Daily Apple News: Glass foldable displays from Corning, iPhones China discounts, new privacy-focused domain name, and more

We’re back again with your daily dosage of Apple news.

There have been quite a few changes with regard to Apple and its products in the past 24 hours and we’re here to outline them for you. Be it software, hardware, or even legal proceedings, we have the scoop of Apple news which you’ve just been dying to read.

So sit back and relax and let the latest news from the Apple universe soak in!

Apple and the Chinese market certainly don’t go hand in hand. This should not come as a shock to you since the company has suffered great losses in the Chinese smartphone market. Reports from Reuters claim that Chinese retailers are raining down discounts on Apple iPhones like the iPhone XS and XS Max.

According to sources, e-commerce websites are slashing the price of the iPhone XS by as much as CNY 1,000 which is around $150. It’s quite clear that they are attempting to get rid of the remainder of their stock of the 2018 flagship iPhones. Some of the Chinese online stores which are practicing this include Suning.Com, Pinduoduo Inc and even JD.com.

Well, Apple too has resorted to pretty much the same technique. The company joined hands with the finance arm of Alibaba, Ant Financial, to offer interest-free loans to consumers for purchasing its iPhones. The CEO himself believed that the soaring prices of the final product, as well as components, was a nail in the coffin for its iPhones in China.

Moving on, there was a news that Apple has had a change of heart and is now accepting repairs for iPhones with third-party batteries. Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers will now accept iPhones for repairs even if they do not contain original iPhone batteries.

The news surfaced through an Apple internal document which was discovered by MacRumors.

However, it has now come to light through an update on the French blog, iGeneration, that this decision is now being challenged by the CFDT union section of Apple Retail France.

Unfortunately, until the clarification is made, the support for repairing iPhones with third-party batteries has been kept on hold. As the saying goes, if it’s too good to be true, it probably is!

Time for next news.

Foldable smartphones appear to be a thing in 2019. Samsung and Huawei with their foldable smartphones have raised the bar for companies like Apple. So it’s natural that Apple is attempting to enter into this arena.

We already know that Samsung has sold its foldable display to Apple. However, Apple definitely wants more and is looking to do things a little differently.

Rumour has it that Apple wants its future devices to have foldable displays made out of glass and not plastic polymers. News has recently broken that Corning, the makers of Gorilla Glass, is attempting to manufacture glass foldable displays in the next few years.

The company has supplied Apple with its technology before and will likely continue to do so. The future could be filled with foldable iPhones and iPads with glass displays!

This was disclosed by Wired.com which even revealed the kind of testing Corning is doing with regards to bending its glass.

Speaking of unbreakable glass, here’s something which can be broken and Apple is the king of doing it. If patents came to your mind, you were spot on! The Qualcomm and Apple feud over a patent has had Apple under the scanner for a very long time. This long-standing issue is still yet to be resolved.

Apple is back with a bang, and thanks to CNET for covering the legal proceedings, we now learn the rest of the story. It’s still unclear on whether or not it is a concocted one and the company’s last glimmer of hope.

Apple claims that its former engineer, Arjuna Siva, was part of inventing the technologies covered in one of the patents which Apple has been accused of infringing.

The technology invented allows a smartphone to quickly establish an internet connection on boot. Since it was Siva’s idea, he should be getting credit for it.

In simple terms, Apple came up with the idea which Qualcomm later filed as a patent. Well, Apple is still a long way from winning the case as Siva still has to testify and provide evidence of Apple’s claims.

Moving on, Apple is continuing to make improvements to Siri. The company has secretly updated the British female voice on the virtual voice assistant through a server-side update. The previous British female voice sounded extremely mechanical.

However, the updated one seems to infuse life into words and sentences. Not only is the voice clearer but the accent is also a lot cleaner. Would you get surprised if you wake up one day to find that Siri has a different but better voice?

Speaking of improvements, Apple has allegedly registered a new domain name for itself. According to the WHOIS record, the domain name is PrivacyIsImportant.com. The filing records the entire details of the owner of the domain name and it checks out to be Apple.

What’s interesting though is that it’s clearly not an active website. It’s unclear on why and what plans Apple has in mind for a new website. While this seems out of character, it could very well be a marketing campaign.

The company values privacy and even assures customers of it with regard to their health records. What comes to your mind when you hear of Apple registering a domain name like this one?

Nothing ends an episode better than the Looney Tunes catchphrase, ‘That’s all folks!’ Come back tomorrow for your daily capsule of Apple news.

Follow @PiunikaWeb

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.