iPhone-Compatible ZEISS VR ONE Plus Headset Launches for $129

ZEISS has announced that its iPhone-compatible VR ONE Plus virtual reality headset is now available at Best Buy stores across the United States for $129. The headset has a universal smartphone tray that fits most smartphones with a screen size between 4.7 and 5.5 inches, including the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

iPhone users can use the VR ONE Plus with thousands of virtual reality apps on the App Store, including Google Cardboard apps, in addition to 360 degree YouTube videos and Google Street View. The headset has an immersive field of view of approximately 100° and can be used while wearing eyeglasses.

ZEISS is also accepting VR ONE Plus orders through its website in the U.S. and Europe.
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Twitter’s Night Mode Now Available for iOS

Twitter today announced that it is expanding its “night mode” option to its iOS app, allowing Twitter users to enable a darker mode suitable for reading tweets at night. Twitter first brought night mode to Android devices in July and after a beta testing period, the company is now ready to offer the option in both of its mobile apps.

Night mode can be enabled by tapping on the gear icon and choosing the “Turn on night mode” option. It is disabled in the same way, by tapping the gear icon and selecting “Turn off night mode.”

Night mode should be a welcome addition for those iOS users who have been hoping Apple will implement its own Night Mode option, as it makes the Twitter interface much darker and more comfortable to look at in low light conditions.

Rolling out today – we’re bringing night mode to iOS! 🌙 https://t.co/XxNZHQdth9 pic.twitter.com/WLwKi4H0Oe

— Twitter (@twitter) August 22, 2016

Twitter’s new night mode feature is rolling out to Twitter users starting today. The Twitter app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
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Apple Accepting Donations for Louisiana Flood Relief

Apple has added banners to its U.S. website, iTunes Store, and App Store encouraging customers to donate to the American Red Cross to help support people who have been affected by the widespread flooding in southern Louisiana.

Donation tiers available include $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $200, with all proceeds from donations sent to the American Red Cross. All transactions are processed as iTunes or App Store purchases.

Flooding in Louisiana, which started last week after torrential rainfall, have damaged more than 40,000 houses and left many thousands of people without homes. More than 20 parishes have been affected, and in many of the areas, flood insurance was not common because they weren’t known flood zones. The Red Cross has called the Louisiana flooding the worst natural disaster in the United States since Hurricane Sandy.

Apple often puts out a call for donations for disaster relief. In the past, Apple has collected Red Cross iTunes donations for the 2016 fires in Alberta, the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the refugee and migration crisis in the Mediterranean sea, the 2013 Philippines typhoon, and more.
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The New York Times Announces Closure of News Curation App ‘NYT Now’

The New York Times has announced that its curated news app, NYT Now [Direct Link], will officially shut down and no longer be available to download from the week of August 29. The app was originally announced in early 2014 as a way to provide readers with a cheaper alternative to the digital subscription service offered by the company, coming in at $8 per month, “roughly half the price of the least expensive digital subscription.”

NYT Now was said to be an attempt by the New York Times to offset dips in revenue from its traditional printed newspaper circulation. The goal was to present a less expensive subscription model, with news focused and curated for each specific user, and attract people who might not otherwise subscribe due to the ease-of-access inherent in mobile apps. Unfortunately, “the app never quite took off,” and NYT Now transitioned to a freemium model last year in an attempt to expand its audience.

Kinsey Wilson, the executive vice president for product and technology, said the decision to do away with NYT Now was driven in part by a shift in how the company thinks about broadening its audience. The Times, with the help of its audience development team, now looks more to third-party platforms like Facebook and Twitter to expand its reach among younger readers.

“That gave us a different ability to tap into younger audiences and to provide exposure to a much, much wider audience,” Mr. Wilson said.

The app was said to have peaked in May 2015 with 334,000 total unique users in one month but, in the last three months, it only managed to acquire 257,000 total unique users. Many of NYT Now’s features will be folded into the company’s main mobile app, NYTimes [Direct Link], “including morning and evening news briefings, bullet-point lists and a more conversational tone.”

The editors of NYT Now have written a brief note about the app’s shuttering, including the specific locations users can find its various features in other apps. For readers who keep the NYT Now app on their iOS or Android device, it will officially cease being updated in September.

Apps like Apple News, which offer users a wide breadth of news stories from an expansive list of various publishers, are also likely to contribute to a slight loss of subscribers for single-publisher apps. Apple News is even getting a feature in iOS 10 that will support paid subscription models from sites like The Wall Street Journal, curating premium content right alongside free stories from other publishers.
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Tim Cook Discusses His Job, Apple’s Long-Term Future, AI, Virtual Reality, and More

The Washington Post today posted a lengthy new interview with Tim Cook, in which he discussed his first five years as Apple CEO and hinted at the company’s work on augmented reality products.

When asked how he handled the scrutiny that came with the role, Cook admitted that it was something he’d had to adapt to since taking over from Steve Jobs, and that there was very little Apple could do without it being reported somewhere.

You’re both praised and criticized, and the extremes are wide — very wide. And that can happen all in a day. You build up — my skin got materially thicker after August 2011. And I don’t mean in a bad way. I don’t mean that I’m callous and don’t care. I think I’m a bit better today about compartmentalizing things and not taking everything so personally.

Asked what has changed about Apple since his tenure in the role, Cook explained that while the company’s aim of making “insanely great products” remained the same, its interests had broadened in line with its tremendous growth.

The obvious things are we have more employees. The company is four times larger [by revenue since 2010]. We’ve broadened the iPhone lineup. That was a really key decision and I think a very good one. We’ve gone into the Apple Watch business, which has gotten us into wellness and in health. We keep pulling that string to see where that takes us. Lots of core technology work has been done.

Cook also explained that the company had stepped up its social responsibility and been more transparent about issues such as its environmental work, which had been “going on at Apple for decades, but we didn’t talk about it.” When asked how Apple could move forward when so much of its business is tied up in the iPhone and an industry that’s cooling off, Cook said:

Look at the core technologies that make up the smartphone today and look at the ones that will be dominant in smartphones of the future — like AI. AI will make this product even more essential to you. It will become even a better assistant than it is today. So where you probably aren’t leaving home without it today — you’re really going to be connected to it in the future. That level of performance is going to skyrocket.

When asked about some analysts’ claims that Apple’s best days are behind it, Cook said the suggestion “doesn’t bother him” because “he’s heard it all before” and he doesn’t subscribe to it “because it’s traditional thinking in a lot of ways: You can’t get large because you are large”.

Asked about Apple’s future and statements he made in the last earnings call about artificial intelligence, Cook argued that the company wasn’t falling behind AI efforts by other companies and called the breadth of Siri “unbelievable”:

Increasingly, Siri understands things without having to memorize certain ways to say things. The prediction of Siri is going way up. What we’ve done with AI is focus on things that will help the customer. And we announced in June that we’re opening Siri to third parties, so third-party developers can now use Siri. So a simple example with that, whatever kind of ride-sharing app you might use, Uber or Lyft in the United States, you could just — using your voice — order the car. So third-party developers are writing tons of those that will be available to the public in the fall. And that’s how we’re broadening Siri in a huge way.

Apple has had a team working on virtual and augmented reality technologies since at least early 2015, when rumors suggested there were a small number of employees investigating how Apple could incorporate the technologies into its products. Apple’s interest in virtual reality dates back much further, however, and Apple has filed multiple patents over the years, for products like video goggles, motion-sensing 3D virtual interfaces for iOS devices, and 3D “hyper reality” displays. When asked if Apple had designs on the augmented or virtual reality space, Cook said:

I think AR [augmented reality] is extremely interesting and sort of a core technology. So, yes, it’s something we’re doing a lot of things on behind that curtain that we talked about. [Laughs.]

In the full interview, Cook reflects on the death of Steve Jobs, Apple’s tax policies, his non-traditional view of the role of a CEO, his succession planning, and some of the mistakes he’s made along the way. You can read the full Washington Post interview here.
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MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Lightning MicroSD Card Reader and 64GB MicroSD Card from Lexar

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with well-known storage and memory company Lexar to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a bundle that includes Lexar’s Lightning-based MicroSD Card Reader and a high-performance 64GB MicroSD card.

Lexar’s MicroSD Lightning Reader is a tiny coin-sized dongle that makes it easy to transfer content from a microSD card to an iPhone or iPad, so it’s an ideal companion to products like drones and GoPro-style action cameras. Many Android phones also feature microSD slots, so it’s also a good way to transfer files between Android and iOS device, and it’s also useful for transferring files directly between two iOS devices.

The Lightning MicroSD Reader is small enough that it can go anywhere, from a pocket to a small camera bag, but it looks like a high quality accessory that matches well with Apple’s design aesthetic. It’s so compact that it’s potentially easy to lose, but it comes with a little strap so it can be attached to a set of keys or a loop on a backpack. The Lightning connector of the MicroSD Reader fits well into the Lightning port of an iPhone even with a case on, including Apple’s own line of cases.

With a USB microSD reader (included with the 64GB card in the giveaway) you can also offload files from a computer and transfer them directly to the iPhone through the microSD reader, or use the reader to offload files from an iPhone to the microSD card for extra storage space.

The MicroSD Lightning Reader has to be used with the Lexar app, which is decent. If you put content like videos and photos on the microSD card, you can view them directly within the app and save them to the camera roll. You can also use the app to back up your iPhone’s photos and contacts and transfer files to Dropbox.

The Lexar MicroSD Lightning Reader can be purchased from Amazon for $19.99, but four MacRumors readers will win a Lightning Reader and a 64GB Lexar microSD card through our giveaway. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner and send the prize.

You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page. Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (August 12) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on August 19. The winners will be chosen randomly on August 19 and will be contacted by email. The winners have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.
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Apple Re-Hires Flipboard Co-Founder Evan Doll for Continued Push Into Health Initiatives

Apple has re-hired software engineer Evan Doll to help the company “develop more health-related software,” according to information spotted by Bloomberg on Doll’s LinkedIn account. Specifically, Doll is now a director of health software engineering at Apple, a position which he began sometime in July, but his profile information doesn’t provide any further details into his role at the company.

The software engineer worked at Apple from 2003 to 2009, helping create and develop the software operating system for the iPhone. In 2009, he left Apple and co-founded magazine app Flipboard with Mike McCue. Similar to Apple News, Flipboard curates content and stories tailored to each user’s personal tastes and preferences, and has even been endorsed by Apple in the past.

The launch of Apple News was reported as a steep competitive challenge for the small company, resulting in a majority of its executives leaving the company — including Doll himself — in September 2015. Despite his background in the news curation space, Doll’s new placement at Apple has him focused on potential new health initiatives, an area that the company has slowly been building upon lately.

Apple has been beefing up its engineering team for health-care applications, hiring Sage Bionetworks founder and Merck & Co. veteran Stephen Friend and former Nest Labs technology chief Yoky Matsuoka earlier this year. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is increasingly positioning the Apple Watch as a wellness accessory as he tries to win a slice of the $4.6 trillion U.S. health and fitness industry.

A report from earlier in the week suggested that Apple is working on a new health-tracking piece of hardware to launch alongside the 10th anniversary iPhone in 2017. Although details are still lacking for a product launch over a year away, the product is said to collect heart rate, pulse, and blood sugar changes, which could be describing a next-generation Apple Watch if it’s not an entirely new addition to the company’s hardware lineup.

Earlier in the year, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke with Jim Cramer on “Mad Money,” discussing Apple’s initiatives in the health landscape. Cook described services like ResearchKit and the Health app as “significantly underestimated” sections of the technology market. Ultimately, when asked what the “next frontiers” in product development, Cook described health, and all the inroads taken by Apple to provide detailed analysis of a user’s well-being, as “the biggest one of all.”
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Apple Patent Describes ECG-Based Heart Health Wearable

Apple has invented a new health wearable device that measures electrocardiographic signals via a series of built-in electrodes (via PatentlyApple).

The device was revealed in a new patent application published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and appears to show designs on another wearable apart from the Apple Watch that can be worn on different locations on the body.

Electrocardiographic measurements rely on multiple electrode readings that can vary depending on where the recording is taken on the body. For example, accidental misplacement of limb lead electrodes is a common cause of ECG reading abnormalities. To solve this, Apple’s patent details how the device can intelligently adapt its measurements for accuracy by taking and comparing readings in different body locations.

In one example, the device can be run through an ‘enrollment’ process, whereby the measurements are taken at different locations on the body. Once the process is finished, electrocardiographic results obtained from the arm can be compared against the stored measurements and determine an accurate reading of heart functioning.

The patent describes how a user wearing the device on their arm can take manual measurements, by placing their finger on an electrode that is not already in contact with the body, whereby the device compares the inverted readings relative to one another to calculate an accurate measurement.

Earlier this week it was reported that Apple is developing at least one new health-tracking product that could debut alongside the tenth-anniversary iPhone in 2017. The product is said to have an array of health-related apps that collect data such as heart rate, pulse, and blood sugar changes.

It’s extremely unlikely that today’s patent relates to the upcoming device, but it does serve as another example of the research Apple is ploughing into this area, and indicates that the company is not averse to developing wearable technology that isn’t necessarily linked to the Apple Watch.

In a recent interview, when asked what he believes the “next frontiers” will be when it comes to product development, Apple CEO Tim Cook highlighted health as “the biggest one of all.”
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