Benjamin Mayo

In a rare move, Apple today launched a special Apple Store promotion in the United States. You can now buy either the Apple TV 4K or Apple TV HD and get a $50 gift card with your purchase. The price of the Apple TV box is unchanged; $179 or $149 respectively.

Customers looking for raw value for money will probably still prefer a sub-$50 streaming stick from competitors like the Amazon Fire Stick, however. A $50 gift card is nice assuming you were planning on buying an Apple TV already, but be aware you only have two weeks to take advantage of the deal.

Apple TV+ is coming to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time. The company announced today it will be holding panels for Severance, For All Mankind, Mythic Quest, as well as a “storytellers of Apple TV+” roundtable featuring producing talent from For All Mankind, Invasion, Mythic Quest, See, and Foundation.

Apple is also hosting a special Severance experience event for con attendees. At the Hard Rock Hotel, attendees will be induced into Lumon industries and taken through a tour of their first day as a severed worker.

The Apple TV set-top box has gained a significant new app to its roster today. Comcast today released the Xfinity Stream app for tvOS, supporting Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD devices.

The app’s launch was first teased back in October 2021, when a partnership between Apple and Comcast also brought Apple TV app to Comcast cable boxes.

At WWDC, much of the attention was on the fancy next-generation CarPlay Apple previewed, but those experiences won’t appear in cars for several years.

Near term, something new for CarPlay in iOS 16 is the addition of new supported app categories for “fuel and driving tasks,” according to the iOS 16 feature preview page. A report from Reuters today says that some gas station chains are already preparing to take advantage of this and allow drivers to pay for fuel through the car’s infotainment center.

In 2020, Apple overhauled its gift card system with a new singular Apple Gift Card that can be used for hardware purchases at the Apple Store, or digital Apple services and software purchases in the App Store.

This unified gift card came to Canada and Australia in 2021. And today Apple Gift Card is now available in Europe, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and more (first spotted by iCulture).

When beta 1 of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 dropped earlier this month, based on code findings and wording on Apple’s official feature preview website page, it seemed that the iPad will no longer be a supported device to act as as a HomeKit home hub.

However, in a new statement to The Verge, Apple says this isn’t correct. Apple says iPads can continue to be home hubs in iPadOS 16 “with no loss of functionality”. However, you won’t get any new functionality either …

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released some interesting information on Twitter today. Kuo said that his latest supply-side surveys are indicating that Apple has been unable to develop a custom 5G modem of its own, in time for the 2023 iPhone series (iPhone 15).

Due to the apparent development delays, Kuo believes that Apple will resort to using Qualcomm modems for the 2023 iPhones once again. Previously, Qualcomm executives had warned investors that it expected to lose up to 80% of the Apple business by 2023, as Apple planned to use its own chips instead.

Apple TV+ debuted its new comedy series Loot last week, starring Maya Rudolph. Following the premiere, Apple has also announced that it has struck a deal with Rudolph’s production company Animal Pictures.

Animal Pictures is headed up by Rudolph, Natasha Lyonne and Danielle Renfrew Behrens. Other notable output from Animal Pictures includes Russian Doll on Netflix.

Apple has released a company statement in response to today’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, which paves the way for states to make abortion illegal.

Apple said it supports employee’s rights to make their own choices about their reproductive health. It reiterated that its company health benefits include paying for out-of-state travel for procedures, if care is unavailable in their own state.

The default video player gets a big upgrade with iOS 16 and iPadOS 16. The redesign brings a drastically modernized UI, as well as some new features and enhancements.

Apple uses the system video player in all of its apps, of course, but many third-party apps do too so these changes take effect across your entire iPhone and iPad experience. Here’s everything new to try in the iOS 16 video player.

Update: In a statement to 9to5Mac, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed this was a glitch that has been fixed.

The Apple Music skill for Amazon Alexa speakers has mysteriously disappeared in the United States and several other regions. Several 9to5Mac readers today noticed that asking their Echo to play Apple Music was failing, and the skill is not available to re-add either.

It’s unclear if this is a temporary glitch or an intentional move. As the skill is still available in the UK and some other markets, it seems more like a bug. However, we could not get official confirmation at time of writing of the true cause.

Apple today announced a major new sports streaming deal. Following on from its MLB Friday Night Baseball deal on Apple TV+, the company today announced that it will be the exclusive streaming destination to watch Major League Soccer games, in the US and internationally, starting with the 2023 season.

Unlike Friday Night Baseball, watching the games will require a separate subscription to an MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app.

The hero changes to iMessage in iOS 16 are the addition of edit button and undo send features. However, there’s also another enhancement that Apple didn’t mention on stage: the dreaded Tapback spam in SMS group chats has been resolved.

Apple is now using a very similar strategy to the hacky workaround that Google rolled out earlier this year to tackle the same problem for Android users receiving Tapback messages from iPhone users …

Catching up to feature request from at least five years ago, the Photos app will finally let you lock your Hidden photos album with your passcode or biometrics.

In previous versions of iOS, marking a photo as Hidden merely removed it from the main camera roll, and put it in a separate bucket available in the albums list. But prying eyes could just tap on it to reveal them.