Chance is the editor-in-chief of 9to5Mac, helping oversee and manage coverage for the entire staff of 9to5Mac writers. He first joined 9to5Mac in 2013 and has published daily coverage of Apple and related topics since then.
Over the years, Chance has worked alongside his 9to5Mac colleagues to publish industry-leading stories about Apple. In the spring of 2020, Chance and the 9to5Mac team exclusively reported a variety of upcoming iOS 14 features prior to the official announcement from Apple.
In addition to serving as Lead Editor of 9to5Mac, Chance is also the host of the 9to5Mac Daily podcast. Published five days per week, 9to5Mac Daily is a recap of the day’s Apple news in 5-10 minutes. You can subscribe to 9to5Mac Daily on Apple Podcasts, Overcast or via the dedicated RSS feed right here.
Chance is also a guest host on the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast with Benjamin Mayo and Zac Hall.
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Apple Music Replay 2024 is now rolling out. This is Apple’s “top songs by year” playlist that it makes available to Apple Music subscribers at the beginning of every year. The playlist then updates every week, tracking your most-played songs throughout the course of the entire year.
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Update: Apple has refreshed its System Status webpage to confirm an ongoing outage affecting iCloud Mail and iCloud.com. There’s no timeline on when the outages will be fixed.
Apple’s iCloud services are experiencing another outage, the third outage to affect Apple’s platforms in the past four days. This time, the outages are impacting iCloud Mail, the iCloud website, Apple Pay, and more.
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iOS 18 will mark Apple’s annual iPhone software update for 2024 and will be full of changes. The update has been described as being “ambitious and compelling” with major new features and design changes planned. Read on for a recap of everything we know about iOS 18’s new features so far.
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Ulysses is one of my favorite writing and text apps, and it’s getting even better with an update this week. Ulysses version 34, which is available now, adds support for home screen and lock screen widgets, as well as a new Templates group for when you’re managing projects.
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In addition to not letting you rearrange home screen icons, visionOS 1.0 also doesn’t support the ability to pin web apps to the home screen. This limitation was pointed out by Brian Tong in his excellent Vision Pro review on YouTube.
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Ming-Chi Kuo is out with a new investor note today focused on his predictions for the iPhone in 2024. The Apple analyst says his latest supply chain survey suggests Apple has “lowered its 2024 iPhone shipments of key upstream semiconductor components to about 200 million units.”
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One of the Vision Pro features I’m most excited to try is using it as an external display for my Mac. While I wait on my Vision Pro to arrive on Friday, some of the early reviews published today offer our first look at this feature in practice.
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The first Vision Pro reviews are here. In addition to a real-world look at the product itself, these reviews and videos also give us a first look at Vision Pro’s packaging and what’s included in the box. Head below for a look from MKBHD.
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Microsoft isn’t thrilled with Apple’s proposed changes to the App Store and the iPhone in the European Union. The company says Apple’s proposed changes are a “step in the wrong direction,” echoing criticism from the likes of Spotify and Epic Games.
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Apple released the first beta of tvOS 17.4 this month, and it includes another reference to a long-rumored Apple operating system: homeOS. Whether or not this actually means anything about Apple’s future smart home plans, however, remains to be seen…
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If you’re looking to take your desk setup to the next level, this is the guide for you. Head below for some of my favorite products that can improve your working setup, ranging from accessories to decorations and more. All of the things on this list are things I’ve personally used and can vouch for.
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Developer Finn Voorhees has released a really great new video upscaling app that works across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Unsqueeze is designed to increase the resolution of your videos “while preserving sharpness and details.”
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As promised, Zoom will be available on Apple Vision Pro from day one. Ahead of Vision Pro’s launch on Friday, Zoom has shared new details on its visionOS app, which it says is designed “to make hybrid collaboration more immersive.”
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Meta is reportedly banking on the launch of Apple Vision Pro helping boost its own VR headset business. A new report from The Wall Street Journal, which cites “people familiar” with the matter, says that Meta is hoping Vision Pro will “reinvigorate its $50 billion metaverse effort, which consumers have yet to widely embrace.”
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iOS 18 is slated to be announced at WWDC in June, and it’s shaping up to be a big update with a ton of new artificial intelligence features. In a new report today, Bloomberg once again says Apple sees iOS 18 as “one of the biggest iOS updates — if not the biggest — in the company’s history.”
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Apple veteran DJ Novotney is departing the company for a new role at Rivian, according to a report from Bloomberg. Novotney, a vice president of hardware engineering, has spent almost 25 years at Apple and worked across multiple generations of the iPod, the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and more. His LinkedIn page hasn’t yet been updated, but he is shown pictured next to a Rivian.
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There’s another small but notable change coming to the App Store. Apple has revised its App Store guidelines to remove the requirement that apps using third-party log-in options such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter must also use Sign in with Apple.
There is, however, a big asterisk to this change. While developers aren’t technically required to use Sign in with Apple, they are required to offer an “additional login service with certain privacy features.”
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Update, 7:51pm ET: Apple has updated its System Status webpage to say that Apple Music, the App Store, and several other platforms are also experiencing outages.
If you’re having trouble accessing the App Store on your iPhone or iPad, you’re not alone. The App Store seems to be experiencing an outage, based on complaints from affected users on social media.
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Update, 7:19pm ET: In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple fires back at Spotify’s claims.
“We’re happy to support the success of all developers — including Spotify, which has the most successful music streaming app in the world. The changes we’re sharing for apps in the European Union give developers choice — with new options to distribute iOS apps and process payments. Every developer can choose to stay on the same terms in place today. And under the new terms, more than 99% of developers would pay the same or less to Apple.”
Apple is facing more criticism for its announced its plan about how it plans to comply with the Digital Markets Act in the European Union. After pushback from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and the Coalition for App Fairness, both Spotify and Mozilla have also now come out against Apple’s plans.
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Given recent reports that Goldman Sachs is looking to bail on its partnership with Apple, I thought it would be interesting to do a breakdown of the increasingly messy relationship between the two companies. After forging their partnership in 2019, Apple appears to have thrived while Goldman Sachs has suffered.
Here is a full timeline of the relationship between Apple and Goldman Sachs.
Updated January 26, 2024 with new details
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Yesterday, Apple announced some major changes to the App Store and the broader iPhone platform in the European Union, including support for alternative app marketplaces. There’s one piece of nuance that Apple is now clarifying.
Some of these changes are coming to all of Apple’s platforms, while others are coming only to the iPhone and not the iPad.
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Apple is widely expected to unveil major new artificial intelligence features with iOS 18 in June. Code found by 9to5Mac in the first beta of iOS 17.4 shows that Apple is continuing to work on a new version of Siri powered by large language model technology, with a little help from other sources.
In fact, Apple appears to be using OpenAI’s ChatGPT API for internal testing to help the development of its own AI models.
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Yesterday, Apple announced that iPhone users in the EU will be prompted to choose a default web browser when they open Safari for the first time after updating to iOS 17.4. The company has now shared more details on this process.
Apple tells me that the popup message in iOS 17.4 will show a list of the 12 most popular browsers from the App Store in that country. That list will be presented in random order for each user.
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It’s been a very busy day here at 9to5Mac. Apple released the first beta of iOS 17.4 with a slew of changes for the App Store and its ecosystem in the European Union, but there are some other changes that are available for everyone. Head below for a roundup of everything new in iOS 17.4 so far.
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