Apple on Thursday launched a new Spanish App Store Twitter account. Followers of the account will get information on new apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. […]

The initiative is now prioritizing the development of an autonomous driving system, though it’s not abandoning efforts to designing Apple’s own vehicle. That leaves options open should the company eventually decide to partner with or acquire an established car maker, rather than building a car itself. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

This is an option Shawn King has repeatedly said since rumors of an Apple car began. It’s certainly an appealing alternative for Apple if they could sell their software to car companies around the world.

The tech titan plans to open an Apple Store in the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, according to Jason Barlia, head of Apple’s marketing for New York stores. He spoke at the opening of Apple’s first Brooklyn store.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple started talking with the Walt Disney Company in early 2015 about getting Disney-owned content onto its then-planned streaming television service, but Apple executives, iTunes chief Eddy Cue in particular, made demands networks were not prepared to meet.

It makes it sound as though Eddy’s tough tactics are holding Apple back from this market. I don’t buy this at all. Remember, Eddy negotiated music for the iTunes store, which is incredibly popular. We want Eddy to be tough when negotiating deals that we’ll end up paying for, either in purchasing content or subscriptions.

Keep being tough Eddy, we’ll wait for a good deal that we’re willing to pay for.

When you look at the other products, the iPhone is absolutely amazing.

Woven throughout the micro-biographies are visual factoids like a timeline of notable events in the history of women in science, statistics about the alarming gender gap in STEM fields, and a visual taxonomy of lab tools.

Mercedes-Benz has defended an advertising campaign for its new E-Class against allegations that consumers were being misled about the car’s self-driving capabilities, the latest backlash by consumer groups in the wake of a fatal Tesla accident.

People need to understand that they are responsible for the vehicle at all times. If they can’t grasp that simple concept, they shouldn’t be driving in the first place.

Apple has now sold its 1 billionth iPhone—Tim Cook made the announcement this morning at an employee meeting, according to the company. It is absolutely amazing that Apple has sold 1 billion iPhones in just 9 years. […]

These are pretty cool.

Apple Map users will be able to view key information about parking garages and lots around the world. In addition, users will have the option to click through to Parkopedia’s website and iOS app to view more detailed information including pricing, user reviews, special offers and real-time space availability. They will also be able to make reservations.

This is a great addition to Maps.

Take better photos without extra effort! Microsoft Pix has serious intelligence behind the lens, so it can automatically tweak settings for each shot, and immediately enhance your photos, to help people and scenes look their best. Now you can just enjoy the moment, instead of struggling to capture it! Point. Shoot. Perfect.

This sounds really interesting—I’ll give it a try. Designed for iPhone and iPad

Upthere, a little-known startup founded by former Apple software gurus, thinks it can do far better than Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Box, and others when it comes to quickly storing, organizing, and searching digital photos, videos, and more.

This new company was co-founded by Bertrand Serlet, the former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple. This is going to be really fun to watch. I would not count these guys out.

BB was so great. This is also one of my favorite songs.

iMore did their usual transcript of the earnings call, which is always good.

Apple on Tuesday announced its fiscal third-quarter results. The company posted quarterly revenue of $42.4 billion and quarterly net income of $7.8 billion, down from the $49.6 billion revenue and profit of $10.7 billion reported in the year-ago quarter. […]

Apple has emerged as the surprise buyer of the unscripted TV series based on the “Carpool Karaoke” segment of CBS’ “The Late Late Show with James Corden.”

I’ll admit to being a little surprised.

Under the deal, Vizio will be operated as an independent subsidiary, with the company’s current management team staying in place and working out of its offices in Southern California. Vizio’s data business, Inscape, will be spun out into a privately held company, with Vizio CEO William Wang serving as chairman and CEO. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

The smartphone platform wars are pretty much over, and Apple and Google won. But it’s interesting, in passing, to note the final score, and think about what it means.

Some good work from Benedict Evans.

The world’s biggest online retailer, which has laid out plans to start using drones for deliveries by 2017, said a cross-government team supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority had provided it with the permissions necessary to explore the process.

I just don’t know about this whole thing.

Recently, there has been a virtual tsunami of articles about the so-called hidden dangers of using the Pokémon GO app. The vast majority of them concern potential violations of the privacy rights of both consumers and landmark-owners. The media’s Chicken Little-like take on this is that augmented reality apps are opening the door to a dystopian future.

However, what has not been widely discussed is the impact of all this on the developers of augmented reality apps.

There are so many things to consider, it’s almost mind boggling.

Dan Frakes:

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of OS X you’re running on your Mac. It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems.

Dan takes you through all the steps using Terminal.

Many people suffer from depression—some people are in so deep, they don’t even know it. Sometimes it takes strong people like Robert Macmillan telling their story to make you realize that you’re not alone. If you know someone suffering from depression, help them.

There are many of us—errr, people—who build stuff with Legos at all ages. Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a Lego Wall-E sitting on my desk right now), I started to wonder how Legos evolved from the sets I remember from my childhood to what they are today.

Everyone loves Lego.

[Via Coudal]

Bob Mansfield had stepped back from a day-to-day role at the company a few years ago, after leading the hardware engineering development of products including the MacBook Air laptop computer, the iMac desktop computer, and the iPad tablet. Apple now has Mr. Mansfield running the company’s secret autonomous, electric-vehicle initiative, code-named Project Titan, the people said.

Mansfield is a very smart guy and is well respected inside and outside of Apple.

Chuck La Tournous:

I’ll begin this story the same way I began the phone call to my wife: “I’m OK, but…”

I’ve known Chuck for a long and he’s a friend. I’m glad you’re okay!

Law enforcement agents had seen a YouTube demonstration of a technique developed by Jain’s lab which could transform fingerprint scans into fake fingertips that could fool the sensors on smartphones.

You certainly can’t blame law enforcement for using every trick they can.

There is no doubt that Musk is a very smart man. He went way out on a limb building the things he has over the last decade and he’s succeeded.

Two youths unaware of their surroundings when they were playing Pokemon GO on their cell phones made an illegal border crossing this week from Canada into the United States in a remote part of Montana, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said.

The weirdness goes on.

Om Malik:

As an avid reader, I am often amazed how much of our written materials are about the past (or the near past) and the future (and the near future) but never about the present. Is present too boring? Or is too real? Or is it too incomplete to merit a careful and long deliberation.

That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t really considered that before.

It’s really interesting that they retain knowledge of the people in these experiments, and reacted to other crows and predators, but not pigeons.