Apple released a major update to the Apple Store app today with a redesigned Shop tab that completely overhauls the online shopping experience. Products are now presented with richer visuals, featured recommendations, and more.
An odd annoyance has emerged among many App Store and iTunes users. Over the last several weeks, many Apple customers have reported that they are no longer receiving email receipts for purchases they made via the App Store or iTunes.
Executives in the online publishing industry speaking with The Information say that Apple has been “stunningly effective” with its goal of Intelligent Tracking Prevention stopping websites from knowing what users are doing on the web. One of the results of this over the last two years is that costs for advertisers have dropped significantly for Safari users while they’ve gone up for Chrome.
The cat-and-mouse game between developers attempting to bypass Apple’s cookie prohibition has (in part) led to Google’s upcoming “fingerprinting” (hacks developers used to continue tracking Safari users) crackdown.
Many observers, such as Ian Johnson, chief product officer at IPG’s data outfit, Kinesso, believe such workaround tactics are part of the reason the platform providers such as Apple and Google have adopted such a hardline strategy toward privacy.
All products have problems, but for the last few years, MacBooks have been suffering from a plague. If it's not the keyboard, it's performance throttling, or even potentially hazardous batteries. Media exposure around these issues has been omnipresent, and Apple has taken enough heat in the tech press to make this reengineered MacBook feel like an apology.
It's a very good apology and, at $2,399 and up, a very expensive one. But rather than rely a radical new design, the new MacBook Pro plays it safe, adding small improvements and fixing the big problems. While that might make it a bit boring, it could be exactly what Apple needs after years of misfires.
Direct Import works exactly as you’d expect. Connect an SD card reader or camera to your device running iOS or iPadOS 13.2 or later, and files will import directly into Lightroom without having to be shuttled through your camera roll in the Photos app. RAW import is supported, and Adobe says imports will take less time than they did in Photos.
Microsoft has for years promised it would eventually shut do to-do list app Wunderlist, which it acquired in 2015, in favor of its own app, To Do — after it felt the latter was able to offer a competitive experience that included Wunderlist’s best features. Today, Microsoft is finally announcing a shut-down date for Wunderlist of May 6, 2020. After this date, Wunderlist to-do’s will no longer sync but users will still be able to import their content into Microsoft’s own To Do app.
Costing just under 20 Swiss francs, the optional remote was reportedly developed in close collaboration with Apple, after a sizable section of Salt TV's customer base apparently complained about the poor usability of the Apple Remote that comes with every Apple TV 4K.
Apple’s flagship original show received multiple nominations across a couple of categories, most significantly as a candidate for best TV series drama. Stars Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon also picked up best actress nominations for their roles in Apple’s show.
Apple Inc. is officially returning to the Las Vegas CES technology conference for the first time in decades to discuss its stance on consumer privacy -- rather than pitch a new hardware product.
The company’s senior director of privacy Jane Horvath will be speaking on a “Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable” on Jan. 7, according to the CES agenda.
It's Mac Pro day!
(Why am I excited about a product that I neither want nor need?)
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