MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

Mozilla has heralded the release of a new version of Firefox that it says enables resource-intensive web content like games, apps, and image-editors to run in a browser window at previously unachievable native speeds. To accomplish the feat, Firefox 52 supports Web Assembly, a new standard developed by Mozilla, which it calls "a game changer for the web". WebAssembly allows complex apps,...

Apple has announced that component supplier Ibiden has become the first company in Japan to guarantee all of its Apple manufacturing will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy. Ibiden is planning to invest in more than 20 new renewable energy facilities, including one of the largest floating solar photovoltaic systems in the country. "We're proud to partner with suppliers like Ibiden ...

LG's UltraFine 5K Display now ships in 1-2 business days on Apple's website in the United States and Canada, signaling that the display is finally back in stock after having been backordered for up to 4-6 weeks due to an interference issue. Specifically, some users experienced flickering issues with the UltraFine 5K Display when it came within close proximity of a Wi-Fi router, or in some...

Apple today announced that its second retail store in the German city of Cologne will open later this month. The address of the brick-and-mortar store is Schildergasse 1-9, which sits on one of the busiest shopping streets in Europe. Doors open on March 25. The announcement confirms long-held rumors that Apple has been planning a second store in the city. Evidence surfaced in January that...

Use of iPads and MacBooks in U.S. schools hit a new low last year, with Apple struggling to make further inroads into the education sector, according to new figures (via The New York Times). According to research company Futuresource Consulting, in 2016 the number of devices in American classrooms that run iOS and macOS fell to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Windows...

Apple board member and former Vice President Al Gore debuted "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power," the sequel to his hit documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," tonight in Silicon Valley. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Senior Vice President of Environmental Policy Lisa Jackson were also in attendance, with Cook delivering an introduction for the film that was recorded by venture capitalist Steve...

Bare Bones Software, the company behind popular code editors BBEdit and TextWrangler, this week announced plans to retire TextWrangler as it focuses development on BBEdit. Going forward, TextWrangler will not be updated for the next version of macOS, but it will continue to be functional so long as the new version of macOS doesn't introduce any software-breaking bugs. Bare Bones is...

The Nintendo Switch launches worldwide tomorrow, March 3, and as journalists and reviewers have had their hands on the console for the past week, news of its hardware and software features have been shared online. This week, Quartz technology reporter Mike Murphy discovered that when plugging the Nintendo Switch into a MacBook Pro through a dual USB-C cable, the Switch inexplicably acts as an ...

Google has ended production of its Pixel laptop, which originally aimed to compete with Apple's MacBook Air. During a small meeting with journalists today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google's senior vice president for hardware Rick Osterlohthe responded to a question about future Pixel notebooks, saying the company has "no plans to do one right now". According to TechCrunch, ...

In the first drone update since Apple officially named its Spaceship campus "Apple Park," Matthew Roberts has shared an ongoing look at the progress of the campus as it grows ever closer to the official employee move-in date in April. The last collection of video updates came at the end of January and saw walkways, lamps, and parking lots beginning to appear on the site. Now, the R&D center is ...

In an interview with CNBC today, billionaire investor Warren Buffett revealed that his holding company Berkshire Hathaway held around 133 million shares in Apple prior to the company's record-breaking earnings results on January 31. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it held 57.3 million shares in Apple as of December 31, 2016, so it more than doubled its stake in the iPhone maker in January. ...

In a bid to reassess self-driving car guidances following the Obama administration, the Trump administration's newly appointed Transportation Secretary, Elaine Chao, said this weekend that she is reviewing the guidances while urging companies "to explain the benefits of automated vehicles to a skeptical public." Chao said that there's a lot at stake in improving and regulating the technology, and ...

Apple has announced that its retail store at the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City shopping mall in Arlington, Virginia reopens on Saturday, March 4 at 10:00 a.m. local time. The store, which originally opened in August 2005, has been closed for renovations since September 25 of last year. Apple Pentagon City has expanded into adjacent storefronts (Image: Jordan Sheckman) Apple Pentagon City...

Google has responded to multiple reports of users being unexpectedly logged out of their Google accounts, in order to assuage fears that the logouts were security related. The unexpected sign-outs began on Thursday night and continued through Friday, affecting multiple services including Gmail, Chromecast, YouTube, and Google Play. During routine maintenance, a number of users were...

For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with CalDigit to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a Thunderbolt Station 3 Lite, which is designed to work with the new 2016 MacBook Pro. The new MacBook Pro is equipped with Thunderbolt 3, but it offers a limited number of ports, making a dock or some form of dongle essential for most users who have older accessories. The TS3 Lite, a small hub...

Content delivery network Cloudflare has confirmed the existence of a bug that caused search engines to cache sensitive user data from a variety of well-known apps and websites. Google researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered and reported the bug to Cloudflare, and the company has since fixed the bug and published a detailed blog post about exactly what happened. According to Cloudflare, the period...

Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to work out of Apple Park, the official name for Apple's second spaceship-shaped campus, according to information obtained by The Chronicle. Cook will presumably move his office from Apple's Infinite Loop campus to Apple Park when it opens for employees in April of 2017. Apple announced its plans to open Apple Park in April in a press statement released this morning. ...

The newest build (58.0.3020.0) of Chrome Canary, Google's experimental browser, includes support for the Touch Bar built into the 2016 MacBook Pro, indicating Touch Bar support will soon be added to the Chrome browser. On the Touch Bar, the current Chrome Canary build offers a search/URL bar, forward and back buttons, a refresh/stop option, a button for opening a new tab, and a button for...