The Control Center on your Apple Watch is a powerful tool for customizing and taking full advantage of its core features. However, it was revamped in watchOS 10 and how you get the most from it has subtly changed.

Apple Watch featuring watchOS 10's many updates and changes

The Control Center has been around for as long as the Apple Watch has, but in watchOS 10, Apple changed the way you access it on the Watch itself. Previously, you just swiped up from the bottom — now you press the flat button on the right side to access it.

Swiping up from the bottom now shows widgets. It's a bit of re-learning for veteran Apple Watch users, but with practice the side button becomes a natural move.


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Apple's new iPad Air and iPad Pro are already on sale, with every 2024 11-inch and 13-inch model eligible for an exclusive discount on the device and optional AppleCare.

A federal judge has raised concerns about whether Apple has overly complex barriers that could deter the usage of alternative payment methods in iPhone apps.


Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' injunction requires Apple to allow app developers to embed links to alternate payment systems. Its goal is to diminish the company's stronghold over app transactions, where commissions range from 15% to 30%.

The commission structure is a significant revenue stream for Apple and a focal point of contention regarding market fairness and consumer choice. The company's defense pivots on the grounds of security and maintaining a quality standard within its ecosystem, according to to a report from The Associated Press.


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The new iPad Pros skipped straight to M4, and initial benchmarks show the potential performance improvements match Apple's claims.


Apple's M4 processor won't be available in the wild until devices arrive in customers hands on May 15. But, that may not have stopped some reviewers with pre-release units from performing benchmarks with Geekbench.

A device called iPad16,6, which appears to be the latest iPad Pro with M4 with 10 cores shows a 3,767 single core and 14,677 multi core score. For context, that's almost an exact 1.5x CPU performance boost from a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with M2, which scored 2,590 single core and 10,019 multi core.


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Apple CEO Tim Cook is planning to exit Apple within the next ten years. Here are the strongest contenders to be his replacement as chief executive.


Tim Cook's time at the top of Apple is limited, according to the man himself. In an interview from April 2021, Cook discussed the iPhone maker's succession plans and confirmed he intended to depart.

"Ten more years? Probably not," Cook responded to a query of another decade of his governance.


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Workers at the first unionized Apple retail store in the US are preparing for a strike sanction vote to address unresolved issues with management.


Despite over a year of negotiations, critical issues such as work-life balance, erratic scheduling, and wages remain unresolved. The workforce at the Towson, Maryland store, which unionized in June 2022, is increasingly disheartened by what they perceive as Apple's insufficient responses to their concerns.

Earlier in 2024, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE) conducted an independent survey. It countered Apple's "Workers Rights Assessment," which was initially undertaken to quell shareholder and employee unrest.


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Duncan Kerr, a designer who has been a part of Apple's journey since the late 1990s is now departing, marking another loss for the design team in a relatively short span of time.


In February, Apple lost designer Bart Andre, who had been with the company since 1992. He was Apple's longest-serving industrial designer.

On Wednesday, it was learned that Kerr would also be departing, though his plans are currently unknown. Kerr had worked at Apple since 1999 and was heavily involved in developing several generations of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.


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A woman with nonspeaking autism got an iPad when she was 18, and through an app on it, is now speaking in schools — and working for the government.


Apple introduced Live Speech with iOS 17 in 2023, but as far back as 2014 there were iPad apps that could speak whatever was typed into them. The iPad then radically changed the life of Jordyn Zimmerman, then aged 18, who had nonspeaking autism.

"[The] iPad gave me so much confidence to really connect with people," she told CBS Mornings. "No matter where I am on iPad, I can double tap that assistive touch button, which allows me to open a live speech accessibility feature."


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Disney is bringing even more immersive content to the Apple Vision Pro. This time it's the turn of Marvel's "What If...?" franchise.


Disney is working closely with Apple to provide Apple Vision Pro users more exclusive experiences. On Wednesday, the Disney-owned Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive revealed that a new one will be arriving soon.

Dubbed "What If...? — An Immersive Story," the content will consist of elements from the original Disney+ animated series of the same name. The show reimagines how various characters within the Marvel universe would be and act if their situations had changed.


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A new report predicts that sales of the new iPad Pro will be affected both by its higher price than before, and by the appeal for consumers of the lower-cost 13-inch iPad Air.


Trendforce has previously and rather obviously predicted that if Apple releases iPad Pro models with OLED screens, it would drop the previous versions that had mini LED displays. Now that Apple has done exactly this, Trendforce has released a report estimating the potential sales of the new iPad range.

The report from market research firm Trendforce is really focused on AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screens. This is the slight but significant variant of OLED that lets the iPad Pro control every individual pixel, and also do so while consuming less power.


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Amidst plateauing iPhone sales, Apple's enhanced storage upgrade options have emerged as a significant profit driver.


Apple has long leveraged the strategy of encouraging iPhone users to opt for higher storage variants, significantly increasing the device's price. The approach has proved crucial in offsetting the otherwise stagnating revenues from iPhone sales.

Upgraded storage options do come with a higher price tag, ranging from an additional 10% to 50% of the base model's price. The value they offer can be significant, depending on the owner's use case.


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If a single set of M4 benchmarks can be believed, the new higher-end configurations of the iPad Pro have a lead on the MacBook Pro with M3 processor for AI tasks — but not by much.


A new benchmark for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with M4 and 10 cores has been posted to GeekBench overnight. In it, the assorted artificial intelligence workloads have perhaps been measured for the first time — but we're skeptical, considering that the benchmark appears to have been run on iOS 18.

If accurate, the score of 9234 on the "Core ML Neural Engine Inference" for iPad Pro is decent. It is not the best from an Apple Product.


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After a year's gap, Apple has finally updated the iPad Pro, with a surprise M4 debut and OLED in the spotlight for 2024. Here's how the newest iPad Pro models compare against the previous generation.


The iPad was complete absent from 2023, with the only change being to add USB-C to the Apple Pencil. Instead, consumers had to purchase iPad Pro models that were introduced in October 2022.

That one-year gap has given Apple time to make quite a few changes to its highest-tier tablet lineup. The result is its 2024 releases.


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Fans of the Jason Sudeikis Apple TV+ show "Ted Lasso" can now preorder Blu-ray and DVD boxed sets for the comedy show from Amazon.


"Ted Lasso" was a phenomenon for Apple TV+, but you can't watch it without the Apple TV+ subscription. Following rumors that a Blu-ray box set was on the way for all three seasons, it's now surfaced on Amazon.

Titled "Ted Lasso: The Complete Series," the product listing reveals that fans can actually buy either the Blu-ray or DVD boxed sets as a pre-order. The release date for the boxed sets is listed as 30 July, 2024 for both versions.


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Collectors are going to have to spend $645 to get the Apple Pencil Pro in each of its five different packaging designs — but they'd better buy in store rather than online.


Apple may be cutting down on plastics in packaging, and getting rid of stickers, but it's not going back to the 1990s when it shipped everything in minimally-printed brown cardboard. Instead, Apple has added full-color artwork to the white Apple Pencil Pro boxes, each one spelling out the word "Pro."

On Wednesday, the CSA unveiled its latest update to the Matter home automation spec, introducing several new device categories to the burgeoning standard.


Matter, overseen by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, has officially reached version 1.3, six months after its last major update. Now that the spec is finalized, device manufacturers and ecosystem stewards can add support themselves.

New device categories include:


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The minute-long Apple ad showing art equipment and materials being crushed down into the new iPad Pro is being called heartbreaking, wanton, and creepy.


Apple first aired its "Crush" ad during the "Let Loose" event that saw the launch of the new iPad Air and iPad Pro models. It shows paints, guitars, toys, sculptures, and more, all being crushed down by an enormous weight, which then rises up again to reveal the iPad Pro.

Since that debut during the event, Apple's Tim Cook tweeted a link to it — and started a backlash. At time of writing, there are over 2,500 comments to his tweet and while many are about iPad details, most are expressing abhorrence at the ad.


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Starting with the new iPads, Apple has finally stopped including the stickers and it is a relief.


Okay, it's partly a relief just for me because I happen to have papyrophobia — I am a writer who is afraid of paper. It's like an OCD thing and I'm fine with US Letter or A4 scripts. If those are torn, or if you give me a Post-It Note, I am in trouble.

Consequently, every single time I've bought a new Mac, or an iPhone, or an iPad, there has been a moment of wincing distaste as I hide the stickers back in the box. But I have also never had a moment's desire to slap any sticker of any kind on anything — and especially not a device I've just spent at least a thousand on.


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After a relatively brief stint, Apple TV+ marketing chief Ricky Strauss is heading elsewhere.


Strauss was hired in early January of 2023. He led consumer marketing for Apple TV+, including both original series and films. He reported to Tor Myhren.

Prior to his marketing work on Apple TV+, he held a similar role for Disney and Hulu for nine years. Under his tenure as president of marketing at Disney the company relaunched Star Wars, and wrapped up the Marvel Infinity Stones saga. Perhaps most importantly, in his role as president of content and marketing the company launched the Disney+ streaming service in 2019.


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A rumor was floating around that mammoth Dungeons and Dragons adventure game "Baldur's Gate 3" was coming to the iPad — but that has since been squashed by the publisher.


Apple is doing what it can in hardware to attract AAA game developers to Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It has gone so far to develop a game porting kit, which has been co-opted by enterprising users to port just about anything that runs on Windows to Apple Silicon, albeit unofficially.

Larian has a native port of Baldur's Gate 3 for Mac. It has had its ups and downs performance-wise, but the latest patch fixes most of the issues that made it unplayable later in the game.


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After a rough start to 2024, promotions on the iPhone appears to have buoyed Apple in China, according to official government data.


Apple and its resellers cut prices in the end of February. This move may have preserved Apple's quarter, and allowed Tim Cook to say that Mainland China sales were only down 8% versus the 25% that analysts feared.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology publishes a monthly report, detailing the financial aspects of the smartphone industry in China. In the latest report, cited on Wednesday morning by Bloomberg foreign-branded smartphone sales surged to 3.75 million units, which is up about 12% year-over year.


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