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While Spotify has long-held a lead over Apple in streaming music subscribers, the gap between the two is slowly narrowing, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The report, citing “people in the record business,” explains that Apple Music is adding subscribers in the United States at a faster rate than Spotify… Apple Music has been adding new subscribers at a 5 percent monthly rate, whereas Spotify is growing at a slower 2 percent rate....

Update: Apple has now confirmed the arrangement, which includes live-streaming coverage. The Democratic National Committee has today announced the next series of presidential debates for 2020. For the first time ever, Apple News will serve as partner for one of those debates. As reported by Axios, Apple News is partnering up for the 8th Democratic debate on February 7. Apple News is teaming up with ABC and WMUR-TV, a local ABC affiliate, for the debate....

Nearly one year after launching its first devices with NFC chips, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, to enable the Apple Pay mobile payments system, Apple has joined the official NFC Forum as a top-tier sponsor. Along with the sponsorship role, Apple has joined the forum’s Board of Directors, according to the forum’s official website. The site lists representation from Aon Mujtaba, a Director on Apple’s Wireless Systems Engineering team for the iPhone....

Apple today has officially launched support for financing additional products with Apple Card and 0% interest. The new financing options are available for the Mac lineup, iPad, AirPods Pro, AirPods, Apple Pencil, and more. In December, Apple launched a new iPhone 0% financing option for Apple Card users, and during Apple’s most recent earnings call with investors, Tim Cook teased that similar promotions would soon be available for other Apple products and recent reports indicated the rollout was imminent....

Those ongoing analyst predictions that Apple would buy Tesla may have been based on some sort of reality. According the the SF Chronicle, Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of mergers and acquisitions, met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk last spring. But it is unlikely that Apple wanted to buy the car company and even more unlikely that Musk would sell it. In response to the acquisition rumors at the time, he tweeted the following:...

We noted last week that Apple Maps London coverage has been significantly improved as part of a shift to the company using its own UK mapping data sourced from both satellite imagery and Apple Maps cars. A Londoner has now put together some slide-over comparisons, highlighting some specific changes … We summarised the overall changes last week. Jonathan Reed has now written a piece looking in more detail at some of the changes, complete with slide-over before-and-after comparisons in London and other cities....

Specific details about Apple Music are still rolling out after the iPhone maker announced its new subscription music service at WWDC yesterday. Music quality for streaming and offline playback is bound to be one concern for potential members and it appears Apple will be taking a conservative approach, according to Slashgear. By default, Beats Music only streamed at the higher 320kbps MP3 quality on the web and when the setting was changed within the mobile app....

Earlier this year Apple finally allowed apps in the Games category to appear on the South African App Store. Today the company has sent out an email to developers notifying them that the same change has been made in Costa Rica and Qatar. App developers don’t have to do anything to enable their apps for sale in those stores as long as the apps have been cleared for sale in those countries....

A new support document from Apple details all information regarding Dual SIM support for iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max. It goes through how to set it up, and when it will be available. The document also walks us through how to set up an eSIM as your primary phone number. First and foremost, Apple says Dual SIM support will not be available at launch, instead it will ship “with an update to iOS 12 coming later this year....

Apple iTunes 10.5 is brand new, released just a day before the Apple iOS planned launch tomorrow. It includes the final version, it says, of iTunes in the Cloud. This give you features like automatic downloading of previous purchases and WiFi syncing. Interestingly, iTunes 10.5 doesn’t require or even include the old Apple standby QuickTime. To upgrade iTunes on your PC, launch iTunes and go to Help » Check for Updates...

Well, finally Apple fans can have a breath of respite. They can now pre-order the new iPhone XR. Last month Apple released its 2018 line-up of iPhones. Out of which iPhone XR was center of many discussions and debates. Now, the Apple iPhone XR pre-order begins, but currently, only members with the upgrade program can order it. Also Read Fix: Apple Wallet Not Showing Add Card Option If you are a part of the Upgrade Program, you can simply use the Store app for the pre-approval application....

As the heated legal saga between Apple and Qualcomm only continues to intensify, the California chipmaker is now insisting that after asking Chinese courts to impose an all-out iPhone ban in the region, it won’t rule out imposing Chinese civil procedure to fine or detain legal representatives from Apple for disobeying the sales ban, according to Global Times China. Further, the company is said to be dissatisfied with Apple’s flippancy towards the Chinese injunction as compared to the recent German one, which saw Apple immediately ban sales of iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 in the country....

As it does every year, Apple has today made its WWDC 2018 video transcripts available. This means interested developers can now quickly search through content from WWDC sessions, as opposed to having to watch each video… Apple’s transcripts are linked directly with each video, meaning developers can search in the transcript and then immediately jump to that part of the video. You can also see al instances where a keyword is mentioned and share time stamped links....

Only a few days after “father of the iPod” Tony Fadell agreed to sell thermostat and smoke detector maker Nest to Google for north of three billion dollars, Apple senior vice president (and former Fadell colleague) Phil Schiller has unfollowed the Nest CEO and the Nest company on Twitter. Here’s Schiller’s following list from a recent cache: And here’s Schiller’s following list now: As the protector of Apple’s brand, Schiller’s unfollowing of Fadell and Nest is perhaps unsurprising....

Due to local regulatory rules, FaceTime is blocked on iPhone and iPad devices sold in UAE countries including Abu Dhabi and Dubai. This has been the case for many years. Obviously, the appeal of Apple’s ecosystem is stunted when features like FaceTime are unavailable. There are promising signs that, soon, the ban will be lifted. Apple is in active negotiations with the United Arab Emirates federal government to permit the use of internet video-chat services on its devices, enabling FaceTime to be unlocked for Apple customers....

For Black Friday, Apple has refreshed the frontpage of its online store with a rather-drastic redesign. Each product category now dominates the webpage, with full-bleed images of their main product lines. The new iPad updates get the top spot, but interestingly Apple TV and Beats headphones also get prime placement. In fact, the product images for Beats accessories are so large, it only takes four images to dominate the screen....

Apple was today granted a patent for devices with a curved glass sidewall with virtual buttons, switches and information displayed on the edge of the device. This approach is the same as that used by Samsung on its Galaxy Edge devices, and a less radical version of an earlier Apple patent for a full wraparound curved display. However, before anyone suggests that Samsung should sue Apple for copying its idea, it should be noted that Apple first applied for the patent in May 2014, almost a full year before Samsung launched its first Edge device, the Galaxy S6 Edge …...

Apple is readying some upgrades to its iCloud Photos web app found on iCloud.com, first noted by MacMagazine. The Photos web app allows users to access their iCloud Photo Library through a web browser, across Mac and Windows computers. However, it is somewhat rudimentary in its current state … but the beta.icloud.com site now includes a redesigned Photos app featuring a sidebar and thumbnail scrubber like what already exist in the native Photos app for Mac....

Apple has introduced a new “billing grace period” feature that it hopes will improve the customer experience for subscriptions in the App Store. Announced on the Apple Developer website, the feature aims to help users affected by unsuccessful auto-renewals of subscriptions. Apple explains that when a user’s subscription renewal fails, it will now attempt to collect payment from the user, but allow them to continue accessing the service during that process....

A Florida man claims that one of his AirPods started smoking while he was listening to music. As reported by WFLA, Tampa resident Jason Colon was working out at his local gym when he noticed his right AirPod “billowing” smoke… Colon says that once he realized the smoke emerging from his AirPod, he quickly took them out and sat them on the gym machine and went to seek help. When he returned, the right AirPod had burst open and showed “flame damage....