All the news from Apple’s 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference – The Verge

The new iTunes icon is a throwback to Apple’s classic logo

2015-06-11T17:10:15-04:00

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Apple loves to change the iTunes icon. It's just never satisfied. And it's hard to blame Apple for that: iTunes is one of the most important pieces of software it makes - a gateway into its revolutionary music and app stores, the home of most of your media, and the place you go to manage iPhones and iPads. All of which is probably why Apple seems to get bored every few years and tweak the iTunes icon to better fit the company's current vibe. And the latest iTunes icon - the one that's coming with OS X El Capitan this fall - may be both the strangest and the most fitting design yet.

Read next: The OS X El Capitan review.

It's either based on …

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iOS 9 finally has a lowercase keyboard

2015-06-10T03:32:45-04:00

There's never enough time during a WWDC keynote for Apple to enumerate all of the new features it's adding to its latest software, but this change in iOS 9 will be a most welcome and apparent one: the keyboard now shows lowercase letters when typing in lower case and uppercase letters when typing in upper case. Up until now, much like the physical keyboard on your MacBook, all letters were uppercase at all times. If the change seems like an obvious and overdue design tweak, that's because it is. Android keyboards have alternated thusly for many years, helping the user know what mode he or she is typing in without needing to reference the Shi …

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The entire music industry is just another feature of the iPhone

2015-06-09T15:56:58-04:00

Apple spent a lot of time at WWDC heaping praise on developers - the middle point of the keynote featured a video celebrating all of the apps and experiences enabled by the iPhone and the App Store in the seven years of its existence. Neil deGrasse Tyson called the combination of apps and handheld devices "a watershed moment in civilization." When Tim Cook announced that watchOS 2 would allow developers to make native apps for the Apple Watch, he told the crowd they would "change people's lives." Heady stuff, to be sure, but deserved - there's no doubting the impact of mobile and apps on our lives.

Cook also said that Apple has now paid dev …

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iOS 9 is turning the iPad into what it always wanted to be: the new-age PC

2015-06-09T09:33:30-04:00

Apple's upcoming iOS 9 has a bunch of under-the-hood performance improvements and new features, like a new, more intelligent personal assistant. While all iOS devices dating back to 2011's iPhone 4S will benefit from the new platform when it officially launches this fall, the iPad - and the most recent iPad in particular - is getting special treatment this time around. With iOS 9, Apple is taking the iPad seriously as a productivity device in a way that it never has before. The iPad is growing up, and Apple is setting the stage to make it an even more powerful device in the very near future.

Update: Read the iOS 9 review.

The iPad has alwa …

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For the streaming music competition, threat of Apple Music turns to a sigh of relief

2015-06-08T21:22:55-04:00

There are very few areas where music and streaming executives agree. Apple Music, seemingly, is one of them.

"I think I've never been more confident," an executive at a streaming music company told The Verge following the Apple Music announcement. "We were all bracing ourselves, but we feel really good about it right now."

Streaming music providers, so far, are breathing a sigh of relief after learning what Apple Music is - and isn't. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek made his thoughts known. Multiple executives throughout the music and streaming industry have made it clear to The Verge that while it would be a success, they don't believe that Apple Music …

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Man vs. machine: why Apple doesn’t want to pick

2015-06-08T19:30:22-04:00

Earlier this morning Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of product marketing, took the stage to introduce Apple News. She showed the app's features and design, while also pointing out its ability to adapt to users' tastes. "There are powerful machine learning algorithms that analyze the content of the articles" to determine which stories are surfaced for a given user, she said. It echoed a point Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, had made earlier about iOS 9's new Proactive Assistant: smarter, more sophisticated computer algorithms are allowing Apple's products to provide custom-tailored features that its cus …

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Apple removes ’50 gallon drum of lube’ from WWDC keynote image

2015-06-08T18:56:10-04:00

Sometimes there comes a moment in every internet writer's life where a headline seems too perfect to be true - but really, truly is the greatest thing ever. Sure, many situations of ludicrously fun headlines arise and are shot down by important journalistic questions like Is this fair? Is this accurate? and Is this unnecessarily lewd?

This is not technically one of those situations. Apple did, in fact, remove "50 gallon drum of lube" from an image shown on stage at WWDC. Only, it wasn't an actual 50 gallon drum of lube so much as it was the phrase "50 gallon drum of lube" (as verified by this Cleveland Indians tweet from June 2nd). For comp …

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I just used Apple Music. It’s fine, and that should scare Spotify

2015-06-08T18:39:03-04:00

As we all expected, Apple unveiled a new music app called Apple Music. It's coming out later in June, and Apple doesn't have it on display here at WWDC - in fact, Apple doesn't have any of its new software on display here. Instead, it's taking some journalists into a quiet, chill sort of lounge to get a chance to play around with the new app. We couldn't take photos or video, probably because some of the corners of the app like BeatsOne Radio weren't operational yet.

But what I did see was a mostly functional and mostly straightforward music streaming app. I often get caught saying that a particular app or technology is boring, but that's o …

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Apple proves that Android is the new Windows

2015-06-08T18:24:26-04:00

Apple prides itself on thinking and being different to everyone else. It acknowledges competitors like Microsoft and Google only grudgingly, and usually in a way that only illustrates how much nicer and more prosperous its own Mac and iPhone platforms are. It will have hurt that pride, therefore, to have to announce today that the big new Apple initiative, Apple Music, will be available on iPhones, iPads, Macs, PCs, and Android.

Until today's announcement, Apple's presence in the Google Play Store was only a technicality of its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, which had already released Beats Music on Android. With the unveiling …

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Apple Music may not steal you from Spotify, but it can still win the streaming battle

2015-06-08T18:04:19-04:00

Apple's playbook is famous at this point. It finds a market that isn't living up to its potential - MP3 players, smartphones, tablets - and then marches in late with something way better that ends up bringing in way more money than anyone has ever made in that field before. It's a challenging strategy that relies on Apple's ability to regularly create remarkable products, but it's one that's been working for over a decade. And today, we learned about Apple's latest target: the streaming music business.

It's about time Apple got started on streaming

This is an area that Apple, by many accounts, should have entered years ago. Spotify has been …

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