Aditya Kalra, reporting for Reuters:

Tinder-owner Match Group has filed an antitrust case against Apple with the competition regulator in India, accusing it of “monopolistic conduct” that forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases, a legal filing seen by Reuters shows.

Apple is fending off a raft of antitrust challenges around the globe and Match’s July filing adds to two other cases in India though Match is the first foreign company to mount such a challenge against the iPhone maker in the country.

Match notes in its filing that Indians prefer using a “state-backed online transfer system,” seemingly referring to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system promoted by the Indian Govt. that has swept the country in recent times.

The govt. has repeatedly shown how much it loves UPI, and if that’s any indication, Apple just might be in some trouble here.

I spent a good 30 seconds just flipping back and forth between home screens, admiring the fluidity of the ProMotion transition. Tapping an icon for the UI view to expand up and out of the app icon is noticeably beautiful. Sliding messages or emails in and out is slick and efficient. That entire app pile-in each time you unlock your iPhone has never looked so fancy.

Give me half an iPhone of a pre-ProMotion display and a current ProMotion display and I’d be able to tell them apart in under a second. The difference is incredible and I will never, ever be able to go back.

My iPhone 13 Pro is still about three weeks away from delivery, and there’s two things that I’m increasingly excited about — ProMotion and the new cameras. I’m jumping from the iPhone XS Max, so there are a lot things that’ll be “new” for me, but the more I read about ProMotion and the new cameras, the more I wish I should’ve just bought the phone from a local store. The wait’s killing me.

Make sure you check out the amazing photos on Josh’s Instagram account as well.

Stephen Shankland, reporting for CNET:

The teams behind the Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers have banded together to improve extensions, the add-ons you can download to customize the software. That should mean your extensions will work better and come with a better security foundation to protect you from malware.

On Friday, the teams unveiled a discussion and development forum at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, dedicated to developing standards for extensions. The forum, the WebExtensions Community Group, gives engineers a place to build a unified and more secure core foundation for extensions.

At WWDC 2020, Apple introduced the WebExtension API for Safari on macOS Big Sur — an effort to enable cross-platform browser extensions. However, I’m yet to see a change in the Safari extensions ecosystem because of that. Here’s hoping this new WebExtensions Community Group brings about a change.

New iCloud Storage Pricing for India (Updated)

Update: 12th August, 2020 with new iCloud Storage Pricing for India in 2020.

At it’s annual September event, Apple announced updated pricing and revised tiers for storage on iCloud. Although the Free Tier remains at 5GB, the paid tiers have been revised from 20GB, 200GB, 500GB and 1TB to only three — 50GB, 200GB and 1TB, costing $0.99, $2.99 and $9.99 respectively.

This new pricing is now active and here’s the iCloud Storage pricing for India.

iCloud Storage Pricing for India in 2020
iCloud Storage Pricing for India in 2020

Due to the addition of 18% GST and fluctuations in the US dollar value, Apple has adjusted the pricing of iCloud Storage in India.

50GB of iCloud storage costs ₹75 per month in India, followed by 200GB at ₹219 per month. Apple has upgraded the 1TB storage tier to 2TB, which comes in at ₹749 per month. So for a small bump in the price, you get double the iCloud storage.

The old article from 2015 is below:

iCloud Storage Pricing for India

As you can see, the 20GB paid tier has been revised to 50GB now and the pricing has been updated to INR 65 for 5GB, INR 190 for 200GB and INR 650 for 1TB of storage.

Writankar Mukherjee, writing for ETtech:

Apple has roped in Ipsita Dasgupta as India country manager for its streaming services like Apple TV+, Apple Music and the App Store.

Dasgupta has joined the iPhone maker from Hotstar where she was president of strategy and new ventures.

She has succeeded Khushboo Ponwar who had last year moved on as head of business development for Apple in India, Middle East, Turkey and Africa. Dasgupta, who is an MBA from Harvard, took charge this month.

Apple needs to focus heavily on some good content in the coming months if it’s serious about Apple TV+ here in India. But I also hope that there’s a good developer evangelism plan for the apps coming out of India. There’s no dearth of shitty apps here with suboptimal experiences.

Apple Updates the 13-inch MacBook Pro, Kills the Butterfly Keyboard for Good

Apple today announced the release of an updated lineup of its 13-inch MacBook Pro that introduces the new Magic Keyboard, doubles the storage, and adds faster RAM and newer CPUs in the top-end models.

The biggest change, of course, is the replacement of the terrible Butterfly keyboard with the newer and better Magic Keyboard. The 13-inch MacBook Pro was the only notebook in Apple’s current lineup that featured the sucky keys, so good riddance.

The new lineup also offers Intel’s 10th-generation CPUs and 16GB of faster 3733MHz LPDDR4X memory, but only on the topend model that features the 2.0GHz Core i5 processor. While the lower model does get the option to upgrade to 16GB of RAM, you’re limited to the much slower 2133MHz LPDDR3 RAM only.

Effectively, the base model of the “new” 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro that will go on sale in India late next month will come with:

  • Magic Keyboard
  • 1.4GHz quad‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i5
  • 8GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 RAM
  • 256GB SSD
  • Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645
  • Two Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports

and cost a whopping INR 1,22,900 or $1625.

If you have to actually take advantage of the newer processor & RAM, you have to get the topend model with:

  • 2.0GHz quad‑core 10th‑generation Intel Core i5
  • 16GB of 3733MHz LPDDR4X RAM
  • 512GB SSD
  • Intel Iris Plus Graphics
  • Four Thunderbolt 2 (USB-C) ports

and costs INR 1,74,900 or $2315.

If you need 1TB of SSD storage, i.e. +512GB in the above config, you have to shell out INR 20,000 extra, taking the total to INR 1,94,900.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at INR 1,99,900.

Julia Alexander, writing for The Verge:

Early reviews for The Morning Show weren’t exactly positive, and executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Mimi Leder believe a lot of the feedback was an “attack on Apple.”

Both Leder and Ehrin felt like critics were reviewing Apple TV Plus as a service, and looping in The Morning Show with those critiques.

The Apple TV+ service launched with much hype and marketing around four shows — The Morning Show, For All Mankind, See, and Dickinson. I haven’t yet seen See or For All Mankind, but Dickinson and The Morning Show both look fabulous. I personally like watching The Morning Show, but that’s largely due to the star cast it has and the cinematography/direction, not because of its writing. I can see why the reviews were bad.

But to say that the reviews were an attack on Apple? Ha!

Apple has posted a new job listing on its ‘Jobs at Apple’ website for a Environmental Initiatives Program Manager focused on India and the Middle East.

The main focus of this position is on tracking, monitoring and implementation of environmental regulations in India and the Middle East, establishing relationships to key internal and external partners, and identifying and developing leadership opportunities for Apple in the field of environmental responsibility.

The position is located at Apple India’s offices in Gurugram, India and has a long list of key qualifications.