MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

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...

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced in March of 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari. Safari Technology Preview release 24 includes fixes and improvements for Web API, JavaScript, CSS, Web Inspector, Rendering, Accessibility,...

Over two years ago it was reported that Apple was planning on opening a new R&D office in Cambridge, England, and after that multiple reports suggested that the company was primarily working on Siri research at the location. Besides a few job posts Apple never formally admitted to being the occupant at 90 Hills Road in Cambridge. This week, however, Cambridge News has spotted confirmation of...

Apple today announced that the 1,000-seat auditorium at its new Apple Park campus will be named the "Steve Jobs Theater" in memory of the company's late co-founder, who would have turned 62 years old on February 24. Steve Jobs Theater, a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder with the world's largest freestanding carbon-fiber roof, is situated atop a hill at one of the highest points of the 175-acre...

Apple today updated Logic Pro X, its software for audio professionals, to version 10.3.1. The new update introduces a few bug fixes and refines two previously implemented features. According to Apple's release notes, Logic Pro X 10.3.1 fixes a bug that caused regions to behave unexpectedly when moved, and it fixes an issue that could cause regions on Track Alternatives to get deleted. As...