MacRumors

In an Apple Newsroom editorial today, Apple Music radio host Zane Lowe revealed that Apple is building tools directly into Logic Pro that will allow musicians to create and mix their songs in Spatial Audio for Apple Music.

"Apple is building immersive music-authoring tools directly into Logic Pro later this year," wrote Lowe. "So any musician will be able to create and mix their songs in Spatial Audio for Apple Music — whether they're in the studio, at home, or wherever."

Spatial Audio, based on Dolby Atmos, is an immersive surround sound audio format that enables musicians to mix music so it sounds like the instruments are all around you in space. Thousands of Apple Music songs are available in Spatial Audio starting today, such as Lady Gaga's "Rain on Me" and Kanye West's "Black Skinhead."

Logic Pro is Apple's professional music production software for the Mac, and is priced at $199.99 on the Mac App Store, with a free 90-day trial available.

While leaker Jon Prosser claimed that a new MacBook Pro was coming at WWDC, Apple's keynote did not include any new hardware announcements. Instead, it is looking increasingly likely that redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models powered by a faster iteration of the M1 chip will be released in the third or fourth quarter of the year.

A paywalled preview of a DigiTimes report today claims that Apple suppliers will begin shipments for new MacBook Pro models in the third quarter, which starts in July and runs through September. It's unclear if these shipments are referring to new MacBook Pro models as a whole or individual components for the notebooks.

"Apple is expected to roll out two new MacBook Pro models later in 2021, with shipments slated to kick off in the third quarter, according to industry sources," the paywalled blurb reads. The full report should be published by tomorrow.

It's worth noting that while there were hopes that Apple would announce new MacBook Pro models at WWDC, supply chain reports from outlets like Nikkei Asia and DigiTimes have repeatedly suggested that mass production of new MacBook Pro models would not begin until at least the third quarter of the year. This timeframe should provide Apple with an opportunity to announce the new MacBook Pro models before the end of the year.

The new MacBook Pro models are each expected to feature a brighter mini-LED display, an improved iteration of the M1 chip, and a new design with a flatter top and bottom. The notebooks are also expected to regain some ports that Apple removed from the MacBook Pro in 2016, including an HDMI port, SD card slot, and a magnetic charging port. Rumors also suggest the Touch Bar will be retired in favor of physical Fn keys.

On iOS 14, Smart Stacks for widgets allow users to stack different widgets on top of each other and then allow iOS to display the most relevant widget depending on the time of day, location, and more. On iOS 15, Apple is taking Smart Stacks even further with Widget Suggestions, which automatically add and remove widgets in a Smart Stack depending on context.

For example, if a user has an existing Smart Stack which includes the Weather and Reminders widget, iOS 15 may add a Calendar widget to the stack if the user has an upcoming meeting. Then, after the meeting, iOS 15 will remove the widget from the Smart Stack, reverting it to the stack that the user had set up with Weather and Reminders. Apple says it hopes this new feature, which can be disabled on a per Smart Stack basis, will allow users to discover new and helpful widgets.

iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 introduces new widgets for Find My, Game Center, App Store Today, Sleep, Mail, and more. Developers interested in learning more about widget suggestions and how they can be implemented into their app can check out this WWDC session.

Apple Music's new Spatial Audio feature started rolling out on Monday evening and officially launches today, and to mark the occasion, Apple's services chief Eddy Cue and Apple Music radio host Zane Lowe shared some thoughts.

Spatial Audio, based on Dolby Atmos, is an immersive three-dimensional audio format that enables musicians to mix music so it sounds like the instruments are all around you in space. Thousands of Apple Music songs are available in Spatial Audio at launch, such as Lady Gaga's "Rain on Me" and Kanye West's "Black Skinhead."

I've been waiting for something in music that was a real game-changer. The quality of audio has not been able to really rise because there hasn't been anything out there that when you listen to it, it truly is differentiated to everybody. It doesn't matter whether you're eight years old or 80 years old, everyone can tell the difference and everyone knows this one sounds better than the other one.

And the analogy to that is obviously the first time you ever saw HD on television: you knew which one was better because it was obvious. And we've been missing that in audio for a long time. There really hasn’t been anything that's been substantial. We'll talk about lossless and other things, but ultimately, there's not enough difference.
But when you listen for the first time and you see what's possible with Dolby Atmos with music, it's a true game-changer. And so, when we listened to it for the first time, we realized this is a big, big deal. It makes you feel like you're onstage, standing right next to the singer, it makes you feel like you might be to the left of the drummer, to the right of the guitarist. It creates this experience that, almost in some ways, you've never really had, unless you're lucky enough to be really close to somebody playing music.

Cue talked up Spatial Audio as a bigger deal than lossless audio, another new Apple Music feature that can be enabled starting today. Lossless audio refers to audio recordings that have been compressed without any reduction in the overall quality of the audio, which can result in an improved listening experience, although the difference between compressed audio and lossless audio is not always obvious:

Because the reality of lossless is: if you take a 100 people and you take a stereo song in lossless and you take a song that's been in Apple Music that's compressed, I don't know if it’s 99 or 98 can't tell the difference.

For the difference of lossless, our ears aren't that good. Yeah, there are a set of people who have these incredible ears, and that's one piece of it. There's the other piece of it, which is do you have the level of equipment that can really tell the difference? It requires very, very high-quality stereo equipment. What you find is, for somebody who's a true, for example classical connoisseur, they may be able to tell the difference in lossless. I can't tell personally -- I do the blind tests all the time with the team -- I can't tell.

Apple Music radio host Zane Lowe also spoke about Spatial Audio in an Apple Newsroom editorial, expressing that the feature is all about the emotion and feeling of music:

I'm fascinated to know how I might be emotionally moved by my favorite songs in a different way with Spatial Audio. Because it's all going through my ears and triggering something, right? That's what dawned on me when I was listening to these songs in Spatial: I was listening to these songs that I knew really well, but I was feeling something different. So, it's not even just about the way it's going to end up sounding, it's very much how songs are going to feel.

Spatial Audio on Apple Music will get even more immersive in iOS 15 with the addition of dynamic head tracking when wearing AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.

With the introduction of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Safari extensions that previously only worked on the Mac can also run on the iPhone and iPad. While the feature won't be widely available until the fall when the new updates roll out to the public, 1Password, a popular password management app, has already teased a functional Safari extension on iPadOS 15.

Shared by 1Password developer Andrew Beyer on Twitter, the in-development 1Password iPadOS 15 extension allows users to access their saved passwords quickly, create new passwords, edit existing accounts, and more.

The 1Password extension will also work on the ‌iPhone‌ running iOS 15. Similar to on macOS, Safari extensions on iOS and iPadOS 15 are easily accessible through the main toolbar. On iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey, Safari received noteworthy updates, including major redesigns, enhanced security, and on iOS and iPadOS, the ability to pull down on a tab to refresh.

On iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey, Safari will automatically upgrade web connections for sites to the HTTPS protocol, in the case they're loaded in HTTP.

The new feature largely went unnoticed during the WWDC keynote, but it is highlighted on the macOS Monterey and iOS/iPadOS 15 feature pages. Apple says that Safari now "automatically upgrades sites known to support HTTPS from insecure HTTP."

Safari on iOS 15, macOS Monterey, and iPadOS 15 all received major redesigns, including new Tab groups, synchronizable start pages, web extensions for iOS and iPadOS, and more. Learn more about iOS 15 and macOS Monterey in our dedicated roundups.

Adobe today announced the release of major updates across its Creative Cloud software suite. Most notably, its Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom Classic apps now run natively on Macs with the M1 chip, resulting in faster performance.

Creative Cloud apps are on average over 80% faster on an M1 Mac compared to an identically configured Intel-based Mac, according to Adobe.

Additional notable new features and workflow improvements in today's releases, per Adobe:

• Lightroom Ecosystem: New Premium Presets, collaborative editing capabilities, Super Resolution in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic (previously available in Adobe Camera Raw), and custom crop aspect ratios in Lightroom
• Powerful new retouching features in Photoshop Express, including skin smoothing, content aware healing, face aware liquify and caricature
• Custom brushes in Photoshop on iPad
• Rotate View in Illustrator on desktop
• New styling tools in Adobe XD: Inner Shadow, Outline Stroke, and Angular Gradient

Premiere Pro with native support for the M1 chip remains in beta, with a public release coming soon, according to Adobe.

Following WWDC, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi said that Apple will continue to protect its customers amid "innovation" in the world of privacy exploitation and that Apple believes it "can largely stay ahead" of the curve to protect users.

In an exclusive interview with Fast Company, Federighi talked about new announcements that Apple made during WWDC on Monday, including Private Relay for iCloud+. Many are attributing the feature to a VPN, but Federighi notes that VPNs require users to trust the VPN provider with their data, whereas Private Relay doesn't include the need for a third party to encrypt and redirect the internet traffic.

Why did Apple develop this technology rather than build a more conventional VPN into its operating systems? "Core to the nature of the internet is that the IP address is traditionally exposed between the requester and the host – and that has some privacy knock on effects that aren't always understandable to users and certainly aren't always desirable to users. And so that's a problem we wanted to solve," says Federighi. He notes an unprotected IP has led to vectors for abuse by bad actors. "VPNs are a technology that has sought to provide some of those protections, but they do involve putting a lot of trust in a single centralized entity: the VPN provider. And that's a lot of responsibility for that intermediary, and involves the user making a really difficult trust decision about exposing all of that information to a single entity."

Federighi further said that Apple wanted to remove the need for users to trust it, or another company, allowing them to enjoy the end-user experience without the privacy trade-off.

"We hope users believe in Apple as a trustworthy intermediary, but we didn't even want you to have to trust us [because] we don't have this ability to simultaneously source your IP and the destination where you're going to–and that's unlike VPNs. And so we wanted to provide many of the benefits that people are seeking when in the past they've decided to use a VPN, but not force that difficult and conceivably perilous privacy trade-off in terms of trusting it a single intermediary."

Speaking generally about Apple’s privacy values, and some resistance to them from companies like Facebook, Federighi said that Apple believes it can continue to lead the industry, and especially as the incentives for finding privacy "exploitations" are high.

"I think the analogy with security is apt," Federighi says of the feline-and-rodent comparison. "The incentives for 'innovation' in the exploitation world are high, and so there is a lot of advancement in the art of tracking; a lot of advancement in the arts of security exploits. And so, in both areas, we think there's going to continue to be a cat and mouse game. We think we bring a lot of tools to that fight, and we can largely stay ahead of it and protect our customers. But it’s something we recognize as a battle we will be fighting for years to come."

The full interview which includes Federighi talking about how governments and the industry should treat privacy can be read on Fast Comapny.

AMD today announced new Radeon Pro W6000 series graphics cards suitable for workstations like the existing Intel-based Mac Pro.

Built on 7nm-based AMD RDNA 2 architecture, the new higher-end Radeon Pro W6800 graphics card delivers up to 79% faster graphics performance than the previous-generation Radeon Pro W5700, although this is based on a test system powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor rather than an Intel processor. The W6800 also features 32GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory with ECC support, and 128MB of AMD Infinity Cache.

AMD says the W6800 graphics card is available now from leading retailers for a suggested price of $2,249. For comparison, the W5700X graphics card is a $600 built-to-order upgrade option for the Mac Pro, which starts at $5,999 itself.

There's also a new mid-range W6600 graphics card that features 8GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory with ECC support, and 32MB of AMD Infinity Cache. AMD expects the W6600 to be available in the third quarter of 2021 for a suggested price of $649.

Last, there's a new Radeon Pro W6600M graphics option for workstation-class notebooks.

Apple on Monday revealed iOS 15 with redesigned notifications, major changes to FaceTime, and new tools that help users reduce distractions. Amongst the comprehensive set of tools for reducing distractions is the ability to disable app badge notifications for all apps on the Home Screen, resulting in a much cleaner ‌Home Screen‌ look.

App badge notifications can be disabled when users are in Do Not Disturb or "Focus" mode. Users running the iOS 15 beta can go to Settings -> Focus, and choose either Do Not Disturb or any of the other Focus modes listed. Then under Customization, tap Hide Notification Badges.

Now, when that Focus or Do Not Disturb mode is enabled, all apps will no longer show a notification badge on the ‌Home Screen‌. Users can, of course, disable notification badges on a per-app basis; however, this is a global option that impacts all apps on the ‌Home Screen‌.

Another customization feature is the ability to rearrange ‌Home Screen‌ pages. With iOS 14, Apple introduced the ability for users to disable individual ‌Home Screen‌ pages thanks to the introduction of App Library, but many users were disappointed to find that ‌Home Screen‌ pages cannot be rearranged. On iOS 15, Apple allows users to tap and hold on individual ‌Home Screen‌ pages and rearrange them. In addition, Apple also now allows users to delete a page completely rather than disable it.

Alongside iOS 15, Apple also introduced iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, watchOS 8, and tvOS 15. Catch up on all the WWDC announcements here.

Apple is in "early-stage talks" with two Chinese companies about the supply of batteries for a future Apple Car, according to a new Reuters report.

Apple is in early-stage talks with China's CATL and BYD about the supply of batteries for its planned electric vehicle, four people with knowledge of the matter said.

The discussions are subject to change and it is not clear if agreements with either CATL or BYD will be reached, said the people who declined to be named as the discussions are private.

One of Apple's conditions for battery suppliers is said to be the building of manufacturing facilities in the United States.

However, CATL, which is the world's biggest automotive battery maker and supplies several major car makers including Tesla, is reportedly "reluctant" to build a U.S. factory because of the ongoing political tensions between Beijing and Washington, in addition to the costs that would be involved.

According to Reuters' sources, Apple is in favor of using lithium iron phosphate batteries that are cheaper to produce because they use iron instead of nickel and cobalt, which are more expensive. However, it's not clear if discussions with CATL and BYD involved any of Apple's own technology or designs.

The last few months has seen a flurry of reports, some conflicting, about potential specifics on an ‌Apple Car‌.

Apple appears to be intensely researching all aspects of car engineering and manufacturing, but there are questions around what form Apple's vehicle project may take, with some reports suggesting Apple may be looking to leverage its software and chip design expertise to create a kind of next-generation vehicle platform for other manufacturers to use.

Bloomberg in January reported that Apple self-driving vehicle is still in early development and is still at least five years away, while reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that the vehicle is unlikely to launch until 2025 at the earliest.

Apple has also reportedly lost "several" top managers from its internal Apple Car project, codenamed "Project Titan," causing a potential setback to the launch of a self-driving car.

Vast swathes of the web are currently offline, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC News, Bloomberg, and Financial Times sites.

The outage is down to a glitch in content delivery network provider Fastly's servers. Fastly has confirmed it's investigating an outage on its status website. Having nothing to do with Fastly, none of Apple's services are currently impacted. MacRumors.com and the MacRumors forums continue to operate as normal.

Update: After identifying the issue, Fastly says it has implemented a fix that seems to be allowing most affected websites to recover from the outage.

At its WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple announced that iCloud is getting a premium subscription tier called "‌iCloud‌+," which includes tentpole privacy features like Private Relay and Hide My Email. Another feature included in ‌iCloud‌+ that wasn't discussed in the keynote is the ability to create a custom email domain name.

From Apple's iOS 15 features preview page, under the ‌iCloud‌+ section:

Custom email domain
Personalize your iCloud Mail address with a custom domain name, and invite family members to use the same domain with their iCloud Mail accounts.

In essence, what this means is that when ‌iCloud‌+ goes live, Apple will allow users to change their ‌iCloud‌ Mail address completely. For instance, the email address jonnyappleseed@icloud.com could be changed to jonny@appleseed.com, forgoing the icloud domain reference entirely for a more personalized or businesslike look.

Additionally, Apple will allow users to invite family members to use the same domain name with their own ‌iCloud‌ Mail accounts, although it's not currently clear if family members will need to be part of Family Sharing for this to work.

For users of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other email providers, this sort of email address personalization has been available for a long time, so Apple could eventually prise some customers away from the competition with this move. It remains to be seen whether custom email domains for ‌iCloud‌ Mail will have certain limitations that rivals don't set, though.

Apple alongside the second-generation Apple TV 4K debuted a redesigned version of the Siri Remote, which is now available to customers with new ‌‌Apple TV‌‌ orders and as a $60 standalone replacement for the original ‌‌Siri‌‌ Remote. In lockstep with the hardware change, iOS 15 also includes a redesigned ‌Apple TV‌ ‌Siri‌ Remote interface in the Control Center.

In iOS 14, the current Remote UI takes cues from the previous-generation ‌Siri‌ Remote, with Menu, ‌Siri‌, Play/Pause and Home buttons below a large gesture pad, mirroring the glass touch surface.

Likewise, the new UI in many ways resembles the redesigned new-generation ‌Siri‌ Remote, and now includes Back, Mute, Power, and channel buttons, while the iPhone's physical Side/Power button becomes the ‌Siri‌ button.

Despite these welcome changes in the iOS 15 beta, there are still some bugs that Apple needs to iron out to get the new ‌Siri‌ Remote working consistently, so it may not be wise to update to the iOS 15 public beta as soon as it becomes available in July just to start using it. iOS 15 will be officially released in the fall.