Apple Inc on Monday unveiled a music streaming service called iTunes Radio and new mobile software in the biggest redesign of its operating system since the original iPhone was introduced in 2007.
The new software, designated iOS 7 and announced at Apple’s annual developers’ conference in San Francisco, sports a streamlined design, employs translucency and a fresh palette of colors, and features animation in apps.
Apple’s iTunes Radio, one of the more highly anticipated features of the new iOS 7, comes free, supported by ads across many devices, including iPhones, iPads and the Apple TV.
Much like rival Pandora Media Inc’s Internet radio, the service — which launches in the fall, months after Google Inc’s “All Access” on-demand competitor debuted — allows listeners to customize their own radio stations by genre, skip songs multiple times, or just tune in to about 200 featured stations.
Apple has been talking to record companies for the past year in hopes of getting the service off the ground, seen as crucial to retaining users as music consumption grows alongside smartphone use. It will also come free of ads for customers who subscribe to Match, another Apple music service.
Executives also showed off a new line of Macbook Air computers. They gave a sneak peek at a cylindrical Mac Pro desktop, in a rare preview of upcoming hardware.
The latest Macs will run a new computer operating system christened OSX Mavericks. It will be released later this year and be assembled in the US, marketing chief Phil Schiller said.
“Can’t innovate any more, my ass,” Schiller said as he showed off the new Mac Pro. “This is a machine unlike anything we’ve ever made.”
Among some of the other features introduced was “activation lock,” an anti-theft security enhancement that prevents unauthorized resetting of the device.
Smartphone thieves are set to have a harder time after Apple introduces an “activation lock” feature in its new mobile software, a move that comes amid pressure from authorities and consumers for companies to do more to stem a tide of smartphone theft.
The new feature will require a legitimate owner’s ID and password before an iPhone can be wiped clean or reactivated after being remotely erased, Apple said.
The company plans to release iOS 7 in the fall. It will support multitasking for all apps.
“It’s the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said.
Cook is under pressure to show that the company that created the smartphone and tablet markets is not slowing as deep-pocketed competitors like Samsung Electronics Co and Google encroach on its market. In April, Apple reported its first quarterly profit decline in more than a decade.
Cook told the audience of developers that Apple’s App Store now has 900,000 apps that have been downloaded a total of 50 billion times.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the