MacRumors

Dr. Dre, aka Andre Young, who will join Apple following the finalization of its acquisition of Beats Electronics, has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal in a piece that gives a look at his work philosophy, his character, and the role he will play at Apple.

An accomplished rapper, the co-founder of Death Row Records, and co-founder of Beats Electronics, Dre is expected to bring not only his music expertise to Apple, but also the "cool" factor that's made Beats hardware so popular with the younger generation.

The music mogul is said to have a "perfectionist impulse," a penchant for being short with words, and a disregard for artificial deadlines, which could cause friction at Apple. "I'm not feeling that," he'll say when he doesn't like an idea presented to him. The Wall Street Journal compares his attitude to that of Steve Jobs.

Dr. Dre's perfectionist impulse, coupled with his disregard for artificial deadlines, have meant that "he doesn't put out a lot of material," despite being a workaholic, said Paul Rosenberg, a lawyer and manager of one of Dr. Dre's protégés, rapper Eminem.

That could portend friction at his new employer, Apple, which agreed to buy Beats for $3 billion last month. But like Dr. Dre, Apple has also boasted about not doing market research. The company's late founder, Steve Jobs, made no secret of his belief that consumers don't really know what they want until someone else shows it to them. Colleagues predict that at Apple Dr. Dre could also cede some decision-making power and become more accommodating.

Dre, who is joining the company along with Jimmy Iovine, will not have a specific title at Apple. As noted by Iovine, the duo will be known as just "Jimmy and Dre" on campus, but according to Tim Cook, Dre will work with both the hardware and music divisions, being supervised by Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue.

Apple has acquired Spotsetter, a social search engine designed to offer personalized recommendations on places to visit, reports TechCrunch. The Spotsetter app, which has now been removed from the App Store, offered personal recommendations for "great venues to eat, play, drink, and shop" via existing social networks.

The app integrated with social networks like Facebook to aggregate data on locations recommended by friends, and it included results personalized for an individual's "taste and trust."

Using the app, you could look up any place, category or keyword, then be presented with personalized results, as well as see what your friends had said about the places around you. The app would also highlight which of your friends were experts in a given area, like coffee or shopping or sushi, for example -- and you could tag your friends as experts in order to influence the recommendations. In addition, you could use Spotsetter to discover new places, by browsing the map to see where your friends have been and what they've shared.

The end result was a social search engine built on top of a mapping interface.

Spotsetter announced plans to shut down its app six days ago, but did not give a reason for the removal. Its co-founders, Stephen Tse and Johnny Lee are now listed as Apple employees on LinkedIn, however.

With fondest emotions, I'm announcing that we are closing down Spotsetter app. We still have big dreams for personalized search for places and look forward to seeing great progress in this area. Thank you everyone for your support over the past years!

According to TechCrunch, Apple may be planning to use Spotsetter's technology, which layered social data on a maps interface, to bolster its Maps app with location recommendations. The deal, for an unspecified amount, was said to focus mainly on the technology and the talent of Spotsetter's founders.

Extensibility, one of the iOS 8/Yosemite features for developers announced by Apple during the Worldwide Developers Conference, promises to bring a range of new functionality to the app ecosystem.

The feature is designed to allow third-party apps to share services with other apps, create widgets for the Notification Center, and develop custom system-wide keyboards, letting apps and services work together and interface with iOS and OS X as they never have before.

Federico Viticci of MacStories has taken an in-depth look at Apple's Extensibility initiative, explaining the various types of app extensions available to developers and how those extensions will work on both iOS and OS X. There are seven general ways that extensions can be used, as detailed by Viticci:

- Today (iOS and OS X): widgets for the Today view of Notification Center
- Share (iOS and OS X): post content to web services or share content with others
- Actions (iOS and OS X): app extensions to view or manipulate inside another app
- Photo Editing (iOS): edit a photo or video in Apple's Photos app with extensions from a third-party apps
- Finder Sync (OS X): remote file storage in the Finder with support for Finder content annotation
- Storage Provider (iOS): an interface between files inside an app and other apps on a user's device
- Custom Keyboard (iOS): system-wide alternative keyboards

One of the most intriguing aspects of Extensibility, app widgets in the Today view of the Notification Center, was demoed on stage during the keynote. A SportsCenter widget displayed sports scores and an eBay widget offered a way to keep an eye on auctions. Philips later demoed how a Hue widget might allow users to control lights directly from the Notification Center. Apple is said to be encouraging developers to keep widgets simple, with iOS 8 preventing system-intensive widgets with complex features.

Action-based app extensions will also bring major changes to iOS, allowing apps to extend their functionality to other apps. On stage, this was shown off in Safari on Yosemite, using the Bing app to translate Japanese text, and through a Pinterest tool that allowed it to capture an image from Safari to save to the Pinterest app.

Custom keyboards, one of the major surprises at WWDC, also fall under the extensions category. Apple has, in the past, been reluctant to allow third-party keyboards due to security concerns but there are a number of precautions in place. Custom keyboards are unable to type in secure text input fields, like those used for passwords, and by default, the keyboards will not have access to keystrokes.

According to Viticci, the developers he's spoken have reacted with excitement about all of the possibilities offered by Extensibility, and believe that "a new class of apps will be possible thanks to extensions."

Today, it's difficult to quantify the impact that extensions will have on the iOS app ecosystem, but I think it's safe to say that, considering developers' reactions to Apple's announcement, we're going to see plenty of cool new stuff this Fall.

iOS users interested in more information on Apple's Extensibility initiative, how app extensions work, and how they might be used by developers should check out Viticci's full extensions piece on MacStories.

Apple is indeed aiming for an October release date for the iWatch as first reported by Nikkei earlier today, according to Re/code. Citing sources familiar with Apple's plans, the site says Apple is tentatively hoping to schedule a special iWatch event to show off the device in October.

People familiar with Apple's plans tell Code/red the company hopes to schedule a special event that month to show off the device, which is designed to make good use of the HealthKit health and fitness information-gathering app it recently showed off at WWDC. Could things change between now and fall? That's certainly possible. But right now October is the target date.

Multiple rumors have previously suggested a fall 2014 release date for the device, but this is the first time a more tangible, specific date has materialized. While few details are known about Apple's iWatch, the Nikkei report from earlier today suggested the device will incorporate a curved OLED touchscreen.

Last week, iTunes chief Eddy Cue boasted that Apple had the "best product pipeline" he'd seen in his 25 years at Apple, which along with the iWatch, may include larger iPhones, iPads with Touch ID, an updated Apple TV, and a redesigned 12-inch MacBook Air.

While it was revealed yesterday that Apple executives Tim Cook and Eddy Cue had visited the company's new operations campus in Austin, Texas, Cook has just tweeted a photo of a second visit he made to Apple's nearby Mac Pro manufacturing facility.

Flextronics' Mac Pro facility is roughly a mile from Apple's new Austin campus, which is actually an expansion of the company's long-standing operations campus in the city. The campus expansion is major effort that will see Apple investing $300 million to add at least 3,600 workers at the site by 2021. The overall project will encompass roughly one million square feet of space, with the just-opened first phase including two out of a planned six buildings on the site.

Following the visit to Apple's facilities in Austin yesterday, Cue was also spotted in the stands at last night's Game 1 of the NBA Finals just down the road in San Antonio.

Update 9:27 AM: Cook has also tweeted a photo of his (and Cue's) visit with the AppleCare team at the operations campus in Austin.

China has become a major focus for Apple in recent years, with the company seeing tremendous opportunities for growth in the region and working to build out China-specific software features to help attract users. These features occasionally also receive brief stage time at Apple's media events, as with iOS 8 at this week's Worldwide Developers Conference, highlighting the country's importance in Apple's eyes.

Since 2011, Apple has steadily beefed up its developer-relations team in China so new apps can be approved in the country, and it has opened a new office in downtown Beijing where the China App Store is operated. Apple has also smoothed the process for how customers buy apps in China, and built new Chinese-language-specific software to benefit developers.

The report highlights Apple's fifth-place market position for smartphones in China as motivation for Apple's initiative. Apple's ecosystem in China has also been challenged by the fact that many apps designed for Westerners don't translate well to the Chinese audience, with many developers not even making their apps available in the country. As a result, Apple's Chinese App Store includes just 150,000 applications, far fewer than the over one million apps available in the U.S. store.

“On a scale of one to 10 in terms of importance in China, it ranks at about 11,” Ramon Llamas, an analyst for IDC who tracks the mobile industry, said of Apple’s app development. “Nobody buys a smartphone just for it to be a phone -- the value of your device goes up with the more applications that you download on to it.”

Apple's efforts to attract more Chinese developers do appear to be paying off, with the country now ranking number two behind the United States in App Store download volume and the number of registered developers in China doubling over the past year. Still, it's clear there is much more potential left in the Chinese market for Apple, and the company is working hard to capture developers and users alike to boost its standing.

Apple's highly rumored "iWatch" smartwatch is expected to launch in October and will run a version of iOS 8, according to a new report from Japanese business newspaper Nikkei.

Apple appears confident of the new product. According to a parts manufacturer, it plans monthly commercial output of about 3-5 million units, which exceeds the total global sales of watch-like devices last year.

The news contrasts a report from Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White yesterday, which stated that iWatch production would begin gearing up this month ahead of a September launch alongside the iPhone 6.

While not much is known about the iWatch's physical features, rumors have suggested the device will come in two separate sizes of 1.3 inches and 1.5-1.7 inches. It is also likely that the iWatch's biometric sensors will work with Apple's new Health app in iOS 8 in order to measure and aggregate health metrics.

HealthKit supports some medical Bluetooth accessories natively, allowing accessory makers to skip developing apps for iOS and focus on their hardware, according to 9to5Mac.

The accessories that will be built-in and supported natively by HealthKit include heart rate and blood pressure monitors, glucose sensors, and health thermometers. Apple is using official standard specs for Bluetooth LE devices from http://Bluetooth.org, which is what allows iOS 8 to automatically establish a connection with the devices listed above without the manufacturers worrying about anything on the software side.

HealthKit can automatically detect these Bluetooth medical devices and gather data from them, syncing them to the new Health app without the user having to do anything in a third-party app, making it easy for users to find health information in a single place. Additionally, device makers won't have to spend resources and time making an app rather than focus on their hardware.

HealthKit and the Health app are available to developers in the iOS 8 now. All three will launch in the fall for the general public.

Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Apple's brand new campus in Austin, Texas today at its opening celebration, according to various Apple employees. Cook recapped the announcements Apple made at WWDC earlier this week and teased that "exciting" new products are on the way, reports 9to5Mac.

Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue was also in attendance, commenting about Beats Music and Beats Electronics. Cook also reportedly talked about new hires, mentioning how new retail head Angela Ahrendts was the best person for the job.

Many Apple employees took to Twitter and Instagram to share Cook's visit to the campus, which is similar in style to the current Cupertino headquarters and complete with advanced facilities for Apple support, engineering and operations. Only part of the first phase of construction has been completed, with the complete first phase expected to finish by the end of 2015 and the entire project to be completed by 2021.

Engineers working on iTunes Radio prefer to listen to Spotify and Pandora because they were better platforms, according to a new report from Buzzfeed. It claims that not only did those employees prefer Apple's competitors over its own radio service, but it says middle management was willfully ignorant about how Spotify worked, thinking it was just another streaming service.

It's "why they thought iTunes Radio would be a Spotify killer," said one employee. The piece alleges that Apple has been overly focused on driving downloads on iTunes and slow to adapt to a shift in user listening preferences towards subscription-based services.

Past and current employees in the company with direct knowledge of iTunes and Apple's services Ping and iTunes Radio told BuzzFeed that Apple engineers involved with those products often preferred to use Spotify and Pandora. "Everyone's excuse was it's because we work on iTunes, running and closing the app after every code change," one source said. "But it's really because Spotify has all the free music with a real social platform." In their personal time, sources said, employees used Spotify and Pandora.

Apple employees confirmed that management actively ignored iTunes' streaming competitors, with some managers refusing to open or use Spotify. One source said that as recently "as last year," some members of management didn't even know that Spotify was an on-demand streaming service, assuming it was just a radio service.

The disconnect between employees, along with a belief that Spotify and Pandora weren't real threats to iTunes, may have been a significant contributing factor to Apple's slowness to embrace streaming music. A reluctance to cut into its iTunes sales was also likely a factor, as it was the platform that revolutionized the music industry back in 2003.

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple's main goal with iTunes Radio was boosting both device sales and sales of iTunes music, which largely ignored the real problem -- the growing popularity of on-demand streaming music and the products being offered by competitors. iTunes Radio was viewed as a "baby step" into the streaming music industry when what Apple really needed was a leap.

Apple had a similar issue back in 2010 when it launched Ping. Designed as a social networking and music recommendation service, Ping was created to push users to purchase songs rather than as a true effort towards improving recommendations, which ultimately led to its failure in 2012. "The biggest reason why Ping failed was because Apple was not interested in making a network -- they were interested in making a purchase pusher," said one of Buzzfeed's sources.

With the purchase of Beats, it appears that Apple is finally ready to make a significant leap into the streaming music industry, though a cautious one. The company reportedly plans to keep Beats as a standalone brand rather than integrating it directly into iTunes, which gives it a safety net should the service ultimately fail.

Along with the streaming music service itself, Apple is also gaining fresh blood for its music endeavors. Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, both of whom are set to join Apple as employees, both have extensive experience in the music industry and an invaluable rapport with a younger generation of listeners.

PayPal is already working to incorporate the fingerprint scanning capabilities of the iPhone 5s into its mobile apps, likely planning to use the technology to authenticate users and confirm payments through the use of a fingerprint rather than a password.

Apple first announced a Touch ID API for developers on Monday, which will allow the feature to be integrated into third-party apps for the first time. According to a PayPal source that spoke to Business Insider, PayPal developers attended a developer session on Touch ID at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday to learn about the new API.

"It seems to be a fairly easy API to use, but we're still kicking the tires," the PayPal source tells us.

Anuj Nyar, PayPal's senior director of global initiatives, confirmed in an email that company developers had attended the session.

At the current point in time, Apple's Touch ID feature is limited to unlocking the iPhone and making purchases for apps and music within the iTunes Store. Apple has previously faced significant scrutiny over privacy concerns with Touch ID, which is likely why it has taken nearly a year for the company to allow developers access to the feature.

Since the release of the iPhone 5s, Apple has worked to overcome security concerns by releasing extensive documentation on Touch ID, which works through a "Secure Enclave" within the iPhone's A7 chip, using a secure boot process and other security measures to prevent both Apple and any other third parties from accessing Touch ID data.

Touch ID for developers works in conjunction with Keychain, unlocking Keychain items through a simple yes/no verification process that identifies successful fingerprint matches. During Monday's keynote, Apple software chief Craig Federighi assured iPhone users that fingerprint data remains protected and inaccessible to developers.

PayPal's main app currently allows users to send and request money and to make payments via the service in retail stores, restaurants, and more. Several features require a password to login or confirm payments, steps that may be simplified with Touch ID.

Apple may have plans to build Touch ID into a complete payment service in the future, as the company is said to be working on a mobile payments solution. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, mobile payments were "one of the thoughts behind Touch ID." Apple has also reportedly been in talks with PayPal about a possible payments partnership, so it is no surprise that PayPal is eager to be at the forefront of Touch ID app integration.

Production of components for Apple's iWatch is reportedly starting later this month, leading to speculation by Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White that the device will see a launch as soon as September alongside the iPhone 6.

With the theme around wearable technology at Computex this year, our research has uncovered more data points as it relates to Apple’s “iWatch.” Our meeting with a tech supply chain company highlighted that initial production of certain “iWatch” components is scheduled to begin later this month and there are plans for a sharp acceleration into fall.

Given the trajectory of this ramp and our experience analyzing other product ramps at Apple, we expect the "iWatch" to be unveiled with the iPhone 6 in September. Since our research suggests the first iteration of the "iWatch" is more of a companion device, and thus requires a connection to an iPhone, we believe unveiling the two new devices at the same time makes sense.

White believes the iWatch will be available at several pricing increments much like the iPhone and the iPad, indicating that prices could start at $199 to $229 to compete with other smart watches currently on the market.

Little physical information has surfaced on the iWatch thus far, but supply chain rumors have suggested the device will come in two separate sizes (1.3 inches and 1.5-1.7 inches) to accommodate different sized wrists. It is also said to include a multitude of biometric sensors to measure various health metrics and it is also expected to interface with the new Health app in iOS 8.

White also believes that the 5.5-inch iPhone, which was rumored to be delayed due to production issues, could launch alongside the 4.7-inch iPhone and the iWatch. He released a report detailing his reasons yesterday and today confirms that research is "uncovering more evidence that the 5.5- inch iPhone 6 will launch this fall."

Having previously predicted seemingly outlandish products such as the "iRing" able to control an Apple television set, Brian White does not have a particularly solid track record when it comes to predicting Apple's plans, but with multiple rumors converging on a fall release date for both the iWatch and the two versions of the iPhone, it is possible we will see all three products before the end of the year.