megabit per second when being throttled, according to the report, resulting in barely usable service. By throttling unlimited data plans, AT&T is naturally encouraging customers to switch to one of the tiered data plans that it introduced in the years after discontinuing unlimited plans. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have similar throttling practices where there is network congestion.

It has not been a good week for Apple's developer services. Less than a day after iTunes Connect experienced a lengthy outage that lasted several hours, TestFlight is now unavailable for many developers. The beta testing service for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps has been returning a "currently unavailable" message since as early as Wednesday afternoon around 6:00 PM Pacific.

Apple's Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams will speak at the annual Code Conference, held this May 26-28 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, reports Re/code. Williams joined Apple in 1998 and leads a team responsible for the company's supply chain management, and during the past two years has also overseen development of the Apple Watch and health initiatives such as ResearchKit.

Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi spoke at the inaugural Code Conference last year, with Cue discussing how today's TV experience "sucks" and is a complicated problem to solve.

Code Conference is a successor to the D: All Things Digital Conference that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, among other Apple executives, have participated in the past before Dow Jones closed technology website AllThingsD and replaced it with WSJD.

Williams will participate in Code Conference just over one month after the Apple Watch launch, which some customers believe has not gone as smoothly as past product releases due to, among other reasons, limited supply and no in-store availability. Much of the criticism has been directed towards Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts, although Williams is directly in charge of Apple Watch development and manages the worldwide supply chain. His interview at Code Conference may offer more details about the launch.

Other notable Code Conference speakers announced include GM CEO Mary Barra, Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti and editor-in-chief Ben Smith, Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao, GoPro CEO and founder Nick Woodman, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Google business lead Omid Kordestani.

Apple today launched a new microsite focused on the iPad, exploring the way the iPad can "change the way you do things every day." The site offers up a selection of apps and usage ideas for the iPad, organized into several categories: Cooking with iPad, Learning with iPad, Small Business with iPad, Traveling with iPad, and Redecorating with iPad.

Like the company's past advertising efforts, this new campaign aims to portray the iPad as a tool that's useful in all aspects of life that goes far beyond mere content consumption, as can be seen in the introductory video on the site. The video features people using the iPad in a whole range of situations, from cooking to managing a business.

Some of the recommended apps include Green Kitchen, Cook, and Epicurious, and the site also recommends the Smart Cover as a tool for propping up the iPad while cooking. Siri is highlighted as a way to use the iPad hands-free in the kitchen, and a long list of apps is linked at the bottom of the page.

Learning with iPad focuses on using the iPad to learn at all ages, with sections highlighting learning through play, programming, exploring space through apps like Star Walk 2, using textbooks in iBooks, using apps like Notability and Coursera for learning, and exploring free courses on iTunes U. Hobby-based apps are also included in a "Never stop learning" section.

The other three iPad sections, Small Business, Traveling, and Redecorating, are equally as extensive, suggesting a range of use cases and apps for different situations that people might otherwise have missed. Every app used on the new site and within the "Everything changes for iPad" site is also listed in a special section on the App Store.

Over the course of the last few years, Apple has explored several different advertising campaigns for the iPad in an effort to spur people into purchasing one of its tablets. We've seen "Why You'll Love an iPad," "Your Verse," and "Start Something New" in 2013 and 2014.

Apple changes its iPad advertising tactics much more frequently than it does for other products, likely because its iPad sales have been down for several quarters in a row. During its the second quarter of 2015, Apple's iPad sales were down to 12.6 million from 16.35 million in the year-ago quarter.

Tim Cook has remained optimistic about iPad sales, however, suggesting that the company's future product pipeline (which includes the rumored "iPad Pro") and its efforts in the enterprise market will ultimately cause iPad sales to grow again. "I believe the iPad is an extremely good business over the long-term," he said. "When precisely it begins to grow again I wouldn't want to predict, but I strongly believe that it will."

Tim Cook's third annual CharityBuzz auction ended this afternoon, earning $200,000 for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The auction, which had more than 20 bids, includes a one hour lunch date with Tim Cook at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino and two VIP passes to an Apple keynote event to watch Apple unveil new products.

Though the auction earned an impressive $200,000 for the RFK Center, it brought in less money than previous auctions held in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, the inaugural CharityBuzz auction for a coffee date with Cook brought in an impressive $610,000, and 2014's lunch auction ended at $330,001.

Today's auction winner will be able to bring one additional person to have lunch with Cook, with the cost of lunch being included in the auction price. Transportation and accommodations to Cupertino are not included, however, and the exact date of the lunch will be scheduled at a mutually agreed upon time.

This year's event, like last year's, included two VIP tickets to an upcoming Apple keynote event -- WWDC is on the horizon, so the auction winner may be invited to attend the WWDC keynote. WWDC promises to be quite exciting this year, as rumors have suggested a whole slew of products could see an unveiling, including a new streaming music service, a new streaming television service, and a new Apple TV. We'll also see iOS 9 and OS X 10.11.

Proceeds from today's auction benefit the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, a charity that Tim Cook has now supported for three years running. The RFK Center aims to achieve "a just and peaceful world by partnering with human rights leaders, teaching social justice, and advancing corporate responsibility."

Ron Johnson, who served as Senior Vice President of Retail Operations at Apple between 2000 and 2011, today unveiled his new online retail startup called Enjoy Technology that will begin selling high-end consumer electronics, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, speakers and drones. The Menlo Park, California company will sell about 60 products starting today.

Enjoy aims to differentiate itself from Amazon and other competitors by providing free personal in-home setup service for products, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. When you purchase a product, Enjoy will send a representative to your home to help set it up, with visits lasting approximately one hour. AT&T, GoPro, Microsoft, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard are among the early partners with the service.

Johnson was interviewed by CNBC today to discuss the Enjoy launch and a handful of other topics, including Apple and the company's current retail chief Angela Ahrendts, the future of physical retail and more. In particular, he offered praise for Ahrendts, who has led Apple's retail operations since May 2014, and noted that he owns an Apple Watch and thinks it's an "incredible product." He also said to "stay tuned" about the availability of Apple products through Enjoy in the future.

Kayla Tausche: It was bizarre to think about an Apple product launch without those lines around the corner. Stretching for miles and miles. I'm just wondering if you look at this new era for Apple products and Apple retail, and you think that there is a lot of change and that it's sort of doing away with the way you used to do product launches?

Johnson: I don't think that's true. I'm Angela's biggest fan. I knew her before she came to Apple. I had the chance to meet her in London. The teams love her at Apple. They love her leadership. She made it clear that the Apple launch was being launched in this way and future products might go back to something that Apple has done before. I wouldn't overread the launch as a change in direction. It's the right thing for this intensely personal products.

Courtney Reagan: You have 60 products on GoEnjoy.com right now from 11 companies. But Apple isn't one of them. Why not?

Johnson: I say stay tuned. We’re not talking about it but I didn't want, our customer would love Apple products. You know there's no doubt about it. And we serve the iPhone through AT&T. You can go to AT&T's website and buy an iPhone and use enjoy. We'll be embedded in on AT&T's website on May 19th. We do help with all the Apple products. Stay tuned when they might be on our personal commerce site.

Enjoy launched in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday.

Apple today was honored as a recipient of a Helen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind for the company's accessibility efforts, particularly VoiceOver's ability to give vision-impaired users access to iOS devices. With the advent of the Apple Watch, many of those accessibility features are now also migrating over to the wrist.

Coincidentally, MacRumors' sister site TouchArcade today took a look at the possibilities for accessibility features in iOS gaming. The report highlights a close-knit community that is gaining the ability to use and interact with experiences on iOS thanks to a few motivated developers taking the time to implement Apple's extensive accessibility options in their own games.

The genesis of the article came from a single comment posted on an RPG-related piece which included the game King of Dragon Pass [Direct Link]. The user, Zack Kline, caught TouchArcade's attention by mentioning the little talked-about feature of the iOS game implementing a successful and satisfying amount of options to become playable for blind players.

This time around, one comment from a reader named Zack Kline caught my attention. It reads, "One aspect which often gets overlooked is that it's one of the few big iOS games which has really gone out of its way to become playable by the blind. There's a sizable population of iOS users, myself included, who are really happy that Apple has done so much work on making their platform accessible, but don't have a lot of interesting games to enjoy. Frankly, (King Of Dragon Pass) is the best, and certainly the deepest. I only wish we had more choices."

The game, originally a PC title, was unable to include accessibility features in the PC version due to time constraints, but designer David Dunham felt adding VoiceOver options to the iOS port simply "seemed like the right thing to do." VoiceOver's simple gesture controls for reading text aloud make King of Dragon Pass, largely a text adventure and interactive story-based game, readily playable for blind users interested in the game.

Many apps and games lack such support, however, with the shortcoming largely stemming from a need to set priorities in the development process of every game. Given the often tight time constraints for development work, accessibility features frequently rank low on that priority list given the relatively small base of people who would benefit from it. Speaking with TouchArcade, however, Dunham points to a largely painless process of including VoiceOver support for his game, and the larger satisfaction of King of Dragon Pass being playable to even more fans as a result.

Since King Of Dragon Pass was mostly a text-based game, Dunham used UIKit to make it rather than a sprite-based engine. That meant that almost everything worked with VoiceOver to some extent without any extra work done. From there, it was just a matter of going through every screen and making sure things worked as they should, particularly with regards to pictures. The only part that required extensive work was the game's map, which was originally designed as being coordinate-based. The new VoiceOver map is actually composed of discrete tappable areas, according to Dunham, something that came about as a result of enthusiastic testers and would-be players.

According to Dunham, in the last month or so about 7 percent of players booting up his game have done so in VoiceOver mode. Although that may seem low, Dunham says it was well worth the investment and time consumption of supporting the features in the game. Amir Rajan is the developer of another accessibility-supported iOS game, A Dark Room [Direct Link], and agrees with Dunham. "It's worth it to get a thank you email from a father with a blind daughter that can enjoy a popular game that her seeing friends play too," said Rajan.

Of course, the games supporting these features right now are a bit simpler, less intense experiences. The developers supporting these features should be celebrated, but, as members of Apple-focused accessibility site AppleVis point out, the hope for the future is more games built with these features in mind from the get-go.

The full article on TouchArcade is well worth a read, and goes into even more detail regarding specific testimonies from blind gamers, developer reactions, and the short list for the best accessible iOS gaming experiences out now.