MacRumors

A new Apple wireless keyboard featuring backlight keys and a power button has been spotted on the Apple Online Store in Czech Republic and Hungary, with an identical Arabic version appearing on the U.S. storefront. The graphic render shows controls for adjusting the brightness of the backlight added to the F5 and F6 keys, as found on current MacBook models, while the eject key for CDs has been replaced with a power button.

Apple has not updated the product description for its wireless keyboard to match the new visualization, so it remains to be seen if this was simply a mistake or if the company will quietly refresh the keyboard in the near future. The old Apple Wireless Keyboard with no backlight keys and an eject key is still shown on the Apple Online Store in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries.

The addition of a power button on the keyboard is interesting, given that Macs currently do not detect wireless keyboards until after booting. It could be speculated that the power button is for turning on or off the wireless keyboard itself, but additional photos reveal that the keyboard still has a power button on the side in its traditional spot. As such, the exact functionality of the key remains unknown.

Update Mar 24: Apple has removed images of the new Apple Wireless Keyboard with backlight keys and a power button on the Apple Online Store in Czech Republic and Hungary. Graphic renders of the current Apple Wireless Keyboard with no backlight controls and an eject key are now showing again.

(Thanks, Roman!)

Apple continues to offer praise for Becoming Steve Jobs, the unauthorized biography of the late Apple co-founder set to be released on Tuesday. A spokesperson for Apple told The New York Times that the upcoming book is "better than anything else we've seen," and several executives at the company agreed to be interviewed for the title because they "felt a responsibility to say more" about the Steve that they knew and worked with.

“After a long period of reflection following Steve’s death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew,” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said. “We decided to participate in Brent and Rick’s book because of Brent’s long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve’s life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we’ve seen, and we are happy we decided to participate.”

Apple senior executive Eddy Cue tweeted last week that Becoming Steve Jobs is "well done and first to get it right" in regards to reflecting on Jobs, after he called the film Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine "an inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend." Apple CEO Tim Cook also dismissed Walter Isaacson's official biography of Jobs as a “tremendous disservice” to the Steve that he knew, adding that “the person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time.”

While it appears that Apple is now set on changing the narrative surrounding Jobs posthumously, the company initially showed no interest in participating in Becoming Steve Jobs, co-written by authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, executive editor of Fast Company. Apple refused to provide the tech journalists with interviews in 2012, but changed its mind 18 months later, according to The New York Times.

“I think our patience and quiet perseverance was what eventually won them over,” said Mr. Schlender, who covered Mr. Jobs for almost 25 years. He said he wanted to write the book because he felt there was a side of Mr. Jobs’s personality that had never been captured by journalists. While the authors fact-checked portions of the book with Apple and other sources and showed the finished volume to the company, Apple wasn’t allowed to have “any editorial input whatsoever,” Mr. Tetzeli said.

Jobs passed away in October 2011 following a lengthy battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Revolutionary Leader will be available through Amazon on March 24 in hardcover and digital formats. Both official excerpts and leaked content from the biography has surfaced in recent weeks, and a sample of the book's prologue and first chapter is available through iBooks in select countries.

Elle is the first magazine to feature the Apple Watch in Australia with a fashion shoot starring the publication's in-house fashion editor Sara Smith. The multi-page style guide in the latest April issue offers women tips on how to make the Apple Watch work with different wardrobes depending on the time and place, such as during the weekend, at a cocktail party or in the workplace.

Apple continues to carefully curate the Apple Watch's image and exercise control over the way it's portrayed in magazines, positioning the wrist-worn device as a fashion item first and a technology device second. Apple wants the Apple Watch to be seen as trendy and sporty, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the device being viewed as overly technical and unfashionable as some people have opined about other wearables.

"For a cocktail party: Wear with a tuxedo suit and sexy heels (think Le Smoking Saint Laurent style with Alexander Wang black heels), or if you have the legs for it, a killer cocktail dress. Mix statement jewels with your watch. Try a fabulous cocktail ring and Cartier’s Love Bracelet would look great sitting side by side with your Apple Watch. It will be the perfect conversation starter at a party."

Apple Watch has been featured in several fashion and fitness magazines worldwide in recent months, including Self, Vogue, Style, East Touch, YOHO and Fitness Magazine. The wrist-worn device will be available April 24, with pre-orders starting April 10 in the United States, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and United Kingdom. Apple Watch starts at $349 for the Sport model, while the 18-karat gold edition will retail for upwards of $10,000.

ABC was recently invited to Apple's top-secret health and fitness lab for the Apple Watch for an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the testing facility, accompanied by Apple executives Jeff Williams and Jay Blahnik. The network shared a preview of its visit on Good Morning America earlier today, and has now provided a closer look at the facility on the latest episode of late night show Nightline.

The five-minute interview behind closed doors revealed that Apple collected over 18,000 hours of health and fitness data based on over 10,000 workout sessions that Apple employees participated in over the past two years at the company's secretive fitness lab. Blahnik, director of fitness and health technologies at Apple, also confirmed that the company tested the Apple Watch outdoors based on a variety of activities.

Apple Watch will be available April 24, with pre-orders starting April 10 in the first wave of launch countries: United States, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan and United Kingdom. The wrist-worn device starts at $349 for the Apple Watch Sport, while the stainless steel models will retail for between $549 to $1,099 and the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition will cost up to $17,000.

Apple's newly refreshed MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro models no longer support running Windows 7 with Boot Camp, according to Apple's Boot Camp support document. Boot Camp on the new notebooks only works with Windows 8 or later, so it is impossible to use Boot Camp to install Windows 7 on the machines.

For those unfamiliar with Boot Camp, it is Apple's software designed to allow Mac users to install Microsoft Windows on their machines.

Apple also dropped Windows 7 Boot Camp support in the 2013 Mac Pro, suggesting the software would cease to be supported by future Macs, but Macs released in 2014 continued to offer Windows 7 installations. The 2014 MacBook Air and the 2014 MacBook Pro will be the last Apple notebooks that support Windows 7.

Though Boot Camp no longer supports Windows 7, the operating system can continue to be used on these newer machines with virtualization software like VMware Fusion and Parallels.

It is not surprising that Apple has opted to phase out support for Windows 7, given its advanced age. Windows 7 first became available to the public in 2009 and was followed by Windows 8 in 2012. Despite being six years old, Windows 7 continues to be the most heavily used Windows-based operating system.

Mac users were not happy with Apple's decision to cease Windows 7 support in the Mac Pro, and it's likely the dropped support in the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro will also be met with resistance. Windows users have not yet embraced Windows 8 due to both its cost and its interface, which deviated significantly from the design of Windows 7.

Windows 10, coming later this year, may encourage stalwart Windows 7 users to upgrade, as it melds Windows 7 design elements with Windows 8 design elements for a happy medium that might satisfy a wide range of tastes. Windows 10 pricing has not been unveiled, but it will be a free upgrade for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users.

(Thanks, Daniel!)

Apple plans to announce its next-generation Apple TV set-top box at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to BuzzFeed News. The report, citing sources familiar with the plans, claims that the new Apple TV will be a "significant overhaul" of the streaming TV box, featuring both Siri and an App Store with an SDK available for developers to create apps.

The new Apple TV will feature Apple's latest A8 system-on-a-chip and a "dramatic increase" in internal storage, well beyond the 8GB included in the current third-generation set-top box. The addition of Siri will enable Apple TV owners to control a wide selection of HomeKit-enabled home automation devices through the set-top box, according to the report.

The new Apple TV will be part of Apple's ambitious plans to improve the TV experience, an area that iTunes chief Eddy Cue thinks "sucks" currently and Apple chief executive Tim Cook referred to as "stuck back in the 70s" in an interview with Charlie Rose last year. The new device will be Apple's attempt at capturing the digital living room through TV, music, apps and home automation amid a sea of competitors including Amazon, Google and Roku.

A refreshed Apple TV would make sense given reports that Apple is also planning to announce its oft-rumored streaming TV service at WWDC, anchored by popular networks such as ABC, CBS, Fox, ESPN and FX. The web-based TV service for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and other devices is expected to deliver a lightweight package of about 25 channels for between $30 to $40 per month. Apple TV is also long overdue for a hardware refresh, with the set-top box last updated in 2012.

ABC News this morning revealed an exclusive behind-the-scenes video of Apple's testing facility for the upcoming Apple Watch, showing off dozens of Apple employees covered in various sensor-tracking technology used to gather data for the health and fitness areas of the wearable device. Apple executives Jeff Williams and Jay Blahnik accompanied ABC on a tour of the facility.

Employees of the company, from engineers to managers and developers, have volunteered to participate in the tests for nearly two years, not knowing of the reason behind the facility until recently. Wearing masks that measure changes in breathing and other various statistics, the volunteers were put through various workout regimens including rowing, yoga, and running, in order to collect data for the Watch.

“[The employees] knew they were testing something, but they didn't know it was for the Apple Watch,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations. “We hooked them up with all the masks and so forth, but we would put on an Apple Watch covered up.”

The lab even included "climate chambers", which allowed Apple to simulate varying environments, from hot to cold, without having to physically leave Apple headquarters for testing. The company did so anyway, visiting drastically different locations around the globe to put the Watch through the most strenuous environment testing they could.

“We have traveled to Alaska and gone to Dubai to really test Apple Watch in all those environments, but we also wanted to be able to have a controlled environment here where we could see those extremes,” said Jay Blahnik, Director of Fitness and Health technologies at Apple.

“I think we've amassed already what may be one of the world's largest pieces of data on fitness,” he said. “Our view is, we're just beginning. We think there's a lot to this fitness thing...the impact on health could be profound.”

Dr. Michael McConnell, a professor in cardiovascular medicine at Stanford Medicine, told ABC News the Apple Watch has great potential to drastically change the cardiovascular technology field. He points to the ease-of-use in Apple's product to take measurements and surveys, thanks to the help of Apple's new medical-focused ResearchKit as well as HealthKit, which would offer them "a new way to do medical research."

The pre-launch buzz surrounding the Apple Watch only continues to grow as the April 10 pre-order date, and official launch on April 24, draw closer. Most recently the wearable has been spotted in numerous fitness and fashion magazines, with third-party manufacturers announcing everything from charging stands to carrying cases to secondary battery options for the wrist-worn device.

The segment, which premiered earlier this morning on Good Morning America, is a small preview for a larger piece airing tonight on Nightline at 12:35 AM EST.

ResearchKit, Apple's new open-source medical framework, was one of the unexpected announcements during the company's Spring Forward media event. Dr. Stephen Friend, one of the key members of the ResearchKit team, talked about the potential genesis of the project in a new interview with Fusion (via iMore).

In September 2013, nearly one and a half years before ResearchKit was unveiled, Friend was at Stanford's MedX conference giving a talk about the future of medical research. He explained how he envisioned an open source system where users could upload their medical data to the cloud for researchers to use in trials.

Sitting in the audience that day was Michael O'Reilly, M.D., the former Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Medical Affairs at Masimo Corporation, a pulse oximetry company. O'Reilly had just left Masimo to join Apple, and wanted to build something that could "implement Friend's vision of a patient-centered, medical research utopia and radically change the way clinical studies are done."

After Friend’s talk, O’Reilly approached the doctor, and, in typical tight-lipped Apple fashion, said: “I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” Friend recalls. Friend was intrigued, and agreed to meet for coffee.

Shortly after his meeting with O'Reilly, Friend started making frequent trips to Apple's HQ in Cupertino, meeting with scientists and engineers. He also organized a DARPA-funded workshop exploring how biosensors could potentially help doctors and scientists understand Parkinson's Disease.

Euan Ashley, a Stanford University investigator behind the myHeart app, told Fusion that Apple largely acted as a "facilitator", building the ResearchKit framework in the background as the researchers designed and built the first ResearchKit apps by themselves. However, Apple did go meet with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration three months before the Spring Forward event to talk about medical research and smooth over any potential regulatory concerns.

Friend noted that even though his open-source ideals didn't totally mesh with Apple's view on open source at the time, he wanted to work with them rather than competitors like Google and Microsoft because Apple is a hardware company that doesn't need to sell data, and that he believed Apple when the company said it wouldn't look at the data being used in ResearchKit.

However, both Apple and Friend decided not to make the true origin of ResearchKit clear to Fusion. It's unknown whether the idea was Friend's or if Apple was developing it before Friend joined the team.

Thus far, ResearchKit has been a success for Apple, receiving thousands of sign-ups less than 24 hours after it was unveiled. In that time frame, 11,000 people signed up for one of the ResearchKit apps, myHeart Counts.

The rest of the interview also provides a good look at ResearchKit and can be read at Fusion's website.

Apple appears to be cracking down on "anti-virus" apps in the iOS App Store, in an effort to prevent customers from believing iOS devices are capable of contracting viruses and malware. Intego, a company that produces anti-virus software for Mac and iOS, recently had its VirusBarrier iOS app pulled from the App Store.

VirusBarrier was an app designed to scan external files stored in the cloud or attached to emails, to detect viruses that might be sent on to vulnerable devices.

Intego CEO Jeff Erwin announced the removal of the app from the iOS App Store yesterday, and pointed towards a larger culling of all anti-virus apps available on Apple's platform. MacRumors spoke to Erwin this afternoon to shed some light on why Apple opted to remove VirusBarrier after four and a half years in the App Store.

According to Erwin, when Apple notified Intego of VirusBarrier's removal from the App Store, the company told him the app's App Store description was "misleading" and could potentially cause customers to believe that there are viruses on iOS.

Intego filed an appeal and rewrote the App Store description with "obnoxiously" clear wording, and that's when the company learned about a wider crackdown on anti-virus apps. "We were as clear as we could be that this wasn't a scanner, that it was scanning email attachments and cloud files," said Erwin. The company "went up to the executive level" at Apple and described exactly what VirusBarrier does, but Apple was firm on the app not returning to the App Store.

Apple, Erwin says, does not want people to be misled into believing that there are viruses on iOS, a position that he understands. Even with an App Store description that stated VirusBarrier scanned email attachments and cloud files, Intego would still receive negative comments from people who didn't read the description and didn't understand the app's purpose.

I sort of get Apple's point. Even as clear as we were about what our product did, there were still customers who were confused as to why the app was scanning their iPad or iPhone. There are a lot of people who don't have a tech background and don't understand.

Erwin does not believe that Apple was singling VirusBarrier out, as several other anti-virus apps have also been eliminated from the App Store. Instead, he sees it as a wider removal of the category and he doesn't fault Apple for the decision. "It's unfortunate, but I understand Apple's position," he said.

Erwin says that Intego's iOS app was not a big source of revenue for the company, and the loss won't hurt financially, but it was a way to get the Intego name out in the world and connect with customers. People who have previously downloaded the VirusBarrier app will continue to get virus updates, but won't be able to download new versions of the iOS app.

It is not clear when Apple began removing anti-virus apps or how many have been pulled from the App Store, but a search for "anti-virus" today primarily brings up games, privacy apps, and apps for finding lost phones. There are still a couple of apps that advertise virus-detecting capabilities like VirusDetector, but those few remaining apps may be removed from the App Store in the near future.

The Apple Watch has already been spotted within the pages of several fitness and fashion-oriented magazines during the month of March as Apple makes an advertising push ahead of the device's launch, and as of this week, it's also scored a spot on the cover of Fitness Magazine.

On the cover, model Kate Bock wears an Apple Watch Sport with a white fluoroelastomer band. The Apple Watch feature in the magazine is all images, and doesn't offer anything in the way of details as other Apple Watch spots have done. Fitness had initially shared some details about the shoot with MacRumors that were used in this post, but has since asked us to remove the information.

Fitness VP/Brand Development for Shape.com and Fitnessmagazine.com Betty Wong gave MacRumors the following statement on the magazine's collaboration with Apple:

"FITNESS, with our tech-savvy, goal-oriented female audience, is a great partner in helping showcase the Apple Watch. I hope to be able to get my hands on an Apple Watch Sport sample in the coming month and really put it to a sweat test for Fitnessmagazine.com to see how useful it is in helping our readers stay motivated to exercise, keep track of their physical activity, or connect with people and their to-do lists while out for a run.

With the Apple Watch positioned as Apple's first wearable accessory, it's no surprise to learn the company has been carefully curating its image and exercising control over the way it's portrayed in magazines. Apple wants people to see the Apple Watch as fashionable, sporty, and genuinely useful to the average person rather than as something geeky and technical that doesn't belong in the fashion world. Thus far, Apple's Apple Watch marketing efforts have been split between posing the Apple Watch as a fashion statement and as a fitness accessory.

On the fitness side, the Apple Watch has been featured in this month's issue of Fitness and it was on the cover of the March issue of Self magazine, on the wrist of Candice Swanepoel. Self did a full feature on the Apple Watch, highlighting its accelerometer, heart rate sensor, and more. Model Christy Turlington has also been promoting the fitness-oriented features of the Apple Watch, both on stage at Apple's March 9 event and on a personal blog on Apple.com. Turlington is using the Apple Watch as she prepares for the London Marathon in April.

On the fashion side, the Apple Watch has been featured in Vogue, Style, East Touch, and YOHO. Late last year, it was on the cover of Vogue China and it was shown off at an exclusive event at Parisian fashion boutique Colette. It will also be featured in a number of high-end exclusive popup shops around the world after it's released.

As the launch of the Apple Watch creeps closer, it's likely the device will continue to appear within an increasing number of magazines and newspapers as Apple attempts to market the device to a wide range of potential customers. The Apple Watch will be available beginning on April 24, but it will be available for pre-order and in-store try ons starting on April 10.

Update 5:21 PM PT: This post has been updated and revised at the request of Fitness.

At its Apple Watch event on March 9, Apple highlighted several apps that will be available on the Apple Watch, including an app from American Airlines, which will let users receive flight information, check in for their flights, and more.

Since then, several other airlines have also announced upcoming apps for the Apple Watch, giving us a hint at some of the ways the Apple Watch will be used to make our lives easier. British Airways, for example, has just announced a British Airways app for the Apple Watch, which will be available beginning on April 24.

Through a glance option, which is accessed by swiping right on the watch face, the British Airways app will display a summary of a customer's next flight, offering details like flight number, flight status, a countdown to departure time, and the weather at the destination. All of that information will be available at a single glance, preventing users from needing to rifle through emails and open up apps to access flight details.

The app will also support on-wrist check-ins for flights, and it will deliver notifications to direct users to their appropriate gates. At certain airport terminals, such as Heathrow's Terminal 5, users will receive welcome messages powered by iBeacon.

Earlier this week, VentureBeat asked several airlines about their plans for Apple Watch apps, which yielded information about two upcoming apps from Delta and United. The Delta app that's in development will deliver notifications about flights to users ahead of their flights, and it will give them access to the boarding pass stored on their iPhones.

Like the apps from other airlines, it will offer flight numbers, gate numbers, flight times, and other info. If a flight gets changed, for example, users will get a notification on their Apple Watch. There will also be a notification when a flight is approaching a destination city, with information about luggage pickup.

United Airlines wasn't prepared to share app screenshots of its upcoming Apple Watch app, but it did divulge some details about it. The app will offer at-a-glance information on upcoming flights, including gate numbers and status, plus it lets users view their flight reservations within the United Airlines Apple Watch app. It will also pull a traveler's boarding pass from the Passbook app, and it's able to alert users if flight times or gate numbers change.

Southwest and Virgin America told VentureBeat they were not working on Apple Watch apps at the present time, but the two airlines, along with other airlines, will likely create apps as they see their competition developing apps for the device.

The Apple Watch will become available on April 24, with pre-orders beginning on April 10. Developers have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on apps ahead of the launch, with many even flying out to Cupertino for guidance from Apple, so there should be a wealth of third-party apps available to consumers right on launch day.

The Apple Watch is still several weeks away from making its official debut, but that hasn't stopped dozens of inventors from coming up with accessories for the device, and many of those ideas are showing up on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Along with charging stands, band adapters are a popular category for crowdfunding campaigns, and several different projects have been started with the hope of creating solutions that will allow the Apple Watch to be used with third-party watch bands.

Earlier this month, we covered the Click Apple Watch band adapter, showing off a 3D printed prototype, and now that project has been further developed and launched on Kickstarter. Click is a band adapter aiming to make most 22mm watch bands compatible with the Apple Watch.

Click is a simple adapter that slides into the grooves of the Apple Watch, much like one of Apple's own watch bands. It supports several different pin styles, including spring bars, T-bars, and quick release bars, promising to give Apple Watch users more band options at an affordable price. It will come in two sizes and four finishes, to match all of the Apple Watch casings. Click also has plans to offer its own leather bands in nine colors.

Until now, there has been no affordable way to customize the bands on your Apple Watch. The current selection is small and very expensive. We want you to be able to express yourself in every situation, because you shouldn't have to change for your watch; your watch should complement you. With Click, you can truly personalize your Apple Watch without breaking the bank.

Another Apple Watch band adapter also promises to let users wear their Apple Watches with existing watch bands. The Adappt is very similar to the Click, with Adappt also pairing its adapter with watch bands in addition to selling it separately. Like the Click, it slides into the Apple Watch band groove on one side and the second side features a standard pin that's used by most watch bands.

Adappt will be available in plastic, anodized aluminum, stainless and gold plated steel, in colors to match each Apple Watch, and it will be available in two sizes.

Thanks to high quality materials, Adappt will match perfectly your Apple Watch. Our aluminum is anodized through an electro-chemical process that creates a porous surface, then coated with a dye, to look and feel exactly like the Sport edition versions, Silver and Space Grey Aluminum.

Adappt's bands will come in rubber, leather, metal, and are priced very reasonably at $9 to $18, adapter included.

The Adappt band was actually launched previously on Kickstarter as the Standap and later removed, leading many to believe that its disappearance was at the behest of Apple, but it appears that Apple has not yet taken a stance on these types of adapters that will allow the Apple Watch to work with any band.

In the weeks leading up to the Apple Watch launch, we'll undoubtedly see additional band adapters and other accessories designed for the device. The Apple Watch will become available on April 24, but it will be available for pre-order and in-store try on beginning April 10.

The Click Apple Watch band adapter is priced at $10 for early backers, with delivery set for May 2015. Later backers will need to pay up $15 for a June 2015 delivery.

The Adappt Apple Watch band adapter starts at $7 for a plastic version, and goes up to $250 for a gold plated version. Adapters and bands from Adappt will ship in June of 2015.