MacRumors

Apple today made a pre-release version of iOS 8.3 available to those who sign up for the company's public beta testing program, giving them early access to a new version of iOS for the first time ever. The version of iOS 8.3 being distributed to beta testers is the third iOS 8.3 beta, which was seeded to developers a few hours ago.

The launch of today's iOS beta testing program has also been accompanied by an overhaul to Apple's Appleseed Beta testing site. Previously the language on the site was heavily focused on OS X, but a site revamp gives it a more general focus to encompass both iOS and OS X testing.

iOS 8.3 was first seeded to developers on February 9, while iOS 8.2 was still in testing. iOS 8.2 is mainly focused on the Apple Watch, but thus far, iOS 8.3 has introduced several new features including support for wireless CarPlay connectivity, a new emoji picker, support for Google 2-step verification, and Apple Pay support for the China UnionPay network.

The second beta brought all new diversified emoji and skin tone modifiers, along with new emoji for country flags and updated emoji icons to represent the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch. Siri also gained several new languages, including Danish, Dutch, English (India), English (New Zealand), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Apple introduced its public beta testing program with the launch of OS X Yosemite, allowing more than a million consumers to sign up for and participate in the Yosemite beta. Prior to today, public beta testing was limited to OS X, but Apple appears to be ready to expand its beta testing program to iOS.

Apple has also continued offering OS X betas, most recently seeding OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 with the Photos app to public beta testers.

Update: Apple is now sending out emails to certain members of the OS X public beta program, inviting them to also test out iOS 8.3.

Thank you for participating in the OS X Beta Program. For the first time ever, we are broadening the program to include the all-new iOS Beta. The feedback you have provided on the OS X Yosemite Beta continues to help us shape OS X, and we would like to offer you an invitation to the iOS 8.3 Beta.

The iOS 8.3 Beta is available for download from the new Apple Beta Software Program website. Try it out and submit your feedback. You can use the iOS 8.3 Beta while continuing to use the OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Beta. And with the all-new Photos app for Mac and iCloud Photo Library, you can now access your entire library on all your devices.

Apple today seeded the third beta of OS X Yosemite to developers, almost a month after seeding the first OS X 10.10.3 beta and a week after releasing OS X 10.10.3 to public beta testers.

The new beta, build 14D98g, is available for registered developers through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store and through the Mac Dev Center. Apple has also released OS X Server 4.1 for developers.

According to the release notes, today's 10.10.3 beta includes developer APIs for the new Force Touch trackpad in the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and the upcoming Retina MacBook, which will allow developers to create apps that take advantage of Force Touch.

There's also a new feature that adds additional data sources when using "Look Up." When right-clicking on a highlighted word, Look Up will now search iTunes, App Store, movie showtimes, nearby locations, and more, in addition to the dictionary. Sources included in Look Up can be customized in Preferences. Currently, the feature is buggy on some machines, causing the keyboard to stop working.

Earlier betas of OS X 10.10.3 have brought several new features to Yosemite, including the new Photos for OS X app. Designed to integrate with iCloud Photo Library, Photos for OS X is a replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture and is on track to see an early 2015 public launch. Reviews have suggested that while Photos is a suitable replacement for iPhoto, with more advanced tools and performance optimizations, it may leave professional users disappointed.

Along with the new Photos for OS X app, the first two OS X 10.10.3 betas introduced a redesigned emoji picker that consolidates emoji into a single page with clear labels, new diversified emoji and emoji skin tone modifiers, new flag emoji and updated emoji for the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch, and support for Google 2-step verification when setting up accounts in System Preferences.

Apple today seeded the third beta of iOS 8.3 to developers, more than two weeks after seeding the second iOS 8.3 beta and more than a month after releasing the first iOS 8.3 beta. Today's third beta release comes just days after the public launch of iOS 8.2, which included support for the Apple Watch.

The beta, build 12F5047f, is available as an over-the-air download and through the iOS Developer Center. Apple has also released Xcode 6.3 beta 3.

Though iOS 8.2 introduced Apple Watch support, it brought only minor bug fixes and security updates to the operating system. iOS 8.3 brings more consumer-facing updates, like a new emoji picker and all new diversified emoji and skin tone modifiers. It also introduces new country flag emoji and updated emoji icons to represent the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch.

Along with those emoji changes, iOS 8.3 brings wireless CarPlay connectivity, support for Google 2-step verification, Apple Pay for the China UnionPay network, and several new Siri languages.

What's new in iOS 8.3 beta 3:

Messages - There's an option in the Messages portion of the Settings app to enable "Conversation List Filtering." With this turned on, messages received from people who are not in your contact list will be filtered into a separate list.

Apple Watch app - Since iOS 8.2 has been released, iOS 8.3 has been updated to add the Apple Watch app to the iPhone's home screen.

IDC on Thursday reduced its five year forecast for worldwide tablet shipments following the tablet market's first year-over-year decline in the fourth quarter. The research firm estimates that 234.5 million tablets will be shipped during 2015, representing marginal growth of 2.1% from 2014.

Android is expected to remain the market leader among platforms throughout the course of the forecast, whereas the iPad is predicted to be the "weakest link" and see its volume share of the market continue to decline in 2015. IDC believes that iOS will drop from its present 27.6% market share to 23% through 2019.

The research firm also estimates that Microsoft could see its worldwide tablet market share nearly triple from 5.1% today to 14.1% market share in 2019 on the strength of Windows 10. IDC research director Jean Phillippe Bouchard claims Microsoft will slowly gain a foothold by delivering a consistent experience across all devices and platforms.

"Microsoft is doing a lot of good things right now and we believe the launch of Windows 10 later this year will not only have a significant impact on Microsoft's share of the market, but on the industry as a whole," said Bouchard, Research Director, Tablets. "There is an appetite for a platform that can provide a productivity experience that remains consistent across multiple form factors and device types, and we believe Microsoft is well positioned to capture some of that demand."

iPad momentum fell flat in the fourth quarter as overall tablet market growth continues to decline. iPad sales have declined for four consecutive quarters, and Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri cautioned investors during its latest earnings call that iPad sales are unlikely to see a dramatic year-over-year improvement in the near future. Nevertheless, it is rumored that Apple could have two new iPad in the works in an attempt to reinvigorate tablet sales.

First and foremost, Apple is expected to release the much-rumored "iPad Pro" later this year with a larger 12.9-inch screen and faster A8X processor. Meanwhile, a questionable rumor from last week claims that the company may release an iPad mini 4 with an A8 processor and 802.11ac Wi-Fi in the near future, after some users expressed disappointment that Touch ID was virtually the only new feature on the iPad mini 3.

At its "Spring Forward" event on Monday, Apple announced a brand-new MacBook and updated 13-inch MacBook Pros with a fully redesigned trackpad called the Force Touch trackpad.

Like on the Apple Watch, Force Touch allows the device to distinguish between a light press and a deep press, opening up new methods for interaction. For example, while a light press could be a simple click, a deep press while browsing in Safari could bring up a Wikipedia entry in a pop-up window.

The Force Touch trackpad on the MacBook and new MacBook Pros achieves this through a total reinvention of the way the trackpad works. Apple ditched the "diving board" structure of older trackpads for a new design with four sensors, called Force Sensors.

These Force Sensors allow the user to click anywhere on the Force Touch trackpad. The "diving board" design on previous trackpads made it difficult to click toward the top of the trackpad, forcing users to move their fingers toward the bottom of the trackpad to click.

The Force Sensors are bundled together with the Taptic Engine, which is also featured in the upcoming Apple Watch. The Taptic Engine senses when a user clicks on the trackpad and issues haptic feedback to let a user know that their action was successful. As noted by TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino, this is because the trackpad itself doesn't move. While the Force Touch trackpad sounds like it clicks and feels like it clicks, it doesn't actually click.

There is a set of vibrating motors underneath that provides ‘force feedback’, also known as haptics in some applications. This feedback fools your finger into believing that you’ve pressed down on a hinged button, the way your current trackpad works. This feedback relies on phenomenon called lateral force fields (LFFs), which can cause humans to experience vibrations as haptic ‘textures’. This can give you the feel of a ‘clickable’ surface or even depth. The Force Touch feature of the new trackpad allows you to press ‘deeper’, giving you additional levels of tapping feedback. The effect is done so well that you actually feel like you’re pressing down deeper into a trackpad that still isn’t moving at all. It’s so good it’s eerie.

While the Force Touch trackpad was a main highlight of Apple's introduction of the new MacBook, the updated 13-inch MacBook Pro is actually the first Mac to ship with the feature. iFixit has already performed a teardown of the new MacBook Pro to get a closer look at the workings of the Force Touch trackpad after removing the machine's well-glued battery.

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With the Apple Watch set to launch in April, Apple has decided to stop selling many competing fitness products in its retail stores. Re/code checked several popular Apple Stores in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and New York, and found that Apple had ceased carrying the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.

The two fitness bands are also unavailable through the company's online store, and it appears the only remaining fitness band available for purchase is the MIO Alpha Heart Rate Monitor Watch. Apple is still selling non-wrist worn fitness tracking devices, like the Jawbone UP Move and the Wahoo TICKR X Heart Rate Monitor, both online and in stores.

Apple began removing wrist-worn fitness tracking devices from its stores back in November, when it stopped selling Fitbit's line of activity tracking devices. Fitbit's devices, along with the Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband all offer functionality that's similar to what can be found in the Apple Watch, including the tracking of metrics like steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, and stairs climbed.

According to Re/code, Apple told Mio founder Liz Dickinson that her company's activity trackers would be removed from the Apple Store due to an effort to re-work branding, which may be at new retail chief Angela Ahrendts' behest.

"They said they brought in a new executive in the marketing area who wanted to re-work branding for the stores, and to make the Apple brand more front and center and clean up and minimize the number of accessories," Dickinson said.

The Apple Watch is set to be displayed in Apple's retail stores beginning on April 10, in an effort to allow customers to try on and experience the watches ahead of their April 24 launch. Prices on the Apple Watch range from $349 to $17,000, and pre-orders will also begin on April 10.

Update: The MIO Alpha has now been removed from the online store as well.

Apple on Monday refreshed its MacBook Air lineup, adding Broadwell chips and Intel 6000 graphics. Both models received the same processor updates, but the 13-inch MacBook Air got an extra boost -- new PCIe-based flash storage that Apple says is "up to two times faster" than the flash storage used in the previous generation MacBook Air. The 11-inch MacBook Air did not receive the same flash storage update.

iFixit decided to test Apple's "two times faster" claim by comparing SSD speeds between a new 11-inch MacBook Air and a new 13-inch MacBook Air, with results that suggest the SSD in the 13-inch MacBook Air is indeed nearly twice as fast as the SSD in the MacBook Air.

Average write speeds for the 11-inch MacBook Air using Black Magic's Disk Speed Test were 315MB/s, while average read speeds were 668MB/s. The 13-inch MacBook Air saw average write speeds of 629.9MB/s and average read speeds of 1285.4MB/s.

An iFixit teardown of the 13-inch MacBook Air conducted this morning suggests the notebook is using Samsung flash memory with a Samsung controller. A teardown of the 11-inch MacBook Air, which does not feature the faster flash storage, was equipped with SanDisk flash memory and a Marvell controller. In comparison to the Samsung flash storage used in the previous-generation 13-inch MacBook Air, iFixit said "it's definitely an update."

The new 13-inch MacBook Air is available from Apple's online and retail stores with prices that start at $999. The higher-end $1,199 model can be configured with up to 512GB of flash storage.

Some of Apple's iPhones produced in 2016 will use wireless modem chips supplied by Intel rather than Qualcomm, reports VentureBeat. iPhones (presumably the iPhone 7) sold in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America will reportedly use an Intel 7360 LTE modem.

Intel has been gunning hard during the past year for a place in the iPhone and now appears to have succeeded, at least partly. The 7360 chip will ship inside a special version of the iPhone that will be marketed to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, the sources said.

The 7360 LTE modem chip [PDF] from Intel features up to 450Mbps downlink and it supports 29 LTE bands. It will begin shipping out to manufacturers during the second half of 2015. Apple engineers have reportedly been traveling to Munich, Germany to collaborate with Intel engineers on the chip.

Though VentureBeat suggests the Intel chips might only be used in some iPhones in emerging markets, analyst Ben Bajarin believes that Apple would make the switch universal, rather than using separate chips in different versions of the phone.

Today's report is the second time we've heard inklings of an Intel-Apple modem partnership. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted Apple's switch from Qualcomm to Intel for its baseband chips back in January. The shift from Qualcomm to Intel for even a portion of LTE chips will be a major loss for Qualcomm, as the company has supplied Apple with modem chips for many years now.

Google today launched an updated version of its Pixel Chromebook, which is equipped with USB-C, much like Apple's new Retina MacBook. With USB-C, the Chromebook's 12-hour battery can be fully recharged in approximately 90 minutes, and a 15 minute charge supplies two hours of power, according to Google.

The new Chromebook Pixel features an aluminum body, a 13-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 2560 x 1700 and an aspect ratio of 3:2, an Intel Core i5 Broadwell processor, 8GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage space.

Unlike the Retina MacBook, the Chromebook Pixel has multiple ports, including two USB-C ports, but it can't compare to the Retina MacBook in size -- the Pixel is more than a pound heavier at 3.3 pounds. It also outweighs the standard 13-inch MacBook Air.

Early reviews from sites like Re/code and Ars Technica have lauded the Chromebook Pixel for its design and its fast charging abilities, but the $999 price point is a major downside. The Pixel line is Google's most expensive Chromebook, and at such a high price, the web-focused ChromeOS operating system seems overly limited. Other Chromebooks sell for as little as $250.

Along with the $999 Chromebook Pixel, Google also has a higher-end version, which it's calling the Ludicrous Speed (LS) model. It has an Intel Core i7 Broadwell processor, 16GB of RAM, a 64GB solid state drive, and a $1,299 price tag.

The two new Chromebooks can be purchased from Google's new online Google Store, which it just debuted today. The Google Store sells a range of Google-branded products, from smartphones and tablets to Chromebooks and Android Wear accessories.

Less than twenty-four hours after Apple unveiled ResearchKit, the open source medical framework had received thousands of sign-ups, according to Bloomberg. The report claims that Stanford University researchers awoke on Tuesday morning, the day after Apple's "Spring Forward" media event, to discover that 11,000 people signed up for MyHeart Counts, a cardiovascular disease app built using ResearchKit.

“To get 10,000 people enrolled in a medical study normally, it would take a year and 50 medical centers around the country,” said Alan Yeung, medical director of Stanford Cardiovascular Health. “That’s the power of the phone.”

ResearchKit is an open source software framework aimed at revolutionizing medical studies by making them more readily available to millions of iPhone users worldwide. When given permission, the framework uses the iPhone's various sensors to collect user data such as weight, blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use, information that Apple hopes will open up new possibilities for researchers.

Apple will also enable users to answer surveys and input data directly from ResearchKit apps, although researchers caution that information collected from an iPhone user may be misleading due to various potential flaws. For starters, the report claims that iPhone users are more likely to have a graduate or doctoral degree than Android users, and the demographic differences can allegedly skew the results.

“Just collecting lots of information about people -- who may or may not have a particular disease, and may or may not represent the typical patient -- could just add noise and distraction,” said Lisa Schwartz, professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, in an e-mail. “Bias times a million is still bias.”

Meanwhile, an iPhone user simply hitting a button by accident or giving his smartphone to someone else can also result in misleading data. Nevertheless, there are issues with data collected through traditional clinical trials as well, and ResearchKit allowing people to engage in medical research more easily is still valuable and, as Apple claims, could transform the way that medicine is approached forever.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a good track record in providing information on yet-to-be released Apple products, today released a report predicting that up to three new casing options for the Apple Watch will launch sometime this fall.

Kuo points out that the Apple Watch's sale momentum could stall entering the fourth quarter of the year, and thinks the release of new casing options for the device could reinvigorate it heading into the 2015 holiday shopping season.

Rumors stating that Apple was looking into a platinum casing for the Watch right before the "Spring Forward" event could point toward the option becoming available down the road.

Aside from current casing materials of aluminum, stainless steel and 18k gold, we believe 1-3 new versions of Apple Watch featuring new casing materials are likely to go into mass production in 4Q15. If this is the case, we think it could boost Apple Watch shipments momentum in 4Q15-1Q16.

Though impressed by the "outstanding designs" of the Apple Watch and new MacBook, Kuo sees the Watch underselling the market expectation of 20-30 million units in 2015 to about 15-20 million devices sold throughout the year. The analyst sees the Watch selling between 5-6 million units in the first half of the year, and the new MacBook about 450,000 units in that same time frame.

Kuo notes that as with many first-generation products, the Apple Watch will "focus on verifying whether the user behavior and business model are right", with subsequent generations honing in and expanding on the device's features and adding new ones, as well. As a result, he expects shipments to "grow significantly" in these second or third-generation Apple Watches in comparison to his predicted numbers for the first-generation model.