Apple launches ‘Made for Business’ sessions in select Apple Stores

by Danis Tazetdinov

Apple launches new series of sessions 'Made for Business' in participating Apple Stores. Sessions focus on use of Apple hardware in business environments focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Kicking off during National Small Business Week in the U.S., Today at Apple will offer six “Made for Business” sessions throughout May in Chicago, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with ongoing programming in select stores around the world throughout the year. Led by small business owners with diverse and unique stories, the sessions will highlight how Apple products and services have powered their businesses’ success.

Apple Newsroom

Apple Newsroom: Apple launches “Made for Business” in select stores around the world

iPhone sales and activations are on decline

by Danis Tazetdinov

Counterpoint Research shares report on smartphone sales in China in Q1 2024. Apple's sales are down 19.1% year over year in China. This could be a result of local premium brands and government restrictions on iPhone use.

CIRP also reports iPhone share of all new smartphone activation from 40% to 33% in US in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. CIRP speculates that this change mostly means that iPhone users spend more time with their devices and do not upgrade or switch phones as often as before.

Counterpoint Research: China Smartphone Sales Remain in Black on Huawei, HONOR, Xiaomi Outperformance

CIRP: iPhone US Smartphone Sales Share Continues to Decline

References:

Apple releases set of on-device language models

by Danis Tazetdinov

Apple publishes set of optimized language models – OpenELM (for Open-source Efficient Language Model). Apple provides pretrained and instruction-tuned models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B and 3B parameters.

Our pre-training dataset contains RefinedWeb, deduplicated PILE, a subset of RedPajama, and a subset of Dolma v1.6, totaling approximately 1.8 trillion tokens. Please check license agreements and terms of these datasets before using them.

Apple

Models are available on HuggingFace.

HuggingFace: OpenELM

References and further reading:

Apple Search Ads are now available in Brazil and other Latin American countries, Q&A added

by Danis Tazetdinov

Apple Search Ads are now available in Brazil, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Paraguay.

Apple also posted Q&A on Apple Search Ads. Questions include topics on where ads will appear, certification, pre-launch advertising and so on.

Apple Developer:

Beta 3 is available for iOS 17.5, visionOS 1.2 and other platforms

by Danis Tazetdinov

Apple seeds next round of beta releases – iOS/iPadOS 17.5, macOS Sonoma 14.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5 and visionOS 1.2 get beta 3.

iOS 17.5 will allow direct web app installation in EU.

No notable changes are reported for this round of beta so far.

No new Xcode beta is available.

Release notes:

Apple announces iPad-related special event – Let loose

by Danis Tazetdinov

Apple announces Let loose. special event for May 7th, 2024 at 7:00am PT. New iPads are to be unveiled during this event. Some tweets also hint on pencils, so new Apple Pencil is expected.

Apple Events

Apple Developer: Let loose.

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Best Buy launches application for Vision Pro

by Danis Tazetdinov

Best Buy gives its customers an ability to see how some of the products could look at home. Catalog currently includes TVs, kitchen appliances, furniture and many other products.

App Store: Best Buy Envision

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Doctor shares use of Vision Pro during shoulder arthroscopy surgery

by Danis Tazetdinov

Surgeon shared his use of Apple Vision Pro during the procedure to access video stream, patient x-ray images and notes on the surgery itself.

Video provides surgeon's experience.

YouTube: VisionPro Shoulder Arthroscopy (age restricted, might be too graphic)

Reference: Apple Vision Pro used to assist doctor during shoulder arthroscopy surgery in Brazil

Apple removes WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Threads from App Store in China

by Danis Tazetdinov

Following China regulator's orders Apple removes popular messaging apps from App Store in China. Regulators were referring to "national security concerns" without additional clarifications.

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