MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

Google is reported to have shelved plans to develop its own self-driving vehicle in favor of nurturing partnerships with existing car makers to continue its work in the automotive space. According to The Information, the company's autonomous car unit, known internally as Chauffeur, is working with established car companies to develop vehicles that will include self-driving features, while...

Opera has added a built-in currency converter to its free web browser to make online international purchases a simpler experience for users (via TechCrunch). The new feature appears in the browser's Preferences under User Interface options, and can be enabled to automatically show conversions in the foreign currency of choice whenever the user highlights a price on a page. Conversions are...

Since the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar was released, developers have been finding increasingly clever, if impractical, things to do with the tiny LCD screen built into the MacBook Pro's keyboard. It's been turned into a piano and used to run Doom, and now two new games have been shown off on the Touch Bar -- Pac-Man and Lemmings. Pac-Bar, a version of Namco's popular Pac-Man game, was...

Apple has held talks with SoftBank about investing up to $1 billion in the Japanese telecommunication giant's global technology fund, according to The Wall Street Journal. A deal has not been finalized, while the current status of the talks could not be determined, according to the report. President-elect Donald Trump and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son (Image: LA Times) The so-called "SoftBank...

Apple is one of a number of retailers looking at opening a store at Scottsdale Fashion Square, in a 100,000-square-foot wing formerly occupied by Barney's department store, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. Former Barney's store at Scottsdale Fashion Square (Photo: Phoenix New Times) Barney's department store closed its Fashion Square store earlier this year, providing Apple with an...

Amazon Prime Video's HTML5 video player now supports Safari on Mac, as spotted by Reddit user netmute over the weekend. Amazon Prime Video previously required downloading the Microsoft Silverlight plugin for playback in Safari, or switching to an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which already supported the HTML5 video player. Some users on Reddit reported that, while HTML5...

Most MacBook Pro apps that have implemented support for the new Touch Bar have focused on putting settings, editing tools, and other utilitarian features right at a user's fingertips, but a new app from developer Graham Parks aims to have a little more fun with it. The "Touch Bar Piano" app is designed to turn the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro into a little tiny touch-based piano that can be...

Throughout the holiday season, B&H Photo is offering discounts on a range of Apple products, including Macs, iPads, and the Apple Watch. B&H Photo is discounting 2015 and 2016 MacBook Pro models by up to $200. B&H isn't offering discounts on the new Touch Bar models, but there are discounts on upgraded non-Touch Bar models. 2016: - 13-inch 2.0GHz/16GB RAM/256GB SSD (Space Gray) -...

Wall Street brokerage firm Drexel Hamilton today informed its clients it continues to believe Apple is "one of the most underappreciated stocks in the world," according to a research note seen by MacRumors. Apple analyst Brian White retained his "buy" rating for AAPL and $185 price target. Apple shares are currently trading at around $114, their highest level since late October, after rising...

Apple recently struck a deal with Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology, known as the world's largest wind turbine maker, which will bring clean energy into the production processes and manufacturing plants of Apple's partner facilities in China (via South China Morning Post). Specifically, Goldwind's wholly-owned subsidiary Beijing Tianrun New Energy Investment will transfer a 30 percent...

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 19 includes bug fixes and updates for HTML Form Validation, Pointer Lock API, Input Events, URL Parser,...

German developers The Soulmen today released a new version of popular writing app Ulysses, bringing Touch Bar support, Tabs in macOS Sierra, and a host of other new features and performance improvements. From Wednesday, users launching version 2.7 of the award-winning app on Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pros will see new contextual functions for Ulysses in the OLED strip, bringing the ability to ...

Setapp, a subscription app service from MacPaw, is entering a beta testing phase today to get ready for an upcoming public launch. Setapp plans to make more than 48 popular Mac apps available to Mac users for a flat monthly fee, with plans to add new apps as the service grows. Setapp will cost $9.99 per month, giving users access to Mac apps like RapidWeaver, Ulysses, iStat Menus, Blogo,...

Apple has updated the iCloud beta website with a new Photos section that includes improved navigation tools similar to the native Photos app on macOS Sierra. As discovered by MacMagazine [Google Translate], the Photos section in the beta site now includes a sidebar for navigation, which displays all of a user's albums so it's easier to jump between photo collections. In the current iteration ...

Apple has announced it will be opening a new retail store at Vanke Mall in Qibao, an ancient town and popular tourist destination in the suburbs of Shanghai, China, on Saturday, December 10 at 10:00 a.m. local time. The location will become Apple's seventh retail store in Shanghai and its 489th store overall. Apple is closing in on 500 retail stores worldwide following the grand openings of...

Google this week began rolling out the latest update to its desktop Chrome web browser ahead of schedule, with Chrome 55 fixing multiple security vulnerabilities and defaulting to HTML5 on the majority of websites. Google Chrome has been phasing out Flash support since September, when version 53 of the browser started blocking Flash-based page analytics and background elements. Version 54...

Earlier this week, we reported on Apple's plans to add select 2009 to 2011 model Macs to its vintage and obsolete products list on December 31, including 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro models from early 2011. In the meantime, Apple today added the smaller 13-inch MacBook Pro from early 2011 to the list. The notebook is classified as "vintage" in California and Turkey, and "obsolete" in the...

Apple is set to create a new distribution center in India to consolidate its logistics and supply chain in the country, according to The Economic Times. The center will be its first in India. Currently, Apple products are brought to India via several different cities: Chennai, Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chandigarh. Each city has a different value-added tax (VAT) rate, which...