As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon's cloud, CNBC reported Monday, citing citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Apple's cloud expenditure reflects the company's determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so. [...] In a February job posting, Apple said it was looking for someone who could "lead and architect our growing AWS footprint." Indeed, that expenditure is on track to expand. At the end of March, Apple's spending was on track to average more than $30 million per month in the first quarter of 2019. That would be more than 10 percent higher than a year earlier, according to two people familiar with the spending. If Apple's AWS use stays at those levels for the rest of 2019, its annual spending would exceed $360 million. Apple spent approximately $350 million in 2018, one of these people said.

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According to the Wall Street Journal today, Samsung is officially delaying the Galaxy Fold launch in the US until further notice following some major display issues that popped up last week. Yikes.

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A Tim Cook Earth Day tweet has shown off four ‘Shot on iPhone’ nature photos. These show two penguins against a mountain backdrop, a tiny frog sitting in a flower (above), a close-up of a snake and a giraffe beneath a tree on an open plain with rain in the background …

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The European Parliament voted last week to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a gigantic, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. From a report: This new database will be known as the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and is set to unify records on over 350 million people. Per its design, CIR will aggregate both identity records (names, dates of birth, passport numbers, and other identification details) and biometrics (fingerprints and facial scans), and make its data available to all border and law enforcement authorities. Its primary role will be to simplify the jobs of EU border and law enforcement officers who will be able to search a unified system much faster, rather than search through separate databases individually. "The systems covered by the new rules would include the Schengen Information System, Eurodac, the Visa Information System (VIS) and three new systems: the European Criminal Records System for Third Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN), the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)," EU officials said last week.

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With Apple’s months-long patent royalty battle with Qualcomm settled as of last week, the pathway to reliable 5G iPhones seems clear. Now reliable supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities has new predictions about what to expect for iPhones including new details about 5G iPhone chips.

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If you have a presentation that could benefit from a little movement, use a Keynote animation. Here’s how to animate objects on a slide in Keynote.

While Apple and Amazon are often viewed as competitors, they also share an important partnership when it comes to cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) are used to power Apple’s services including iCloud and its monthly payments to the retail giant are now said to be more than $30 million.

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A Zillow iPhone app allows realtors to create 3D tours of homes for sale across the USA and Canada. The company first piloted the app in Arizona back in 2017, but it has only now been made available to all.

Realtors use the iOS app to take panoramic photos of the home, which the server then stitches together into a complete 3D tour, in much the same way as Google’s Street View building interiors …

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With a new free jailbreak tweak called DNDAllow, you can let specific application notifications through iOS' native Do Not Disturb filter.

Earlier this month, Beats official unveiled its new Powerbeats Pro totally wireless earphones — a sporty, louder take on Apple’s AirPods that uses the same H1 chip. The early reveal was tagged with a message about pending FCC approval, however, with the official launch not planned until sometime in May.

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Mangroves – trees and shrubs that grow in coastal waters – absorb ten times as much carbon as land-based trees, which is why Apple announced last year that it was investing in a mangrove restoration project in Columbia. The company has marked Earth Day by reporting back on the environmental project.

Apple said in September that it would be supporting a project to protect and restore a 27,000-acre mangrove forest …

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With Konban, your favorite app is never more than a swipe away. It replaces the Home screen's traditional Today page with an app of your choice.

Do Not Disturb is a wonderful feature of iOS, but it does come with a few shortcomings. LeaveMeAlone is a new free jailbreak tweak that aims to fix those.

The American Medical Association (AMA) has found that most free apps designed to help people quit smoking, or cope with depression, are sharing data with Facebook or Google – and only a third of them properly disclosed that fact in privacy policies …

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With Blanka, you can confidently hand your iPhone or iPad to a stranger or family member knowing that they won't be able to access specific apps.

Last week, Bowers & Wilkins invited us downtown in New York to show off their latest audio line, Formation. The lineup is predicated on five launch products, all sharing the same Formation namesake at the beginning: Bar, Duo, Wedge, Bass and Audio.

Featuring support for AirPlay 2, the company is touting the innovations presented in the Formation line as top-tier wired audio fidelity achieved wirelessly, all with the same setup simplicity of a $249 everyday-consumer level speaker.

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Department store giant JCPenny has dropped support for Apple Pay from both its retail stores, and its app.

The company’s Twitter support account confirmed the change over the weekend …

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elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) shares an article from The Next Web: Scientists from Cornell University have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with incredibly life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die. That sure sounds a lot like life, but Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, who worked on the research, says otherwise. He told The Stanford Chronicle, "We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that's alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before." Just how lifelike? According to the research they're on par with biologically complex organisms such as mold.... "Dynamic biomaterials powered by artificial metabolism could provide a previously unexplored route to realize 'artificial' biological systems with regenerating and self-sustaining characteristics." Basically, the Cornell team grew their own robots using a DNA-based bio-material, observed them metabolizing resources for energy, watched as they decayed and grew, and then programmed them to race against each other... Lead author on the team's paper, Shogo Hamada, told The Stanford Chronicle that "ultimately, the system may lead to lifelike self-reproducing machines."

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"I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I'm not doing it anymore," said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington. The New York Times reports on a "rebellion" that started in Kansas against an online "personalized learning" program funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, and developed by Facebook engineers -- including a classroom walk-out, a sit-in, and parent protests at public school board meetings. Read the Times' pay-walled original article or this free alternate version. Some highlights: Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning... Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit's program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately. Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad's hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone. "We're allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies," said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son's fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school. In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform... The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit's platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017... By [this] winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit's program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says the program also "demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond." But the real concern is whether the programs are effective. The Times also spoke to a senior scientist at the RAND corporation who's studied digital customized learning programs, who acknowledges "There has not been enough research." And a Wellington city councilman told them that 12 parents actually pulled their children out of the school system after this year's first semester -- and nearly 40 more plan to do so by summer vacation. One church secretary (with two school-age children) even coined a pithy slogan for her yard sign: "Don't Plummet With Summit."

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Need to quickly change your Instagram password on iPhone? Read on below for how to do it in a few easy steps.

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