Apple has never really been one to bridge the gap between operating systems, ecosystems, and platforms.
The company's stronghold over things like iMessage are essentially keeping people locked into iOS, although arguments could be made its totally escapable.
However, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel, as Apple seems to be more willing to expand some of its services to competing platforms. After all, for example, Apple Music is available on Android and iTunes (later replaced with Apple TV after iTunes was effectively killed) was released earlier this year for LG and Samsung TVs
Now iCloud is making its way to competing operating systems. Apple and Microsoft have become closer partners, and Apple has released iCloud for Windows 10's Microsoft Store.
While you could've been using iCloud on Windows all along, there hasn't been an iCloud app in the Microsoft Store for it.
With the new iCloud app for Windows you can easily sync your data to the cloud using File Explorer. It supports iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, as well as Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, and Bookmarks. For Mail, Contacts, Calendars you'll need Outlook 2016 or later.
According to Wall Street Journal, Nintendo has started producing their next-generation game console, two of them to be exact. This means the dual successor to highly successful Nintendo Switch is just around the corner.
It also means that current trade issues between China and the U.S. might really affect where and how it is manufactured and shipped.
Nintendo is reportedly ready for the effects the trade war might have with their products, and has already moved some of the manufacturing out of China. This will allow them to avoid profit killing tariffs.
While officially Nintendo hasn't commented on this, they do say that majority of Switch manufacturing is located in China.
Not only is Nintendo avoiding China but, according to Bloomberg, Google is moving some of its production out of the country. Google's smart home division Nest is manufacturing more of the devices in Taiwan and Malaysia.
Apple's rise to the top with the iPhone was nothing short of miraculous, but things haven't necessarily been going as great after Steve Jobs passed, although they are again closing in on that $1 trillion.
Market cap was rising until it hit a trillion dollars last year, but since it has hit some big roadblocks.
One of them was the failure with 5G. Apple's sole modem partner was Intel, who completely flopped with their 5G modem development. Not only were they late to the party, but they eventually had to pull out entirely.
However, the partnership with Qualcomm is definitely not what Apple would consider optimal. They would much rather not work with the company that makes most Android modems, and have either an exclusive partner or, better yet, produce their own modem.
Mozilla's Firefox has been in a slow and painful decline ever since Google announced their own web browser, Chrome, approximately 10 years ago.
Not only has Firefox's market share been cut in third but the company has become increasingly dependent on search engine partnerships and the royalties they provide.
That's why the company has just announced a new premium version of Firefox. A massive move from the company that has provided, and keeps providing, a free to use web browser.
While the premium Firefox is only going to hit the testers this fall, the company has already revamped Firefox's image quite a bit.
Mozilla has also determined that in the future Firefox will encompass not only the browser but a larger group of software, including Firefox Send, Firefox Monitor, and Firefox Lockwise. Thus, it is only reasonable that the browser be called Firefox Browser from now on.
Well, whether you'll be calling it that (you won't), that is indeed the official name. It also means that Firefox has gotten a brand new logo that spans over all the apps.
As you can see below, Firefox the brand has a different logo than the browser, but the two are completely different from Send, Monitor, and Lockwise.
Not many of the younger generation of photographers know what developing a photo is like. However, apparently the ones that have learned about it are interested.
There's interest enough for Fujifilm to bring back photographic film to the market. The company has started producing a new version of its iconic black-and-white Acros photo film.
The new product is called Neopan 100 Acros II. They are producing both a 35 mm as well as 120 film variants of this monochrome technology that we thought had been largely forgotten.
This nearly 200 years old method of photography has some new technology inserted in it. According to Fujifilm, a new Super Fine-Σ technique improves the sharpness and produces a more fine graininess compared to the original Neopan 100 Acros.
Fujifilm will start selling the film in Japan this fall and expansion is in store if there is demand.
The best example of the escalation of the trade war between China and the U.S. is of course Trump blacklisting world's number two smartphone manufacturer and top 5G competitor Huawei.
However, there is no trade war where there is no retaliation. China has warned that it is willing to blacklist companies in America, and elsewhere, who abide by what Huawei calls unconstitutional ban.
Furthermore general trade war actions, like tariffs, could damage other companies as well. One of the main ones in the line of fire is of course Apple, who've had troubles in China.
Fortunately Apple's key supplier Hon Hai, better known here as Foxconn, is assuring investors that drastic trade war acts are not going to leave Apple without iPhones, Bloomberg reports.
According to Foxconn, they have all the necessary facilities to keep on producing iPhones for American consuming needs. Thus, even if the trade war would escalate further and make it necessary to build iPhones outside China, that is possible according to the Taiwanese contract manufacturer.
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has revealed a rather strange development for the web browser developers. The company responsible for the popular Firefox browser is going to be releasing a premium version of the browser.
At this point he doesn't reveal what kind of price people are required to pay to access this new piece of Mozilla software, but needless to say it will include some improvements over the free version.
In an interview with Germal publication t3n, Beard says that the new version might include things like integrated VPN service as well as free and safe cloud storage, although not all features have yet been decided.
He ensures that in no universe is Mozilla going to get rid of the free version, however. This also won't affect the new features that have already been promised to the free version in upcoming updates.
Firefox has lost much of its traction to Google's Chrome over the years, and it currently hold the second place in market share with measly 10%, when it topped 30% around ten years ago before Chrome.
According to the company this is one of the ways it is seeking new revenue streams.
AMD had their E3 press event yesterday where they revealed finally the upcoming GPUs based on the new Navi architecture.
They company had already initially revealed the new generation of GPUs at Computex, but this time around we got some dearly needed details.
AMD's newly announced Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 are the new champs that challenge Nvidia's midrange RTX series cards. RX 5700 is aiming to challenge the RTX 2060 with a compelling $379 price tag.
The XT version is going to perhaps challenge the RTX 2070 with a bit pricier $449.
Both will be available from July 7 onwards.
AMD told us that RX 5700 XT features 40 compute units and 2560 stream processors that produce up to 9.75 teraflops, and 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory that can reach up to 1905 MHz boost clock speed (and 1605 MHz base clock).
The cheaper RX 5700 has 36 compute units, 2304 stream processors with up to 7.95 teraflops, and same 8 gigs of GGDR6 with a lower 1725 MHz boost clock (and 1465 MHz base clock).
If you are wondering whether the new Navi cards support ray tracing like their Nvidia counterparts, that is a definite no, and it's likely that they'll wait until the next generation to properly implement it. Even then the full scene ray tracing is going to be a cloud solution.
Microsoft launched the new Xbox Game Pass PC at their E3 press event very much as expected. The $5 a month service offers free games to PC gamers, and you can try it out now for an introductory monthly fee of $1.
In addition Microsoft introduced a new Game Pass tier for all to subscribe to. Previously only available for testers, the Game Pass Ultimate offers Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass as well as the newest addition Game Pass PC.
All three services bundled in one costs you $14.99 a month, which is a bargain if you intend to get them all. Separately they would cost around $25.
Microsoft has said that Game Pass PC will include over 100 games from 75 different developers, similarly to the Xbox version. In addition to free games, subscribers get a 20 percent discount towards other games on Microsoft Store and 10 percent discount from DLC.
The U.S. government's blacklisting of Huawei could have disastrous consequences to the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, but the worst hasn't still gone into effect, and we might even see some backtracking from the Trump administration.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has revealed that the president might ease the restrictions if upcoming trade negotiations with China go well, Reuters reports.
This makes it even more clear that with the blacklist trade war is a large part of it, not only a national security aspect that Mnuchin also highlights. China has also suggested that it might be ready to respond in kind to what it considers an act of trade war.
While Huawei has been targeted by the U.S. government for years national security grounds, and this has meant that Huawei hasn't had an opening to enter the very closed U.S. smartphone market, Trump escalated it by requiring U.S. companies to halt business with the Chinese company altogether.
One of Microsoft's core competencies lies in the cloud, and they've been trying to leverage that know-how in creating the next-generation gaming platform for quite a while.
In the meantime companies like Google have been doing exactly the same thing, and even managed to officially release their product. Microsoft obviously has to worry about their stil very physical Xbox business, but they are soon ready to expand to the cloud with a new service.
Microsoft's streaming game platform xCloud is going to be ready for testing this fall, the company revealed at their E3 event. The public testing of the platform will begin in October.
You'll be able to test both Xbox games you own as well as games on Xbox Game Pass with the new service. While there's no expansive list of supported devices or platforms, Microsoft has assured that xCloud will be made available widely across different platforms.
This suggests that you'll be able to play on big screens, mobile devices, and everything in the middle. Microsoft and Sony striking a deal on cloud services also suggests that Sony devices are likely to support xCloud.
Our dear website, AfterDawn, officially launched in 10th of June, 1999. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we start a year-long project to look back what news we covered back in 1999 - 2000. We'll publish these collections once a month, covering a month years earlier on, with modern perspective on events happened back then.
At this point, it is also time to remind you, our readers, that AfterDawn didn't start out as a "general tech website", but instead, our core focus was on digital audio technology (MP3s, most notably, and how to encode, edit and play them) and digital video. As the decades have passed, our focus has also changed to cover other things. But during these first years, it was all about digital audio and video.
And yeah, we didn't produce many news in our early days, as AfterDawn's original idea was - and still is - to be a "portal" where you can get various types of information. Back in 1999, that meant we published guides, news and software downloads. But hey, we also provided free hosting for independent artists' MP3 tracks and, at some point in time, offered a quite large collection of WinAMP skins for users to download.
And damn, our news articles weren't too long, either :-)
Software update: WinDAC
In June, 1999, we covered handful of major software updates in our news. One of those was a recent update to a CD audio ripper program called WinDAC. As the name implies, the Windows-based software was meant to copy the contents of an audio CD to a PC hardware. Back then, this was done by storing the data in WAV format, which user later could edit and compress (encode) to a smaller format, such as MP3.
As expected, E3 started with a bang from Microsoft. The company revealed the first details about their upcoming, next-generation Xbox console.
While Sony has been revealing some tidbits about their PS5 already, Microsoft has been fairly quite until now. Microsoft's upcoming Xbox doesn't have an official name yet, not one that we know about, but they did give us some impressive specs to look forward to.
The device we still know as Project Scarlett is extremely powerful. According to Microsoft it can perform up to four times faster than current generation Xbox One X.
This means that the upcoming Xbox will no only provide 120 FPS framerates but up to 8K resolution. In addition it will support variable refresh rate and the state-of-the-art lighting effect known as ray-tracing, popularized by new GeForce RTX cards.
It's based upon the AMD Zen 2 processor architecture and new RDNA GPU architecture, which means that you'll get super fast GDDR6 memory. As expected, Microsoft will move from HDD storage to much, much faster SSD.
It all started in winter 1998/1999. It was one of the coldest winters in Finnish history with temperatures dropping to record low of -51C in Northern parts of the country. There was this slightly bored web developer, with too many easy job tasks at hand, dreaming about doing something of his own to the Internet.
After months of thinking it through, a vision of a website dedicated to all things about MP3s was taking a shape. The idea was to build a website that would combine all aspects of the trendy new technology under one umbrella: news about the tech, guides on how to use the tech, software downloads to help to follow the guides provided and a place for indie artists to publish their songs, in MP3 format, for free.
Drafting the plans, the realism hit hard. Building - and maintaining - such a site on my own seemed like an impossible task. The thinking was, that once the novelty of the project would wane, the project would be left to die, if running the site on my own. Furthermore, back in those days, there weren't open source CMS systems, free picture galleries, WordPress themes to pick from or anything like that. Nope, you had to build the entire site from the scratch, on your own, including all its backend systems, design, etc. And yeah, hosting, even a medium-sized website would cost something like $100 a month back then. I was in my 20s and quite poor, to be honest.
The U.S. government's blacklisting of Huawei has resulted in fairly dire consequences for the Chinese smartphone giant. Many of the American, as well as some European, companies have stopped, or will stop, working with Huawei.
Now another U.S. top brand is shying away from supporting Huawei. Facebook has announced that it will no longer provide their apps for pre-installation on Huawei devices.
This means that no Huawei comes with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp installed at the factory. However, it doesn't ban the apps from being installed, or updated, by the user. At least as long as Huawei phones retain the ability to use Google Play.
According to atw, the policy applies to all the phone units that haven't yet been shipped, including smartphone models that have been in stores before the blacklist.
Obviously this isn't the worst of the blacklist consequences but it sure doesn't help Huawei's standing against other Android brands. First and foremost the problems will come with Google and Android and perhaps after that from chip manufacturers and designers like Qualcomm and ARM.
Apple has never really been one to bridge the gap between operating systems, ecosystems, and platforms.
After Hon Hai Precision, better known as Foxconn, assured investors that 
Apple's rise to the top with the iPhone was nothing short of miraculous, but things haven't necessarily been going as great after Steve Jobs passed, although they are again closing in on that $1 trillion.
