Apple Insider
Our industry expert rounds-up the biggest Apple corporate stories circulating this month
Apple News gets interesting
Apple News is the company’s solution for providing preference-based news to iOS 9 users, and it’s now available in the UK and Australia on devices updated to iOS 9.1. The company has published details of its Apple News Format and the News API, which should enable developers to explore the potential of the service. These tools enable publishers to create customised layouts with iOS fonts, rich photo galleries, videos and animations optimised for iPhone and iPad, and to add Apple News output to existing content management systems.
The Apple News Format is good in purely financial terms as news publishers keep 100% of the revenue from the ads they sell, and 70% when iAd sells ads for them. Apple does not allow ads to be placed in the RSS format that’s currently used by publishers to put content into channels in the News app.
DisplayPort standard gains extra powers
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has published the Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) standard version 1.4b, enabling improved device interoperability, lower cost, and better power efficiency in products using the standard. This will eventually be good news for Mac users, as it should help foster development of a wider range of products supporting the technology, and also enables 8K support in notebooks and all-in-ones like the iMac. It may even lay the ground for the future introduction of much improved Apple-branded displays for Mac Pro users.
20 million Macs sold in a year
While the overall PC industry declined 11% year-on-year, Mac sales climbed 3%. While Apple defied industry trends, its sales were impacted by the strong dollar. Apple also excelled in the only PC industry bright spot: notebook sales. Overall industry growth reached 11%, while in contrast Apple’s notebook sales climbed 19.8%.
Apple has set fresh Mac sales records across the last 12 months, shifting 20.6 million of the machines over the last fiscal year. In that process, it has proved the Mac is no longer a niche product, but rather that it is increasingly the first choice of computer for a digital generation.