According to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Apple is in talks with banks in the United States on a brand new person-to-person mobile payment service that would be rival to PayPal’s Venmo platform and could launch as soon as 2016.
According to people familiar with the ongoing talks, it's unknown at this stage whether any of the banks have cut a deal with the iPhone maker and how the rumored service would tie into the banking industry’s existing infrastructure.
Apple’s rumored electric project, code-named Project Titan, has sped up development as the Cupertino company now targets 2019 as a prospective shipping date, The Wall Street Journal said Monday.
In fact, Apple has internally designating the rumored electric vehicle as a “committed project” after it spent more than a year investigating the feasibility of an Apple-branded car, including meetings with two groups of government officials in California.
In a new interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple design chief Jony Ive reveals that the company spoke to Hermès regarding a possible Apple Watch partnership before the product was announced to the public last fall. "It’s something highly unusual for Apple to do—to talk about an unannounced project,” he explained.
For those who missed the news on Wednesday, Apple unveiled an all new Hermès edition of the Apple Watch that starts at $1,100. The device features custom watch faces, and a Hermès leather band that's available in multiple colors and three different styles: double tour, single tour and cuff.
An interview with the world renown designer and recent Apple-hire Marc Newson popped up in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, covering a wide range of topics. The discussion yielded a number of interesting tidbits, including Newson's thoughts on automotive design.
When asked what his design pet-peeve is, News responds unapologetically "the automotive industry." He goes on to elaborate, "there were moments when cars somehow encapsulated everything that was good about progress. But right now we’re at the bottom of a trough."
According to a report Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal newspaper, Apple is putting high hopes into a forthcoming mid-cycle “S”-upgrade to the present-generation iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones.
The company apparently believes that an 'iPhone 6s' and 'iPhone 6s Plus' which, among other things, sport new color options and Force Touch technology for sensing deep presses on the screen, should prove massively popular as it reportedly ordered its suppliers to build a record 90 million units this year.
Contradicting a February 2015 report which asserted that Beats Music would get folded into a new on-demand streaming music subscription service, The Wall Street Journal said Monday that Beats Music will be maintained as a standalone service once Apple launches its new music $10 per month offering at WWDC next week.
Apple, the world’s leading music retailer, is apparently “prepared to cannibalize its download business in favor of streaming.” As part of an all-in bet, Apple may prompt people “who download a $10 album to instead subscribe to the streaming service for $10 a month.”
The new “set of music services” will cost $10 per month, like Spotify, and is said to include “augmented Internet radio” with DJs.
Faulty Taptic Engines may be behind the extremely limited availability of the Apple Watch, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the publication says that after mass production of the Engines began in February, quality testing found some of them to be unreliable.
The component, which Apple uses in its Watch to produce the sensation of being tapped on the wrist, is made by two suppliers: AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. and Nidec Corp. Apparently some of AAC's Taptic Engines were found to break down overtime, so Apple has moved a majority of its production over to Nidec.
The top court of the European Union has determined that e-books shouldn't be treated like their printed counterparts when it comes to taxes and therefore should be subject to higher tax rates, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
“But the European Commission signaled it may change the rules next year to allow for equal taxation of books in any form,” reads the report.
Apple's focus on designing iPhone and iPad processors in-house is reportedly expanding with news that CEO Tim Cook's visit to Israel this week is linked to efforts to increase its own chip design prowess, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Cook earlier in the week met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
He met with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and is expected to meet with former President Shimon Peres later this week. The newspaper added that Apple' hired most of the Israeli employees of a chip-design division that Texas Instruments shut down in 2013 in Ra’anana, some 10 miles north of Tel-Aviv.
Apple has commission its suppliers to build five to six million Watch units in the first quarter of 2015, ahead of its April release, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported Tuesday.
Taiwan-based Quanta Computer Inc is the main assembler of the wrist-worn device. Half of the first-quarter production order is earmarked for the entry-level $349 Apple Watch Sport model, or about three million units.
Following its report last week alleging that Apple and Alibaba are currently ironing out specifics of an upcoming Apple Pay partnership in China, The Wall Street Journal on Monday published an interview with Alibaba CEO Jack Ma who explained why such a deal would be hugely beneficial to the iPhone maker.
Long story short, the Apple-Alibaba deal would help avoid any regulatory scrutiny that Apple would be subjected to as a new financial player in China.
Following reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook during last month's visit to China discussed a rumored mobile payments partnership with UnionPay, The Wall Street Journal said Tuesday that the Cupertino firm met with Alibaba's Jack Ma to reportedly iron out an Apple Pay alliance with the popular Chinese e-commerce company.
This could give Apple Pay a major boost in the 1.4 billion people country. Alibaba, founded in 1999, is the world’s largest online marketplace and has a commanding 80 percent market share in the country.
The company raised a whopping $231 billion during its initial public offering. Cook at the WSJ Digital conference last month hinted (the full uncut interview now available) that his company was in talks with Alibaba regarding partnering on Apple Pay.