Alongside updates to iOS and OS X, Apple has released watchOS 2.0.1 with a whole host of changes and bug fixes. As well as including the new emoji character set like Apple’s other operating systems, watchOS 2.0.1 includes bug fixes for poor battery life, stalling software updates, Calendar event syncing and much more.

It has also seeded developers with the Gold Master release of tvOS for Apple TV. We’ll update with any changes …

Here’s all the changes for Apple Watch:

• New emoji characters
• Fixes an issue that could cause software updates to stall
• Resolves an issue that prevented a managed iPhone from syncing iOS Calendar events to Apple Watch
• Addresses an issue that could prevent location information from properly updating
• Fixes an issue that could cause Digital Touch to send from an email address instead of a phone number
• Addresses an issue that could cause instability when using a Live Photo as a watch face.
• Resolves an issue that allows the sensors to stay on indefinitely when using Siri to measure heart rate.

Catch up on our watchOS 2 walkthrough here for what changed in the last major update.

Filed under: Apple TV, Apple Watch, iOS, iOS Devices

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Not to be left out on ‘Back to the Future Day‘, Apple too is joining in on the Internet’s celebrations for reaching the day, October 21, 2015, in which fictional character Marty McFly time travelled to in 1989’s “Back to the Future Part II”. What better way to officially celebrate being in the future than to have our pocket-sized electronic assistant updated with a few witty remarks related to the occasion.

Here’s a sampling of the Back to the Future related responses from Siri:

While some of the predictions about what the world would look like in 2015 actually came true— video chat, 3D movies, hoverboards, for example— I’m not holding my breath for the Chicago Cubs winning the 2015 World Series as the film depicted, although it’s still a possibility.

Filed under: iOS Tagged: 3D, Apple, back to the future day, Chicago Cubs, hoverboard, iPhone, Marty Mcfly, Siri

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Apple has published the first update to OS X El Capitan since it launched last month. The update introduces a collection of new emojis and fixes many bugs, including problems with Microsoft Office, Mail, and Audio Unit plugins.

You can download the update for free on any El Capitan-capable Mac through the updates tab on the Mac App Store. Apple also released iOS 9.1, watchOS 2.0.1, and the GM build of tvOS today.

Filed under: Mac Tagged: 10.11.1, el capitan, Mac, OS X

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Apple is out with a new update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch today, the official iOS 9.1 release. For most users, a collection of new emoji characters including a taco, unicorn, and yes, a middle finger is the most notable new feature within the update. Apple has also tweaked its three planetary wallpapers and developer support for Live Photos as well as improvements to the capture experience.

As for those new emoji characters, you can check out our gallery here from during the beta period last month while you’re downloading the new update.

As for the Messages app, you can now toggle contact photos on or off on iPhone 6 and later. Go to Settings > Messages > Show Contact Photos to change this setting, which is on by default.

As expected, Apple’s News app is now available for use in the UK.

iOS 9.1 is available through the Software Update of the Settings app.

Filed under: iOS, iOS Devices Tagged: emoji, iOS 9, iOS 9.1, Live Photos

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Hinting at the sea change that will come to the television and movie industries after the launch of the fourth-generation Apple TV, Disney today announced DisneyLife, a £9.99 ($15.43) per month subscription video, music, and book service that will include Pixar’s entire catalog and classic films such as Snow White and The Jungle Book, report The Financial Times (sub. req.) and Variety. Beyond films, DisneyLife will feature Disney’s television series, books and music, with new content being added as it’s released. The service will launch November in the United Kingdom, and is planned for a 2016 rollout across France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

While a U.S. launch has not been ruled out by the company, Disney’s upcoming theatrical releases will hit Netflix under previously announced deals for the United States and Canada. According to the report, Marvel movies and Star Wars movies will not be a part of DisneyLife, but could be launched as separate subscription services…

“There’s a general sense that the world is going in this direction,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told The Financial Times. “There will be multichannel TV and we will be part of it, but the app experience offers many more layers (and) much more richness in content than a channel, where one program follows another program.”

Filed under: Apple TV, General, Tech Industry Tagged: Disney, Disney Channel

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Keep up with the best gear and deals on the web by signing up for the 9to5Toys Newsletter. Also, be sure to check us out on: Twitter, RSS Feed, Facebook, Google+ and Safari push notifications.

Today’s can’t miss deals:

Apple 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro 2.5GHz/16GB/512GB (newest version): $1,950 shipped (Reg. $2,499)

iPad mini 2 Wi-Fi 16GB in Silver or Space Gray: $230 shipped (Reg. $269)

Get a 64GB Wi-Fi iPad Air 2 for less than Apple charges for 16GB: $490 shipped (Reg. $599)

Games/Apps: Skylanders SuperChargers Pack (all platforms) $50 (Reg. $75), Angry Birds Seasons goes free, more iOS freebies

Save $20 on select Kindle e-Readers, deals start at just $59 with free shipping

Dell Black Friday Ad Leak: Gears of War Xbox One w/ Fallout 4 + controller $300, VIZIO 60-Inch 4K HDTV $800, more

Amazon and Toys R Us give a peek at this year’s must-have holiday gifts

Two Aukey 3-ft. MFi Apple-Certified Lightning Cables: $11 Prime shipped ($14 value) wp.me/p1xTlR-IMJ https://t.co/NQInikakDq

—
9to5Toys (@9to5toys) October 21, 2015

More new gear from today:

GoPro HERO4 Action Cameras: Black 4K $389 (Reg. $500), Silver w/ LCD Display $329 (Reg. $400)

• USB Power Deals: KMASHI 10,000mAh Battery $9 (Reg. $14), 6-Ft. Braided MFi Lightning Cable $8.50, more
• VIZIO 2.1 Sound Stand w/ subwoofer & remote $100 shipped (Orig. $250)
• Bluetooth Speakers: Mpow Armor Waterproof $20 Prime shipped (Reg. $36), Inateck Aluminum $37 shipped (Reg. $46)
• Daily Deals: iHome Wireless Bluetooth USB FM Clock Radio $20, Logitech K400 Wireless Keyboard $20, more

Amazon Gold Box: Mr. Beams Wireless LED Spotlights up to 45% off, prices from $55 shipped http://ift.tt/14A2fAD https://t.co/Oz4s7fnSNO

—
9to5Toys (@9to5toys) October 21, 2015

Stream Back to the Future trilogy free today on Amazon Prime or grab DVD/Blu-Ray for $20off wp.me/p1xTlR-IKn https://t.co/1G9Wqy1qC9

—
9to5Toys (@9to5toys) October 21, 2015

More deals still alive:

Seagate 4TB Portable USB 3 Hard Drive w/ 200GB Cloud: $150 shipped

21:9 Displays: Dell UltraSharp 34″ Curved $650, LG 34″ Curved $720, more

• Media: Peanuts Holiday Collection HD Download $5 ($60 value), Spider-Man Blu-ray Trilogy $14, more
• Networking: TP-Link AV1200 Powerline Kit $53 (Reg. $80), Linksys 802.11n Wireless Extender $30 (Reg. $36)
• 2.1-Ch. Home Audio: LG Soundbar 120W (refurb) $65 (Orig. $149), Harman Kardon 200W $120 (Orig. $200)
• Acer Chromebook w/ full HD display 1.50GHz/4GB/16GB SSD: $249 shipped (Reg. $279)
• Ticket To Ride goes free on iPhone for the first time in years (Reg. $2)
• Samsung Smart 4K HDTVs: 40-inch $550 (Reg. $700+), 50-inch $699 (Reg. $1,000+)
• Aukey 15,000mAh Quick Charge 2.0 power bank $22 Prime shipped (Reg. $35)
• Freebies: System Monitor for iOS + OneNote/Evernote GTD eBook + The Peanuts Movie Stencil + More!
• Jawbone UP Move Splash-Proof Bluetooth 4.0 Activity Tracker: $20 w/ in-store pickup (Reg. $50)
• Display your iPhone 6/s w/ this Mpow Car Air Vent Mount $5 shipped (Reg. $9)
• Save 20% off iTunes Digital Gift Cards: $25 for $20, $50 for $40, more
• OtterBox SYMMETRY Series iPhone 6/6s Case $20 Prime shipped (Reg. $40)
• Aukey 3-in-1 clip-on smartphone camera lens kit $10 Prime shipped (Reg. $16)
• The original Bluetooth-enabled August Smart Lock drops to $199 (Orig. $250)
• App Store Free App of the Week: Sky Gamblers Air Supremacy
• Apple’s new 4K & 5K iMacs already seeing the first price cuts and tax-free options
• Apple is dishing out free downloads of the award-winning puzzle game Shadowmatic
• Amazon slashes prices on Levi’s jeans for Men, Women and Boys
• Griffin Technology merch credit 50% off
• Adjustable iPad mount for $17 Prime shipped (Orig. $30)

New products & more:

D-Link’s latest surveillance cameras go wide-angle with “less distortion” than the competition

Libratone introduces multi-room audio alongside two new colorful ZIPP speakers

• Guitar Hero Live lands on iOS with a new mobile instrument bundle
• Gold is Best: This one-off Macintosh is a must see with its walnut enclosure and shiny keyboard
• This mini Segway hopes to take-off with its affordable price tag and compact design
• You’ll have to hurry to grab one of these limited edition Fallout 4 Xbox One controllers
• Waylens is the iOS-connected dashboard camera you’ve been waiting for
• It took about 500,000 LEGO bricks to put this life-size Batmobile together
• These futuristic looking headphones could be straight out of the Transformers movie series
• NBA 2K16 hits iOS and Android with new gameplay, controls and updated graphics
• Minecraft: Story Mode launches on iOS and Android with a new multi-episode campaign mode

Filed under: Tips and Tricks Tagged: 9to5Toys, Amazon, Angry Birds Season, app deals, Best Buy, Daily Deals, free apps, Gold Box, ipad mini 2, Retina MacBook Pro, video games

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Writing in his column in The Verge, Walt Mossberg – who says he spent “scores of hours” in conversation with Steve Jobs across 14 years – says that the man depicted in the Sorkin/Boyle movie is not the Steve Jobs he knew.

Steve Jobs wasn’t perfect. He was difficult. He was unnecessarily rude and brusque at times. He lied. But he also mellowed and grew as a person, and that mellowing coincided with the best part of his career. Mr. Sorkin opts to hide all of that from his audience. The best of the real Steve Jobs begins to unfold just as Steve Jobs ends.

A lengthy piece in Hollywood Reporter earlier this month – leaning heavily on emails leaked from the Sony hack – provides a lot of insight into what was going on behind the scenes in the run up to the making of the movie. This included the fact that Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures, knew from the start that the project was going to be challenging … 

“Fasten two seat belts,” she warned in a prescient early email. “Its [sic] gonna be more than bumpy.”

She later passed on the movie when the filmmakers wanted more money than Sony was prepared to spend, a decision she later described as a huge mistake.

We use numbers as an excuse not to make a movie to the outside world not between us. This is the second time in my career I let past performance of the current state of things corrupt my thinking and feeling about a movie. I have made other kinds of mistakes but not like this.

Producer Scott Rudin was apparently not a fan of Pascal’s handling of things.

“You’ve behaved abominably,” the producer emailed Pascal toward the end of their dealings on Steve Jobs, “and it will be a very, very long time before I forget what you did to this movie and what you’ve put all of us through.”

While Pascal may have had cold feet, both director Danny Boyle and leading star Michael Fassbender said they never had any doubts.

Said Boyle: “I was moved beyond belief by the script, in a way that really surprised me […] I read it, and that was it. I said, ‘I’m in.’ And Rudin said, ‘Are you serious?’ I could hear in his voice, thinking, ‘It can’t be this easy, can it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m as serious as I can get.’ “

Fassbender had initially planned to take some time off, but changed his mind when he saw the script.

Then he learned Rudin and Boyle were interested in having him play Jobs. He knew little about the icon. “I’m not a very techie person,” he says. “I use all the Apple products, but I had no real insight into him.” Still, the script was strong and the character compelling, and he decided to say yes, ditching his intended hiatus.

Sorkin expressed doubts in an email about Fassbender’s suitability for the role, but quickly changed his mind.

“At the time I wrote the email, I was the one person in the world unfamiliar with Michael Fassbender’s work,” he says today. “I hadn’t seen 12 Years a Slave. Hadn’t seen Inglourious Basterds. Hadn’t seen Shame. Hadn’t seen X-Men. I just managed to miss every single Michael Fassbender movie. So I said to Francine Maisler, our casting director, ‘Send me all the Fassbender movies.’ And as soon as I watched them, I was leading the Michael Fassbender parade.”

It was previously reported that Laurene Powell Jobs tried to block the movie. Director Danny Boyle wouldn’t be drawn on this, nor on Cook’s description of such movies as “opportunistic,” limiting his comments to three sentences.

“They haven’t helped,” says Boyle of her and Cook. “There’s been some tough moments. I’m not going to go into them.”

An unnamed Sony executive did, however, go further.

“She reached out; she had a strong desire not to have the movie made. But we said, ‘We’re going to move forward.’ My understanding is, she did call one or two of the actors.” Another source says that Laurene lobbied each major studio in an attempt to kill the project.

While Sorkin has taken some flack over the movie, Steve Jobs was reportedly a fan of the writer.

“First time, he called me because there was an episode of The West Wing that he particularly liked and he called to say so out of the blue,” Sorkin recalls. “The second time, he wanted me to come and tour Pixar in the hope that I would write a Pixar film. And the third time, he asked for my help on a Stanford commencement speech.” (Sorkin obliged, free of charge.)

Sorkin has recently been modest about his role in the latter, claiming that he had merely “fixed some typos.”

The full piece is a very interesting read. The film was released earlier this month in select theaters with a wider release set for this Friday.

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: Aaron Sorkin, Apple Inc, Danny Boyle, Michael Fassbender, Sony, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs biopic, Steve Jobs movie, Walt Mossberg

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A former Apple Store employee has been charged with grand larceny and other crimes after allegedly using fraudulent credit and debit card details to purchase an incredible $997,000 worth of Apple gift cards in just three months.

24-year-old Ruben Profit is accused of carrying out the fraudulent purchases while working at the Apple Store in the Queens Center Mall in Elmhurst, the company’s first retail store in Queens. All of the purchases were made between August and October, reports NBC New York … 

Profit reportedly overwrote the data on the magnetic strip of the cards to emulate other cards – it’s not yet known how he obtained the card details to do so.

An investigation launched in October when Apple started getting notifications of charge-backs, which indicate fraudulent transactions, on the Apple gift cards Profit allegedly purchased.

At the time of his arrest, Profit was allegedly in possession of 51 Visa and American Express gift cards with magnetic strips that had been fraudulently re-encoded with credit card information. He also allegedly had seven Apple gift cards worth $2,000 each.

Profit is reported to have told police that he sold the gift cards for 10% of their face value. He is currently being held on bail, and faces a maximum prison sentence of 15 years if convicted.

Another alleged fraudster was last year accused of obtaining over $300k’s worth of Apple kit by deception by working a ridiculously simple con on store employees.

Photo: michaeltruskowski.com

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: Apple Store, Apple Store fraud, Apple Store Queens, Credit card, Credit card fraud, Debit card

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With Tim Cook stating that Apple is “not announcing the numbers” for Apple Watch sales, it’s been left to the analysts to estimate – or perhaps, ‘take a wild guess’ would be the better description in this case. While Fortune reports the average estimate of 3.95M sales, the range is so wide as to be meaningless: from a low of 2.5M to a high of 6M.

Cook did, however, give one clue that those analysts coming in on the low side are likely to be wrong … 

We shipped a lot [of Apple Watches] the first quarter, then last quarter we shipped even more. I can predict this quarter we will ship even more.”

Apple reports its fiscal Q4 (calendar Q3) earnings next week, but based on Cook’s comments to date, we’re unlikely to learn the actual numbers then. You can see the analyst estimates below – professionals in blue, amateurs in green.

Filed under: AAPL Company Tagged: AAPL, Apple Inc, Apple watch, Apple Watch Q4 sales estimates, Apple Watch sales

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Apple Music appears to be off to a strong start in terms of paying subscribers, but as the old adage has it, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. A decent chunk of those who have opted not to pay for Apple Music appear to have headed instead to Spotify. TechCrunch notes that Spotify’s iOS app has taken the top grossing spot in Apple’s U.S. App Store for the first time ever.

Spotify was quietly hitting a milestone of its own. The company’s music streaming app just moved into the No. 1 position on the iPhone App Store’s “Top Grossing” charts for the first time in the US. Previously, according to data from App Annie, the highest rank Spotify saw on the “Top Grossing” charts stateside was No. 3, which it hit earlier this year and maintained in September.

When we polled 9to5Mac readers, 19.5% of you said that you would be switching to Spotify instead of paying for Apple Music.

With Apple hot on defending customer privacy, Spotify did hit a bit of a sticky moment back in August, when it was forced to clarify its new privacy policy, which appeared to allow the service to share personal information. CEO Daniel Ek apologized for the lack of clarity previously, and sought to reassure customers that data is used only to improve the Spotify service and use of customer data is opt-in.

Photo: curved.de

Filed under: Apps Tagged: Apple Music, iOS apps, Music, Spotify, Streaming media, Streaming Music

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