Apple Music subscribers are discovering a new station today called, er, Discovery Station. Apple has also updated the animated artwork for [Your name’s] Station in Apple Music to match.
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Discovery Station is algorithmically based on a user’s music taste similar to [Your name’s] Station. The key difference with the new station, however, is that it shouldn’t play songs from your library or playlists.
It’s only been a few hours, but my impression is that Apple sees the “discovery” part of this ‘Discovery Station’ as something fundamentally different from Spotify’s Discover Weekly. Spotify’s popular algorithmic playlist (which refreshes once a week) is generally skewed toward lesser-known acts and recent releases; in the hours I’ve been testing Apple’s new radio station, it seems it’s not afraid to recommend older music from bands I am familiar with and that I wouldn’t consider “niche”, but which I don’t have in my music library either.
Since the introduction of Apple Pay in 2014, Apple has expanded its range of financial products. The services it offers now extend beyond payments, and include both long and short term (BNPL) credit, savings, identification, credit rebates, and tools for merchants to take card payments.
For a service that doesn't get a lot of attention, Apple Pay is a strategically important element to the company’s future plans. That’s clear.
Apple is testing the next-generation M3 Max chip, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The Apple silicon chip will be a replacement for the M2 Max, and it is set to be used in new MacBook Pro models next year.
Signs of the chip were found by a third-party Mac developer in test logs, and it appears to feature a 40-core GPU and a 16-core CPU with 12 high performance cores and four efficiency cores.
It's been rumored for several months now that Apple will be using a new 3 nm manufacturing process from Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) for its next-generation chips, including M3 series processors for Macs and the A17 Bionic for some next-gen iPhones. But new reporting from The Information illuminates some of the favorable terms that Apple has secured to keep its costs down: Apple places huge chip orders worth billions of dollars, and in return, TSMC eats the cost of defective processor dies.
SoftBank Group's British chip design unit, Arm, plans to float its shares in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq in September, Nikkei has learned. The unit's market capitalization by that time is expected to be more than $60 billion, which would make the deal the world's biggest initial public offering so far this year.
SoftBank will officially apply to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the listing later this month. Then it must obtain approval from Nasdaq. Leading global chipmakers, including Apple, Samsung Electronics, Nvidia and Intel, will invest in Arm as soon as the company is listed on the market.
I see the new Discovery Station in my Apple Music now. I'll going discover new music tonight.
Or maybe revive some old music too.
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Thanks for reading.