North Carolina has approved Apple's request to push back the hiring and investment milestones tied to its long-delayed Research Triangle Park campus, effectively restarting the incentive agreement that could be worth up to $845 million to the company, the Herald reports.


North Carolina's Economic Investment Committee voted this week to grant Apple a four-year extension on the timelines originally established when the company secured a rare "transformative" Job Investment Grant in 2021. The move follows Apple's confirmation last year that it had paused construction plans and was seeking to renegotiate the agreement with the state.

Under the original deal, Apple committed to invest $1 billion in North Carolina over a ten-year period, including $552 million for a new corporate campus in Research Triangle Park and $448 million to expand its data center footprint in Catawba County in exchange for up to $845 million in tax benefits if it met strict annual hiring and spending goals.

Apple has still not begun construction on the campus. In June last year, the company formally asked the state to suspend the project for up to four years, noting it had added around 600 employees in the Raleigh area since 2021 but required more time before beginning major development work.

Site plans filed in 2023 showed that Apple expected to build three office buildings, several support structures, and a car park totaling around 900,000 square feet. The latest vote enables Apple to delay hiring requirements until the end of 2027, by which time it will need to add 126 positions to remain eligible for incentives, rising to 1,719 by year five and 2,700 by year ten.

Apple previously said the campus will focus on machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and other related fields.
This article, "Apple Granted Reset on New Campus Deal" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Days after Apple's iPhone Pocket sold out around the world, fake versions of the accessory have started to become available online.


Earlier this month, Apple introduced the ‌iPhone‌ Pocket in collaboration with Japanese fashion brand ISSEY MIYAKE. The 3D-knitted limited edition accessory is designed to carry an ‌iPhone‌.

The accessory is like a stretchy pocket, not unlike an iPod Sock, but elongated to form a strap made of a ribbed, elastic textile that fully encloses an ‌iPhone‌ yet allows you to glimpse the display through its open structure. It comes in a short strap variant for $149.95 and a long strap variant for $229.95.

The ‌iPhone‌ Pocket became available to order on Apple's online store starting Friday, November 14, in the United States, France, China, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. It quickly sold out around the world.

Now, lookalike versions of the accessories have started to become available on Chinese sites like AliExpress, where you can buy an ‌iPhone‌ Pocket clone for as little as $6. Some listings describe it as a 1:1 replica, but there is no ISSEY MIYAKE print on the label. They describe the accessory as being made with the same production processes. Both the short and long variants are available in all of the original color options.

Apple products and accessories are often replicated by manufacturers in China, but the turnaround for these particular copies has been especially fast. As with most reproductions, quality can vary, yet for customers who missed out on the limited-edition release, found it too expensive, or simply like the aesthetic, the dramatically lower price of these lookalikes may make them a tempting alternative.
This article, "$6 Fake iPhone Pocket Already Available" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Singapore has ordered Apple to block or filter messages on iMessage that impersonate government agencies, requiring the company to implement new anti-spoofing protections by December as part of efforts to curb rising online scams, the Straits Times reports.


Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that it had issued an Implementation Directive to Apple under the Online Criminal Harms Act, instructing the company to prevent iMessage accounts and group chats from using names that mimic Singapore government agencies or the "gov.sg" sender ID. The directive also applies to Google Messages, with both companies required to comply by November 30.

MHA said the order was necessary because iMessage does not currently support the safeguards built into Singapore's registered SMS sender ID system. Since July 2024, legitimate messages sent by Singapore government agencies through traditional SMS channels have used the "gov.sg" sender ID to help the public verify authenticity.

Messages sent via iMessage, however, do not pass through the same ID registry and therefore allow scammers to present themselves using identical or near-identical identifiers. The ministry cited more than 120 police reports in which scammers impersonated registered sender IDs.

As part of the directive, Apple must now ensure that profile names of unknown iMessage senders are either not displayed or are shown less prominently than the phone numbers associated with the account. Authorities said this requirement is intended to give users a clearer view of the identity information least susceptible to manipulation. Messages or group chats that appear to spoof government identifiers must either be blocked entirely or filtered so that recipients do not see them.

Apple's compliance will require changes to iMessage's display logic and name-handling behavior in Singapore, creating an exception to the platform's long-standing reliance on unverified user-defined sender names in one-to-one and group messaging threads. iMessage does not currently use a sender ID registry or external name verification scheme, and the new rules mark one of the first instances of a government requiring compulsory filtering for specific categories of display names within Apple's messaging ecosystem.

The MHA said Apple and Google have indicated that they will comply with the directive. If they fail to implement the mandated controls, the companies could face penalties.
This article, "Singapore Orders Changes to iMessage by December" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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