On May 8th Beddit made it official that Apple had acquired them as noted in the video below. At the moment the company is still operating and maintaining its own web site that explains the product in more detail here. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman tweeted in late August that "Tech support for Beddit sleep trackers is now handled via Apple Support."...

Apple and AT&T have been working together to improve cellular connectivity for iPhone users in Puerto Rico who have been largely without cellular service since Hurricane Maria hit a month ago.

The two companies are enabling LTE Band 8, a provisional LTE band that's been approved but not activated or licensed in the United States or Puerto Rico, reports TechCrunch.

LTE Band 8 will work with the iPhone 5c and up on iOS 10 or higher in Puerto Rico following a carrier update. Band 8 is a 900Mhz band with improved range to better reach cell towers that are located further away."We are working with AT&T to activate cellular service for iPhone users in Puerto Rico as the island recovers from Hurricane Maria," read an Apple statement. "Apple engineers have created a special carrier settings update which users...

Starting on Monday, October 23, iPhone Upgrade Program customers will be able to get a "head start" on the iPhone X pre-order process by getting pre-approved for an iPhone Upgrade Program loan.

Apple started notifying customers about the option this morning through its website and via a notice in the Apple Store app.

Customers will need to download the Apple Store app and choose their preferred iPhone X model to get pre-approved for a loan ahead of the launch of iPhone X pre-orders. Apple says this process, which was also offered for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, will let customers "speed through checkout on 10/27."

Once approved for a loan on a device, customers can use the Apple Store app when iPhone X pre-orders kick off to complete the purchase, making the pre-order process faster for iPhone Upgrade customers as no approval will need to be completed at the time orders are...

Apple today seeded the fourth beta of an upcoming iOS 11.1 update to developers, just four days after releasing the third iOS 11.1 beta and a month after releasing the iOS 11 update to the public.

Registered developers can download the fourth iOS 11.1 beta from Apple's Developer Center or over-the-air once the proper configuration profile has been installed from the Developer Center.

iOS 11.1 introduces a range of new Unicode 10 emoji like crazy face, pie, pretzel, t-rex, vampire, exploding head, face vomiting, shushing face, love you gesture, brain, scarf, zebra, giraffe, fortune cookie, pie, hedgehog, and more.

Several emoji also feature some small design changes in iOS 11.1, including the dolphin, octopus, bee,...

Japan's Emonster and Enrique Bonasea have collectively sued Apple for trademark infringement over Animoji. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) clearly presents 'Animoji' as a trademark owned by EMONSTER ...

Billboard has announced that its Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts -- which measure singles and albums, respectively -- will begin weighing plays made on paid subscription streaming services/tiers more than plays made on pure ad-supported services/tiers in 2018. This means services that only support paid subscriptions, like Apple Music, will receive a "greater emphasis" in Billboard chart calculations.

The Billboard calculations will include plays made on paid subscription tiers of hybrid services as well, related to Spotify and SoundCloud. For the Hot 100 list, Billboard said that there will now be "multiple weighted tiers" of streaming plays, with paid subscription at the top, then ad-supported streams, and programmed streams. Besides streaming, radio airplay and digital song sales are also still accounted for.

Currently, the Billboard Hot 100 chart...

Last week Patently Apple posted a patent application report titled "Apple Invents a 360° Head-Mounted Display System that Relates to Post-Production of VR Applications." Apple's invention related to monoscopic, stereoscopic, 180 degree (hemisphere) or 360 degree (full sphere) photography and post-production for distribution to dome, mobile or head-mounted display virtual reality applications. Yesterday another AR patent came to light that was an extension to one that was granted a patent this summer. One of the engineers on this invention worked for several years at Intel as a lead engineer on their RealSense team.

Earlier this month Patently Apple posted a report titled "Tim Cook's meeting with French President Macron was relatively brief and to the Point about future Taxes." The report noted that French officials had stated that Apple's CEO Tim Cook didn't push back against calls by the French president and European allies to change rules in the region to get technology giants to pay more taxes. Today a new report has surfaced that may explain why Cook stayed quite while French President Macron read him the riot act on taxes.

Apple is facing a lawsuit for infringing on an existing Animoji trademark, reports The Recorder. Animoji is the name Apple chose for the 3D animated emoji-style characters that will be available on the iPhone X.

The lawsuit [PDF] was filed on Thursday by law firm Susman Godfrey LLP on behalf of Enrique Bonansea, a U.S. citizen living in Japan who owns a company called Emonster k.k. Bonansea says he came up with the name Animoji in 2014 and registered it with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2015.

Since 2014, Bonansea has been using the Animoji name for a messaging app available in the iOS App Store. The lawsuit alleges Apple was aware of the Animoji app and attempted to purchase...

Looking at different Apple forums on iPhone cameras having problems with photo flaring today, it appears that some have experienced this problem. A number of Apple customers described a blue flare and yellow tint while others experienced the 'green dot' problem. As noted in a photo below from that same Apple forum, a customers states that "Festival of lights in...

Mastercard today announced that cardholders will no longer have to provide a signature for any purchases in the United States and Canada after April 2018. The change will apply to both debit and credit cards.

Mastercard said removing the need to sign for card-present transactions will not have any impact on customer security due to modern safeguards.

"Our secure network and state-of-the art systems combined with new digital payment methods that include chip, tokenization, biometrics, and specialized digital platforms use newer and more secure methods to prove identity," said Linda Kirkpatrick, an Executive Vice President at Mastercard.

Mastercard's consumer research unsurprisingly found that a majority of people believe it would be easier to pay, and that checkout lines would move faster, if they didn't need to sign the receipt when making a purchase.

Already,...

On October 05, 2016 Patently Apple posted a report titled "Southwest Airlines Flight Evacuated due to a Replacement Samsung Note 7 Catching on Fire." It was likely to straw that broke the camel's back that forced Samsung to formalize a full worldwide recall of their Note 7. The South Korean press went ballistic calling the U.S. recall of the Note 7 a protectionist move to protect Apple. Now the Korean tech press is out for blood and want the government to investigate the iPhone 8 battery bloating problem and force a recall.

Apple Stores continue to be the most popular destination to purchase a new Mac in the United States, according to a recent survey conducted by research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Apple's retail locations and online store accounted for roughly 40 percent of Mac sales between October 2016 and September 2017, based on 2,000 survey respondents who purchased a Mac during that period.

When the first Apple Stores opened in 2001, Apple was still known as Apple Computer, and the Mac was its primary product. Nowadays, of course, there is the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and beyond.

"Since Apple designed its stores originally to promote Mac computers, it is not surprising that that they continue to account for roughly 40 percent of Mac sales," said Josh Lowitz, co-founder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

While it's generally unsurprising that Apple is the most popular Mac retailer, given...

Apple has reportedly asked its suppliers to reduce iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus production by nearly 50 percent in November and December, according to Reuters, which cited China's Economic Daily News.

The report quotes an unnamed source who claims it is the first time in the iPhone's history that new models face a major cutback so shortly after mass production began. iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus officially went on sale September 22.

Apple shares declined around 1.5 percent in pre-market trading as investors reacted to concerns about low sales of the devices.

Apple hasn't revealed iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus sales numbers. The company will report its fourth quarter earnings results on November 2...

In May, Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple Seeks License from FCC Covering new Wireless Millimeter Wave Technology Found in a Recent Patent Filing." Since that time several Apple patents covering millimeter wave technology have surfaced and today the U.S. Patent Office published yet another patent from Apple on this technology that is likely to be used with iPhones supporting 5G networks and possibly wireless charging and/or faster charging.

Samsung today announced the second-generation version of its Bixby voice assistant, seven months after Bixby was first unveiled ahead of the launch of the Galaxy S8.

According to Samsung, Bixby 2.0 is a "fundamental leap forward for digital assistants" and a "bold reinvention of the platform," designed with the aim of making Bixby available on "any and all devices."

Bixby 2.0 will be available on smartphones, TVs, refrigerators, home speakers, and other connected technology products. Bixby 2.0 will be "open," allowing developers to choose how users interact with Bixby in their services.

Samsung says Bixby 2.0 features enhanced natural language capabilities to support more natural commands and complex processing, so it can "really get to know and understand" who you are and who...

Customers who purchased a Kindle e-book between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 may be receiving a credit from Amazon this morning as the retailer continues distributing funds from an antitrust lawsuit levied against Apple back in 2013 by the United States Justice Department.

Emails were sent out to eligible customers in the United States this morning, and Amazon has also set up a website that will list available credits for those who are eligible for a refund.

Apple, along with five other publishers including HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and Penguin, was found guilty of conspiring to inflate the prices of e-books to weaken Amazon's dominant position in the market. While the five publishers settled, Apple held out and appealed several...

A new entry in Apple's Machine Learning Journal provides a closer look at how hardware, software, and internet services work together to power the hands-free "Hey Siri" feature on the latest iPhone and iPad Pro models.

Specifically, a very small speech recognizer built into the embedded motion coprocessor runs all the time and listens for "Hey Siri." When just those two words are detected, Siri parses any subsequent speech as a command or query.

The detector uses a Deep Neural Network to convert the acoustic pattern of a user's voice into a probability distribution. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase uttered was "Hey Siri."

If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up and proceeds to complete the command or answer the query automatically.

If the score exceeds Apple's lower threshold but not the upper threshold, however, the...

The new Apple Michigan Avenue is scheduled to open this Friday. Today we learn that that the new Apple store has been sold ...

Yesterday WhatsApp announced that it will be rolling out a new feature that allows users to share their location in real-time with family or friends in the coming weeks.

Earlier today Patently Apple posted a report titled "Microsoft Revealed their Next-Gen Surface Book 2 today claiming it's more powerful than Apple's MacBook Pro." After filing our report Intel published a report about Microsoft's Surface Book 2 adopting their new Intel 8th Gen Core processors. Intel also introduced the industry's first AI Neural processor called Nervana.

Apple introduced a free mobile video editing app called 'Clips' on the App Store on April 6, 2017. It's only available on 64-bit devices running iOS 10.3 or later. Apple describes it as an app for "making and sharing fun videos with text, effects, graphics, and more." Today Apple's European trademark filing surfaced from London for the figurative version of the 'Clips' trademark. Legally Apple has a priority date of 21/04/2017 which could be a problem for Google's new products with the same branding.

Two weeks after first unveiling the Pixel 2 at an event in San Francisco, reviews of Google's latest smartphone have now been published online. Many of the reviews written on the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL are positive, with multiple articles referring to the smartphones as the best Android devices on the market, as well as legitimate competitors to Apple's iPhone series. The only slight negatives appear to surround Google's decision to aim for functional, more iterative updates over flashier feature additions.

Like most reviews posted today, The Verge was more impressed by the design and look of the Pixel 2 XL than the smaller Pixel 2, calling the latter phone "humdrum" with "big, chunky bezels" that don't compare favorably to the XL's smaller bezels and larger 6-inch screen....

According to a new Gartner report published today, worldwide shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are predicted to exceed 2.35 billion units in 2018, an increase of 2.0 percent from 2017. This would mark the highest year-over-year growth since 2015. The report also clarifies a common misconception about mobile PCs.

It was only this past April that Patently Apple posted a patent application report titled "Apple's Next-Gen AirPods Case could double as a Wireless Charging Dock for Apple Watch and iPhone." Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple this patent in record time. In total Apple was granted 48 patents today and we wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple today.

CarPlay is becoming an increasingly important feature that consumers look for when purchasing a vehicle, according to a new report released today by Strategy Analytics.

In a survey querying future car buyers about their interest in Android Auto, CarPlay, and Baidu CarLife in the United States, Western Europe, and China, Strategy Analytics discovered the majority of consumers are interested in CarPlay.

In the United States, 23 percent of respondents said CarPlay was a "must have" feature, while 56 percent said...

Apple considered purchasing medical clinic startup Crossover Health as part of its push into healthcare, reports CNBC. Apple is said to have participated talks with the healthcare company up until recently, but after months of discussion, no deal materialized.

According to its website, Crossover Health works with major companies to provide employees with on-site medical clinics. Some of its existing customers include Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Square, and Apple, with many of these companies offering on-campus medical care.

Citing three sources with knowledge of the talks, CNBC says it's not clear why no acquisition ultimately happened between the two companies. Apple also talked to One Medical...

Apple has already patched serious vulnerabilities in the WPA2 Wi-Fi standard that protects many modern Wi-Fi networks, the company told iMore's Rene Ritchie this morning.

The exploits have been addressed in the iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS betas that are currently available to developers and will be rolling out to consumers soon.

A KRACK attack proof-of-concept from security researcher Mathy Vanhoef

Disclosed just this morning by researcher Mathy Vanhoef, the WPA2 vulnerabilities affect millions of routers, smartphones, PCs, and other devices, including Apple's Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Using a key installation attack, or "KRACK," attackers can exploit weaknesses in the WPA2 protocol to decrypt network traffic to sniff out credit card numbers,...

A new report by Strategy Analytics states that access to smartphone apps through in-car HMI is increasingly important to consumers’ purchase decisions. Mobile apps are preferred for many navigation tasks, especially more advanced ones.

VirnetX today announced that the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has denied all of Apple's motions in a longstanding FaceTime-related patent lawsuit between the two companies.

The court also granted all of VirnetX's motions in the retrial and increased the royalty rates that Apple owes during the infringement period, resulting in a revised final judgment amount of $439.7 million.

"We are elated with the Court's Final Judgement of $439 million in that not only did it affirm the jury's verdict of $1.20 per infringing iPhone, iPad and Mac Product, but also added for willful infringement, interest and attorney fees. This is the third time a jury has ruled in our favor against Apple," said Kendall Larsen, VirnetX CEO.

VirnetX...

Just over a decade after the iPhone launched, and six years after Steve Jobs passed, some critics believe that Apple's pace of innovation has slowed. Unsurprisingly, Apple's services chief Eddy Cue doesn't share that opinion.

"I disagree vehemently with that and I think we've been incredibly innovative," said Cue, in a recent interview with Indian publication Livemint.

Cue pointed out that both the iPad and Apple Watch launched after the iPhone, while noting that revolutionary products take time. He also believes that Apple's work on Mac, macOS, and iOS has led the market.Apple historically has a track record of coming out with industry-defining products, whether it's the Mac or iPhone or iPod. But over the past decade, there's a been perception that the pace of innovation and the pace at which Apple has come out with...

According to a CNBC interview with Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at IDC, "Huawei is today the biggest challenger to Apple and Samsung. Indeed they are growing very fast. They will probably overtake Apple in the smartphone business, either this year or next year.

It's being report today in a supply chain report that Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai) has started shipping iPhone X devices, with the first batch of 46,500 units already being shipped out from Zhengzhou and Shanghai. Foxconn's production of the iPhone is beginning to gather steam.

Apple’s Denise Young Smith sent an apology to team members at Apple today over comments she made at the One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia. Political correctness wins the day.

Apple in May purchased Beddit, a company that develops health-related hardware. It was an unusual acquisition because Apple continued to sell the company's Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor on Apple.com, and collected sleep data from the device.

As of early October, though, the Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor has been listed as "Sold Out" on Apple's website, suggesting it has perhaps been quietly retired. When an Apple product is sold out, that typically means it's not going to be restocked. Since the Apple acquisition, the device has only been sold at Apple.com and is not available elsewhere either.

With the Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor no longer available, it's not known what Apple will do with the Beddit sleep technology in the future. Apple ...

Since Apple's WWDC event back in June Apple legal has been very busy filing a long string on new and updated trademarks for Apple as noted in our archives. The most recent trademark filings include an update to Apple Music and ....

Apple's portion of the mobile ecosystem market increased in eight major territories in the three months ending August 2017, according to new data collected and shared by Kantar Worldpanel. Over the summer of 2017, iOS saw growth in the following territories compared to the same year-ago period: Spain (4.4 percentage point increase), followed by China (4.3), the United States (3.7), Germany (2.3), France (1.7), the European Union (1.2), Australia (0.9), and Italy (0.4).

Specifically, iOS grew from 31.3 to 35 percentage points year-over-year in the U.S., and although Android still dominates the U.S. smartphone OS market at 63.2 percentage points, it has dipped slightly from its hold of 66.1 percentage points in the same year-ago period. Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech's Global Business Unit Director, said that "Apple maintained strong momentum in the US one...

Apple is reportedly "mulling" the idea of launching a stylus compatible with iPhone, believed to be a new iteration of the Apple Pencil, which is currently only supported by the iPad Pro. The rumor comes from industry sources speaking to The Korea Herald (via The Investor), which claimed that Apple engineers "have recently been working" on a new iPhone device that "comes with a digital pen," aiming for a potential launch in 2019.

The sources said that the iPhone stylus is likely to adopt a "supercapacitor stylus type" for price benefits, contrasting with Samsung's Galaxy Note pen which is based on electromagnetic resonance technology that needs additional panel components to be installed underneath the smartphone display. "A supercapacitor type is cheaper to make compared to the EMR stylus. It also offers a more pen-like feel," according to the industry sources.

Notably, Apple's...

In 2016 Patently Apple posted a report titled "Samsung Dodged a Bullet this week, but for How Long?" The report pointed to Apple's CEO alluding to have seen an iPhone using Apple Pencil. In an interview with India's NDTV in 2016, Apple's CEO stated that "If you've ever seen what can be created with that pencil on an iPad or an iPhone, it's really unbelievable." Today a new rumor from Korea claims that Apple will introduce an iPhone with an all-new Apple Pencil using new technology.

Aqua Connect Inc. and their wholly-owned subsidiary Strategic Technology Partners are jointly suing Apple for patent infringement. The companies claim that Apple is infringing two patents relating to a user session in a Mach-derived system environment. The company claims that Apple's AirPlay uses their technology without permission and more.

A little over three weeks after being released to the public, iOS 11 adoption has reached its 47 percent, successfully overtaking iOS 10, according to data collected by analytics company Mixpanel.

With iOS 11 installed on 47 percent of devices, iOS 10 is now installed on 46 percent of devices. 6.7 percent of devices also continue to run iOS 9 or earlier.

iOS 11 adoption has been much slower than iOS 10 adoption during the same timeframe last year. It took just two weeks for iOS 10 to overtake iOS 9, while iOS 11 was only installed on 38.5 percent of devices at the two week mark.

Adoption rates have been steadily increasing, though. At 24 hours, iOS 11 was installed on...