Boost Mobile to Offer iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Starting October 17 With $100 Discount [iOS Blog]
Boost Mobile confirmed that it would begin selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus starting next Friday, October 17, reports CNET. The new iPhones will join the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c in Boost’s existing smartphone lineup.
Boost Mobile, a division of Sprint, offers a no-contract prepaid service that requires users to purchase their phones at full price and pair them with prepaid mobile cellular and data plans. Unlike its competitors, Boost offers the iPhone at a discounted price, taking $100 off the full retail price of each available model. Prices start at $549 for the 16 GB iPhone 6, with the iPhone 6 Plus priced at $649 for the entry-level 16 GB model.
Boost’s mobile plans include unlimited talk and texts along with data available in 1 GB, 5 GB and 10 GB allotments. From now until November 3, Boost is taking an additional $5 off the cost of its prepaid plans. Plan prices now cost $35 monthly for the 1 GB plan, $45 monthly for the mid-tier 5 GB plan and $55 monthly for the 10 GB option.
Boost joins several other prepaid carriers offering the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Prepaid options for the iPhone also are available from Consumer Cellular, Straight Talk, Net 10, and others.
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Snapchat servers ‘were never breached,’ but your snaps may still be compromised (update)
Snapchat is a photo sharing service known for its temporary nature: you send a photo to a friend, a few seconds later the photo disappears and is erased. If you snap a screen of the image, Snapchat tells the other person. That’s the elevator pitch, anyway. A variety of third-party apps skirt around that temporality, enabling users to secretly save the images they’re sent — occasionally of the nude variety — and anonymous internet forum 4chan is claiming it hacked one of those apps to access hundreds of thousands of images. Worse, those images are allegedly tied to usernames. Yes, that means your images may be at risk of exposure. Snapchat can’t confirm the alleged leak because it didn’t involve the company’s servers if it did happen, but the company says its data centers are secure. Here’s what Snapchat told us:
“We can confirm that Snapchat’s servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimized by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users’ security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed.”
First things first: don’t panic. The images from the leak aren’t actually online just yet, making the hack a claim at most right now. So, what allegedly went down?
4chan users, posting anonymously, say that the third-party service Snapsave was hacked. Snapsave is a third-party app for both iOS and Android that enables users to save snaps without the other person knowing. The posts allege that Snapsave uses cloud saving, and when it was breached, the cloud database was downloaded with approximately 200,000 images. Snapsave has yet to return our requests for comment, and 4chan says to expect the image database online by October 12th (this Sunday).
Due to the recent hacking of various celebrities and the subsequent leaking of images depicting said celebrities in the nude — which was dubbed “The Fappening,” a reference to an internet term for masturbation — some media outlets are calling this alleged breach, “The Snappening.”
Update: Snapsave rep Georgie Casey says, “Our app had nothing to do with it and we’ve never logged username/passwords.” Moreover, he says that Snapsave doesn’t run on a cloud setup.
A report on Business Insider states the service in question is known as “SnapSaved” (the same name, but in the past tense), a website that enabled Snapchat users to log in and save their images. “The service acted as a web client for the Snapchat app that allowed users to receive photos and videos, and save them online,” BI writes. “What its users didn’t realize was that the site was quietly collecting everything that passed through it, storing incriminating Snapchats on a web server, with the usernames of senders attached.”
The website “www.snapsaved.com” no longer resolves — as of this writing, it’s just a blank white page.
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Internet, Software, Mobile, Apple, Google
Source: 4chan, Business Insider
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Apple Reportedly Preparing to Remove Bose Audio Products From Retail Stores
Apple is preparing to remove all Bose audio products, both demo and sellable, from its retail environment, according to a reliable source who spoke to MacRumors. The inventory change will begin early next week, with instructions for removal being sent to employees in the coming days.
The reasons behind this removal were not disclosed, but it is very likely tied to to Apple’s recent acquisition of Beats Electronics. As part of this deal, Apple obtained the popular Beats headphone division as well as the company’s subscription music streaming service. With Beats now featured prominently by Apple, either Bose or Apple may have decided to end their retail relationship.
Bose also has a new sponsorship deal with the National Football League that has seen the league prohibit players from wearing Beats headphones while in the presence of television cameras at practice and on game days. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick defied the ban by wearing bright pink Beats headphones at a postgame press conference last Sunday, a move that saw the league hit Kaepernick with a $10,000 fine.
Apple acquired Beats Electronics earlier this year in a deal worth $3 billion. Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre reportedly have assumed senior roles within the company and are said to be working to improve Apple’s influence in the music industry. This partnership may help Apple as it supposedly negotiates with music labels in order to lower the price of its Beats Music service ahead of a planned revamp rumored for February of next year.
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Apple fashion push puts its Watch on the cover of Vogue China
Would you buy an Apple Watch if the fashion industry named it the “it gadget” of 2015, even if you couldn’t care less about what it can do? See, it’s slated to grace the cover of Vogue China’s November issue, merely a month after it made its first public appearance at Paris Fashion Week — so clearly, Cupertino wants to present it as a chic device for the tech-savvy fashionista. According to Vogue China EIC Angelica Cheung, she met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and head designer Jony Ive way before the watch’s September 9 unveiling, hinting that the company always meant to put some focus on fashion when it comes to marketing this particular product. If you’re wondering which variant gets the honor, it’s the fancy 18-karat gold one (check out the image after the break), though you’ll see other versions in the editorial spread inside.
Filed under: Wearables, Mobile, Apple
Via: Mac Rumors
Source: Business of Fashion
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Jony Ive Details Apple Design Process, iPhone 6 Design Choices in New Interview
Apple’s head of design Jony Ive today gave a live interview at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. In the interview, which BusinessInsider attended, Ive gave some rare insight into the design process at Apple and some of the design choices the team made with the iPhone 6.
According to Ive, he has a great design team that’s quite small, numbering 16 or 17 employees. During a typical day, Ive says that designers gather around tables like those in the Apple Store to draw. The team meets three or four times a week.
One of the major advantages of being part of a design team that’s been together so long is that it’s given them time to develop a design process. Ideas, Ive says, don’t really come along until the design team has created a physical object from their drawings. “It really galvanizes and focuses our team,” said Ive.
When asked whether or not he had experienced a “eureka moment” in a design meeting, Ive pointed towards the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus, saying that there’s a “special moment” when there’s an object you can touch. He says he’s surprised and thrilled every time he gets to see a new first model.
On the iPhone 6’s rounded edges, Ive says that Apple opted to go back to rounded edges because they were necessary to make the device feel less wide. Apple made bigger-screened prototypes years before, but they were “clunky.”
Ive also shared details on Steve Jobs, saying that Jobs was “the most focused person” he’d met in his life. “It’s terrifying that when you really truly focus, it seems a bit illegal. You can achieve so much.” Ive went on to say that focus means saying “no with every bone in your body” to something you know is a good idea, but impossible because “you’re focused on something else.”
During audience questions, Ive also gave some interesting thoughts on Xiaomi, the Chinese manufacturer that closely copies Apple’s designs. Ive says what Xiaomi is doing is theft, not flattery.
There is a danger…I don’t see it as flattery. I see it as theft. (Talking about copying designs in general). When you’re doing something for the first time and you don’t know it’s going to work. I have to be honest the last thing I think is “Oh, that is flattering. All those weekends I could’ve been home with my family…I think it’s theft and lazy. I don’t think it’s OK at all.”
The full paraphrased text of Ive’s interview, where he also shares why he chose to be an industrial designer, what he thought was well designed as a kid, how he came to work at Apple, and his thoughts on Steve Jobs, can be found over at BusinessInsider. Both TechCrunch and The Verge have shared details on the interview as well.
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Apple to Live Stream Upcoming October 16 iPad Event
Apple has plans to offer a live stream of its October 16 event, according to a source that spoke to MacRumors. As with its September 9 iPhone event, Apple will likely offer a stream of the event both on its website and through a dedicated channel on the Apple TV.
Invitations for the October 16 event, which will be held at the Town Hall auditorium on the company’s Cupertino campus at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, went out earlier this week with the tagline “It’s been way too long.”
At the event, Apple is expected to introduce an updated iPad Air and possibly a new Retina iPad mini, as well as updated iMacs with a 27-inch model that has a high-resolution Retina display. OS X Yosemite is also likely to be previewed one more time before its public launch, and updated Mac minis, which are rumored to be in the works, might possibly see an announcement at the event.
In addition to Apple’s live stream, MacRumors will be providing its own live coverage of the event, both on MacRumors.com and on the MacRumorsLive Twitter account.
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U2’s free album spread to 81 million iTunes users
So, just how far did U2’s Songs of Innocence spread during its tenure as a free, exclusive iTunes album? Pretty far: according to Eddy Cue, Apple senior VP of internist software and services, 81 billion customers heard at least one song from the album during its free period. While those numbers represent just partial downloads of the album, Cue told Billboard that 26 million iTunes users nabbed the whole thing. Those are huge numbers — he told the publication that before the promotion, only 14 million iTunes customers had purchase the band’s music since 2003.
Giving away the album for free doesn’t necessarily mean that the band lost physical sales, however — a deluxe edition of the album is available in stores that features 10 more songs than the free release as well as a handful of other bonus features. Those numbers also don’t account for people who downloaded the album by mistake, though it does set an interesting precedent for the future of music distribution. Will freebie albums become the new trend in the music industry? We’ll let you know once we see how things pan out with that new music format Bono says Apple’s working on.
Filed under: Misc
Source: Billboard
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GT Advanced Asks Court for Permission to ‘Wind Down’ Operations at Sapphire Plant
After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this week, Apple sapphire partner GT Advanced has asked for the court’s permission to “wind down” operations at its Mesa, Arizona manufacturing plant, reports Re/code and The Wall Street Journal.
GT is said to be filing motions to get expedited hearings to cease certain operations and get out of both contracts and leases connected to those operations.
The facility, which was purchased and outfitted by Apple and run by GT Advanced, has operated for less than a year. Approximately 700 employees are employed at the manufacturing plant, where GT Advanced was rumored to be creating sapphire for use in Apple products like the Apple Watch and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Furnaces for sapphire production
Little information about the reasoning behind GT Advanced’s bankruptcy filing is available as the company has asked for a non-disclosure in its bankruptcy proceedings. GT is subjected to a confidentiality agreement with an unnamed third party (confirmed to be Apple by a courtroom reference) that has prevented it from disclosing details about the bankruptcy. The company could be fined up to $50 million per violation for breaking the agreements.
GT’s bankruptcy filing took both Apple and Wall Street by surprise. Apple has reportedly been working with GT Advanced to help it remain solvent and to help it receive its final $139 million payment, but it is unclear how this latest request will impact the relationship between the two companies.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal between GT Advanced and Apple may have crumbled following the former’s failure to deliver sapphire iPhone screens for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple was widely expected to use sapphire screens in at least some models, but both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus continue to feature Gorilla Glass displays.
GT Advanced will again appear in court on October 15 at a hearing related to its wind-down request. Apple, for its part, has again said that it plans to focus on “preserving jobs” in Arizona and that it will “work with state and local officials” as it considers its next steps.
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San Francisco 49ers Quarterback Fined $10k for Defying No Beats Headphones Rule
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been fined $10,000 for wearing Apple’s Beats by Dre headphones following a ban on the brand after the NFL signed an exclusive deal with Bose.
Kaepernick opted to wear bright pink Beats by Dre headphones following last Sunday’s game against the Chiefs, in order to “pay homage to Breast Cancer Awareness.” Kaepernick declined to say whether Beats paid his fine, saying “I’m going to let that be unanswered.”
Kaepernick, along with a number of other high-profile NFL players, has an endorsement deal with Beats. Last year, he starred in a popular Beats ad that depicted him tuning out the negative comments and boos of opposing fans by wearing Beats noise-canceling headphones.
Bose and the NFL signed a sponsorship agreement before the season began, but last week the NFL decided to ban players from wearing Beats headphones in front of television cameras to support its sponsor. Players are not allowed to wear them when conducting interviews during training camp, during practice sessions, or on game day, from before the event until 90 minutes after play has ended.
This is the second time Beats headphones have been banned from major sporting events. Earlier this year, World Cup headphone sponsor Sony banned soccer players from wearing Beats headphones within stadiums, and during the London Olympics, the International Olympic Committee ended up banning Beats headphones after a guerrilla marketing campaign because the company was not an official sponsor.
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Apple Releases Third OS X Yosemite Golden Master Candidate to Developers
Apple today released a third golden master candidate of OS X Yosemite to developers, just two days after releasing the second candidate golden master and the fifth public beta. The first golden master candidate was seeded to developers on September 30.
The latest Yosemite update can be downloaded from the Mac App Store and through Apple’s Mac Developer Center.
OS X Yosemite brings a flatter, more modern look to OS X, with an emphasis on translucency and redesigned dock, windows, and more. It also includes a multitude of new features, such as improved integration with iOS 8 through Continuity, a new “Today” view in Notification Center that offers integration with third-party apps, a retooled Spotlight search with new data sources, and several new features for apps like Mail, Safari, and Messages.
Over the course of the beta testing period, each Developer Preview has added new features and refined the look and performance of OS X Yosemite, although changes have become less obvious in more recent builds as Apple begins finalizing Yosemite ahead of its public release, which is expected in late October.
The current build, like the previous golden master candidate, may not be the final version of OS X Yosemite, depending on the outcome of final testing. Last year, Apple seeded multiple golden master versions of OS X Mavericks, with the final version coming a couple of days ahead of the software’s public release.
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