News

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has been hiring hundreds of engineers and supply chain managers in China and Taiwan, in an effort to support a faster paced product release schedule. With a pair of new iPhones on the way (supposedly), a new iPad, a new Apple TV and the iWatch among others, Apple now has more new products than ever before. The amount of new products, coupled with an increasingly shorter product cycle and a major push into the Chinese market with the China Mobile deal, warrants the hiring spree. Apple now has over 600 engineers and operations staff in China, and a global total of 80,300 full-time employees, up from 72,800 a year earlier.

Some other notable Apple financial news over the past week:

At Apple's annual shareholder meeting last week, Tim Cook noted that Apple has acquired 23 companies over the past 16 months, and the company's research and

Last November, Microsoft released its XBox One companion app, SmartGlass, in the App Store, allowing XBox One owners to navigate their consoles via their iPhones or iPads to track achievements, message friends, watch game clips and more. Now, according to The Verge, Microsoft is planning a big, cross-platform push to bring XBox Live functionality to both iOS and Android games.

A description within a recent Microsoft job listing (that has since been removed) serves as evidence of the software giant's plan: "We will create a modern framework that is open-source, lightweight, extensible and scalable across various platforms including Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android." The listing

A member of the Chinese forum WeiPhone has posted two purported images of an iPhone 6 digitizer. The pictures reveal that the next-generation Apple handset will feature a larger screen due to its lack of side bezels, however, it is unknown how the pictures were obtained and if the images are real.

As you can see above and below, the images seem to show how the iPhone 4s, iPhone 5s and iPhone 6 differ, but the cutout for the Home button on the purported iPhone 6 digitizer seems a little bit off. This could mean the images are fakes, or they were just taken of an early prototype for the next-generation iPhone.

As expected, Apple today announced CarPlay, formerly know as "iOS in the Car," at the Geneva Motor Show. In conjunction with this announcement, Volvo showcased its CarPlay implementation in its new XC90 SUV, which will be available later this year.

Initially revealed at last year's Worldwide Developer's Conference, CarPlay is designed to integrate the driver's iOS device with the vehicle's built-in display/control system. Features familiar to iPhone and iPad users, such as Siri,

Another day, another firmware update. With the release of iOS 6.1.6 to patch the SSL security flaw, iH8sn0w and Winocm have updated the p0sixspwn Cydia package accordingly. Now those looking to untether a jailbroken iPhone 3GS or iPod touch 4G running iOS 6.1.6 can grab the latest version of p0sixspwn.

Updating to iOS 6.1.6 is a good idea for those on earlier versions of iOS 6. The data security flaw identified as CVE-2014-1266 is a vulnerability in SSL that makes it possible for an attacker to capture or modify data. Those with devices that are already jailbroken can install SSLPatch directly from Cydia to fix the problem.