Tech Talk

Apple's education team today debuted 30 activities for kids and families to do as part of an ongoing effort to support at-home learning while many schoolchildren are completing classes remotely.


Available as a PDF that can be downloaded or printed, the suggestions include a wide range of activities that can be done using the built-in features of an iPad or iPhone.

We know parents out there are juggling a lot in this challenging time. Apple’s education team has some fun ways to keep kids everywhere creating. #CreativityForKidshttps://t.co/hWIrWeSqGG — Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 9, 2020
Some of the activities include capturing a time-lapse video, going on a photo walk, recording a news interview, personalizing a portrait, seeing color in slo-mo video, and emojifying a mood. The PDF features a different activity for each number, each of which can be clicked for an activity description. For the photo walk activity, for example: Pick a color or letter of the day and take photos around t…

From today, iPhone users across China can set up their T-Union cards for Express Transit, Apple's contactless transit payment system. The new support is a result of a partnership between Apple and China T-Union, a contactless transit card currently used in 275 Chinese cities.


Express Transit is an Apple Pay feature that allows users to pay fares with a swipe of their ‌iPhone‌ or Apple Watch at the turnstile without having to unlock their device first with Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode.
How to Set Up Express Transit With Apple Pay on iPhone and Apple Watch
Express Transit was already in use in Beijing and Shanghai thanks to integration with local transit cards, but the new partnership between Apple and China T-Union essentially extends Express Transit nationwide.

Apple has a web page that it updates with the countries and regions that support the feature. Other places currently include London with Transport for London (TfL), New York City with Metropolitan Transportation Authorit…

Apple CEO Tim Cook will hold a company-wide virtual meeting later this month for employees to ask questions about working-from-home arrangements that have been put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.


According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple sent a note to staff on Wednesday advising them of the plan.
It asked that questions be submitted by end of day on Saturday and also encouraged workers to share their experiences of working through the disruption to daily life that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about. The specific date of the meeting has not yet been disclosed. Apple last week informed employees that its retail stores in the United States will remain closed until early May, and Apple employees will continue to work from home until then.

In Santa Clara County, where Apple Park, Infinite Loop, and many other corporate offices and retail stores are located, there is a shelter in place order that will remain in effect until May 3.

The order prevents all nonessentia…

Five months after launching, and with millions of people stuck at home, Disney's streaming service Disney+ now has 50 million subscribers, reports Deadline.


Disney+ in early February had 28.6 million subscribers, which means the streaming service has grown by 21.4 million subscribers in the last two months. Much of the boost can be attributed to recent launches of the service in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, France, Switzerland, and India.

50 million subscribers is ahead of Disney's own figures. When unveiling the service, Disney estimated that it would garner 60 to 90 million subscribers worldwide by the end of 2024, and if growth keeps up, Disney will hit that goal this year.

Apple has not released subscriber numbers, which means there's no direct comparison to Disney+. Since September, Apple has been providing a free year of service to everyone who purchases a new Apple device, so it will take over a year until Apple has large numbers of paying subscr…

Foxconn and other factories in China have implemented stringent measures to prevent the another viral outbreak in the country, according to an overview of the practices shared today by The Washington Post.

Pages from a manual issued by Foxconn that covers rules employees must follow. Image from The Washington Post.
Apple iPhone supplier Foxconn, for example, has organized workers into teams of 20 who stick together day and night for health tracking purposes. "The same group of employees work, travel, live, and eat together to ensure that employees' personal trajectories are fully traced," reads a notice from the Zhengzhou government where Foxconn is located.

A Foxconn employee told The Washington Post that workers are provided with a face mask and have their temperatures checked regularly, plus there are infrared cameras to check people for fevers as they walk by. Foxconn said that it is also using nucleic acid tests and chest x-rays when required, and it has produced 10 …

WhatsApp today implemented new restrictions on the mass forwarding of messages in an effort to slow the spread of misinformation on the chat platform.

The new limits on bulk forwarding mean if a user receives a message that has been forwarded more than five times, they will only be able to send it on to a single chat at a time. The previous limit was five chats at once, which WhatsApp introduced last year.

Obviously the restriction doesn't completely prevent mass forwarding, but anyone wanting to do so now has to put a lot more repetitive manual effort into it.

The move comes after several hoaxes went viral on the platform, including false stories about the current global pandemic one of which linked the outbreak to the rollout of 5G networks. At least 20 mobile phone masts across the U.K. are believed to have been set on fire or vandalized as a result of the baseless theory.

"We've seen a significant increase in the amount of forwarding which users have told us can feel …

Lady Gaga has teamed up with the World Health Organization and Global Citizen for a "One World: Together At Home" special to raise money to battle the ongoing pandemic, and Apple is donating money to the cause.


Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the donation in a video shared on the YouTube channel for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Lady Gaga called Apple's $10 million donation "quite sizable."

In the video, Jimmy Fallon and Lady Gaga FaceTime Cook, who confirms Apple's plans to donate to the initiative. According to Gaga, more than $35 million has already been raised by tech companies ahead of the special.

"One World: Together at Home" is set to air on Saturday, April 18 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time/8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. It will be available on major cable networks and it will be live streamed by Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, YouTube, and more. Funds raised both ahead of and during the event will support the World Health Organization's COVID-19 …

Global Citizen and the World Health Organization have teamed up to create a "One World: Together at Home" global special to support the fight against COVID-19.


The special is set to be broadcast live on Saturday, April 18 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time/8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on ABC, NBC, and CBS, plus it will be streamed by Apple, Amazon Prime Video, Alibaba, Facebook, Instagram, LiveXLive, Tencent, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, TIDAL, TuneIn, Twitch, Twitter, Yahoo, and YouTube.

It's not clear how Apple will stream the event, but the company could add a special channel to the Apple TV as well as offering the live stream on its website. The virtual broadcast will show unity among all people who are affected by COVID-19, as well as celebrating and supporting the brave frontline health care workers around the world who are doing incredible, life-saving work. Lady Gaga, Elton John, Lizzo, John Legend, Keith Urban, and more are set to perform during the event, and there will…

Apple will announce a new 13-inch MacBook Pro in May with the codename J223, according to a rumor shared by YouTuber and leaker Jon Prosser.

Note: it’s a refresh to the current 13”

So the bigger 14” display upgrade is a big possibility — Jon Prosser (@jon_prosser) April 4, 2020
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said Apple plans to release new ‌MacBook Pro‌ and MacBook Air models with scissor keyboards in the second quarter of 2020. As predicted, Apple launched its new ‌MacBook Air‌ last month with the new keyboard, so that only leaves the 13-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌, given that the 16-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌ was released just five months ago.

As noted by Prosser, Apple could launch a new size for its smaller ‌‌MacBook Pro‌‌ offering, with any refresh potentially seeing a display bump to a 14-inch screen. Kuo has referred to a 14-inch model in the past, but it's not clear that this size would feature in any impending refresh. The new 14-inch model would likely replace the 13-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌, which w…

Apps with sign-in functionality, including The New York Times, IFTTT, Medium, and more, have continued to adopt Apple's secure Sign in with Apple feature ahead of a deadline of June 30. The deadline for these apps to support the feature was recently extended from April 30.


‌Sign in with Apple‌, first introduced in iOS 13, allows users to create accounts for apps and websites using an Apple ID. It also lets users to select specific data he or she would like to share with an app and even allows users to mask their email addresses.

The feature has been largely welcomed as a more secure alternative to similar sign-in services since it authenticates the user with Face ID or Touch ID and doesn't send personal information to app and website developers.

MacRumors forum member Pedro Marques has compiled a list of other apps currently supporting ‌Sign in with Apple‌. Be sure to check out our Sign in with Apple guide to learn more about the feature and how it works.

Apple users, it’s been …

With the calendar rolling over to April this week, we yet again saw several leaks and rumors, most notably including Apple itself leaking some references to a pair of long-rumored products: a new budget iPhone SE and AirTags item trackers.

Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Apple also acquired popular weather app Dark Sky, while Amazon's Prime Video app now allows users to bypass Apple's in-app purchase system and rent or buy movies directly from Amazon.

Check out our roundup below and the video above for details on these stories and more!

New Low-Cost 'iPhone SE' Could Launch Soon
We've been hearing about a new low-cost iPhone for almost exactly a year now, and it looks like it may finally be ready to launch, with new details suggesting a launch is imminent. The new phone will apparently recycle the iPhone SE name used for Apple's previous dedicated budget phone, but this version will look nearly identical to the iPhone 8 but with upgrad…

Global online music streaming subscriptions were up 32 percent year-over-year in 2019, hitting 358 million subscribers, according to new estimates shared today by Counterpoint Research.


Spotify was the market leader with a 31 percent share of total revenue and a 35 percent share of total paid subscriptions, while Apple Music earned the second place slot with a 24 percent share of total revenues in the industry and a 19 percent share of the total paid subscriptions. ‌Apple Music‌'s subscription base grew an estimated 36 percent year-over-year.

Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and Tencent Music all trailed both ‌Apple Music‌ and Spotify. "Spotify maintained its top spot with the help of promotional activities like free Spotify Premium for three months, price cuts, customized campaigns like Spotify and a focus on exclusive content. Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google have started focusing on music streaming and have sufficient cash at their disposal to give stiff competition to S…

Apple today informed employees that its Apple retail stores in the United States will remain closed until early May, and Apple employees will continue to work from home until then.


In a memo to employees, excerpts of which were shared by Bloomberg, Apple's retail chief Deirdre O'Brien said that Apple is "continuing to monitor local conditions for every Apple facility on a daily basis" and that reopening decisions will be made on after "thorough, thoughtful reviews and the latest guidance from local governments and public health experts."

For now, Apple's flexible work arrangements "will remain in place for all offices, and all retail stores will remain closed, until early May."

In Santa Clara County, where Apple Park, Infinite Loop, and many other corporate offices and retail stores are located, there is a shelter in place order that will remain in effect until May 3. It prevents all nonessential businesses from being open and requires employe…