Apple

Apple retail stores will offer a little more money for iPhone trade-ins in the US and Canada for people upgrading to the iPhone 15 series of phones from May 20th to June 3rd, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

He didn’t say what the new values will be. At the moment, the most Apple offers is $630 for an iPhone 14 Pro Max.

The app’s “Now Playing” screen has a gradient background now, as 9to5Google spotted. Also, the three tabs at the bottom aren’t on a visually separate bar anymore, though you can still swipe up to reveal them.

If you don’t see it at first, try swiping the app closed from the app switcher and relaunching — worked for me.

If you use Uber with an iPhone, you can turn off unwanted marketing notifications — but the feature is a leetle hard to find. Okay, it’s a lot hard to find. John Gruber found it, though: go to Account > Settings > Privacy > Offers and Promos from Uber and tap the word here.  You can then unsubscribe from some or all Uber marketing emails or notifications.

An Apple “wearable computer” made by the Vision Pro’s manufacturer received the necessary quality and safety accreditation for it go on sale, according to the website of the Chinese product standards body that granted its approval.

The report aligns with recent rumors suggesting the Pro will roll out internationally after WWDC on June 10th, though an exact date is still unknown.

Here’s a quick demo of Stem Splitter, a new feature added to Logic Pro for iPad and Mac, which takes a single track of mixed instruments and splits it into individual multitrack files for remixing or sampling.

This idea, using AI to separate music tracks, seemed so novel only 6 months ago when we got a new Beatles song using a similar process with John Lennon’s old tape recordings.

Does running custom shortcuts put the “Pro” in Apple Pencil Pro? I scoffed at the name when the new iPad stylus was announced last week (it doesn’t even have a built-in eraser function?) but I take it back knowing I can use it to turn off my LED candles like I’m waving a magic wand.

RetroArch, a long-running (and very good) emulator frontend, is waiting for Apple to green-light it for the App Store, according to one of its developers. PPSSPP, a well-known PSP emulator, is also in the approval queue, its developer told The Verge via email.

And that’s not all! Another multi-system emulator (Nintendo 3DS, DS, GBA) called Folium is also awaiting approval. There are yet others — see this list on Reddit.

The EU’s DMA rules have resulted in the launch of two third-party app stores for iPhone owners: AltStore PAL last month and Setapp Mobile today.

With the release of iOS 17.5, companies like Spotify and Epic now have the option of distributing apps directly from their own websites as well, assuming Apple’s rules aren’t too onerous.

Instead of reviewing the iPad, Federico Viticci over at MacStories decided to take iPadOS to task. He runs down what’s missing, what’s broken, and what Apple needs to do to make the iPad the do-everything device it could be. Federico gets it!