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Ahead of the World Cup final tomorrow between France and Croatia, Apple is joining the fun. The company has overhauled both its French and Croatian websites with a short soccer-themed videos… As first spotted by French Apple news website iPhoneAddict, Apple’s homepage in France now plays a short 3-second video featuring floating soccer balls and the French flag. Once the video has played once, the regular Apple homepage appears in seamless fashion....

Apple confirmed today that iTunes Connect will be unavailable for a five-day period lasting from December 23 to 27. The pre-announced shut down is part of Apple’s annual time off period for app reviewers at the company. For developers, this means any changes being planned during that period should be in place ahead of time and new app and update submissions should be handled days in advance. For customers, it means the App Store won’t be updating for a few days aside from scheduled releases while the App Store team takes a break....

As someone who’s been managing iPads and Macs for a long time, I know there are a lot of “nooks” where settings are in various mobile device management systems. I’ve learned a lot of things through trial and error as the platforms have evolved, but that isn’t useful for new technicians. A new book was recently published that I feel is essential for anyone who works with Apple products in the enterprise....

Apple today has acquired the rights to the insanely popular Carpool Karaoke series that started out as a part of The Late Late Show with James Corden on CBS. While it’s unclear how much Apple has paid for the series, it will release new episodes of it via the Apple Music, reports THR. For those unfamiliar, Carpool Karaoke is an idea thought up by Corden that sees him drive around in a car with a celebrity or musician and sing along to popular songs....

Apple has just unveiled its new premium News service featuring premium newspaper and magazines for $9.99 a month. The service is branded as News+ and is available today with the release of the new iOS and macOS software updates. $9.99 includes family sharing, so you can share with up to six Family members at no extra cost. The service is integrated directly into the News app and features magazines from National Geographic, Popular Science, New Yorker, Vogue, Rolling Stone and more....

After over a week of back and forth, Apple and Qualcomm presented closing arguments today as part of their patent infringement suit in San Diego. Qualcomm zeroed in on a certain patent, while Apple argued Qualcomm is mad it switched to Intel for iPhone modems. As a quick refresher, the trial centers on three patents, which Qualcomm alleges Apple infringed upon on certain versions of the iPhone. One patent relates to how quickly a device reconnects to the internet after booting up....

Apple is moving forward with a larger version of its iPad tablet and it is working with Quanta Computer for manufacturing, according to United Daily News (via Macotakara). UDN does not have a substantial record in Apple reporting, but it is one of Taiwan’s most prominent newspapers. Today’s report refers to the larger iPad design as featuring a 12-inch display, though recent rumors have pegged the screen-size as closer to 13-inches…...

After many complaints from the developer community about poor networking performance on Yosemite, the latest beta of OS X 10.10.4 has dropped discoveryd in favor of the old process used by previous versions of the Mac operating system. This should address many of the network stability issues introduced with Yosemite and its new networking stack. The discoveryd process has been subject to much criticism in recent months as it causes users to regularly drop WiFi access and causes network shares to list many times over, due to bugs....

Marking the 30th anniversary since Apple gave us the Mac, Macworld spoke with Apple’s Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Bud Tribble to discuss the Mac in an era dominated by the iPhone and iPad. The execs looked back at the Mac’s impact on the PC market and its historical significance for the company, and while they acknowledged the success of iOS, insisted the Mac has a permanent place in the hardware lineup....

Apple has filed a lawsuit today against virtualization company Corellium. For those unfamiliar, Corellium allows users to virtualize iOS, pitching it as a research tool for security experts. Apple, however, says Corellium’s “true goal is profiting off its blatant infringement.” Essentially, Corellium allows researchers to run software only virtualizations of iOS. This opens up a new set of capabilities for security researchers, as they can do things like pause the operating system completely (via Bloomberg)....

Apple’s $3B acquisition of Beats was never going to be completed overnight, and it’s only today that Apple actually completed its purchase of the 13 percent of the company that was owned by Vivendi/Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record label. In a one-sentence press release, Vivendi announced that the sale of its shares had been completed for a total of $404M. It was expected that Apple would have acquired all of the Beats shares by the end of September, but based on the formal welcome message, it appears this may complete the sale....

. More fun stuff surfaced today from the Apple vs. Samsung trial. Pictured above are Samsung’s sales numbers for its smartphones in the U.S. Perhaps most surprisingly is that Samsung’s best selling phone by unit number is Boost Mobile’s Samsung Prevail, which sold 2.255 million units. Finishing in second and third were the Samsung Epic 4G and the Galaxy S2 Epic Touch both on Sprint. That means Samsung’s top three devices were on Sprint’s network....

Apple has apparently updated its Apple TV trademark with new conditions related to gaming. Patently Apple reports today that the company filed an updated trademark last Friday to cover gaming use cases, a move that the site calls “a significant update that has to be taken seriously.” The new trademark, made public today, was filed solely under the “Internationalal class 028” which exclusively covers video games. Here’s the legal jargon with the specific (but still vague) categories it covers:...

Whoa, Apple has reconsidered its stance on in-app subscriptions and has changed strict guidelines of its iOS developer agreement to allow in-app subscriptions outside the App Store. MacRumors spotted a crucial change in section 11.13 which previously required that content sold outside of the app be “also offered in the app using In-App Purchase at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app”. This requirement, which applied to both purchased content and subscriptions, is no longer in effect and has been entirely removed from section 11....

One month after his last drone flyover of Apple’s under construction Apple Campus 2 site, Matthew Roberts has sent over an update for July that gives an up-close look at progress in recent weeks. In the video, we see Apple is making rapid progress towards reaching its goal of completing construction by the end of the year. As for the main circular building on the site, Apple has made noticeable progress on the installation infrastructure for solar panels and fuel cells, and it’s also continued installing the massive glass panels and canopies— the world’s largest— that make up the interior and exterior of round ‘spaceship’ structure....

It appears that most of the foundation is laid now in an update from a video taken by a drone two weeks ago. Apple CEO Tim Cook has called Apple’s Campus 2 the ‘Greenest in the World’. The controversial structure which will house 12,000 staff in 2.8M square feet on 176 acres and is estimated to be completed in 2016. Interestingly, even though Apple is covering the construction site with a high green wall, it is updating the 3D flyover of the location in Apple Maps somewhat frequently....

Apple’s Chief Information Officer Niall O’Connor visited Bangalore in January, according to The Economic Times, and the senior officials at technology firms Infosys and Wipro made sure he received the full-treatment upon landing in India. Apple is supposedly looking to “quadruple the amount it spends in India, making it all the more covetous for Infosys and Wipro.” The CIO will decide which Indian companies get software outsourcing orders and maintenance work worth about $100 million USD (490 crore), which is roughly 20 percent of the Cupertino, Calif....

Apple yesterday updated Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor for macOS with new features to detect media files that may be unsupported on future versions of macOS. Today, Apple has updated a support document with additional details about incompatible media files for Final Cut Pro X and Motion projects. Last year, Apple warned users about macOS legacy media support with future versions of macOS. Today’s updated support document sheds more light on the upcoming changes....

As we await more details on Apple Silicon and the upcoming iPad Air, Apple executives Tim Millet and Tom Boger recently joined Relay FM’s Upgrade podcast to talk about the Mac and iPad lineups, including details on the A14 processor, how the iPad used internally at Apple, and much more. Millet serves as Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, while Boger is the company’s senior director of Mac and iPad product marketing....

Apple typically holds a single developer event each year, WWDC in San Francisco around June, but sometimes uses Tech Talks to bring developer events around the world at other parts of the year. With Apple TV’s App Store launching several months after WWDC 2015 and long before WWDC 2016, Apple has announced that it will host 11 Tech Talk sessions across 10 different cities around the world. Apple describes the sessions as a way to “Get in-depth guidance from Apple experts on developing and designing for tvOS, in a city near you....