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News bites – the stories you may have missed (7 October 2022)

Plenty of Apple, iPhone, and iPad news gets released every single day – but we know you’re busy, so we’ve got your back. Here, we’ve picked out some of the most important stories from the past week or so and summarized them for easy digestion. You’re welcome.

Let’s take a quickfire look at some of the most interesting recent headlines of late. As ever, click through to read the full stories if you want to know more!

iPhone 14 Plus was almost the iPhone 14 Max

The all new iPhone 14 Plus was originally set to be called the iPhone 14 Max. Dutch website iCreate has discovered references to a so-called iPhone 14 Max on Apple’s own websites, both in a support document and a regulatory information PDF. As if to dispel any doubt, the latter is even accompanied by the iPhone 14 Plus model number. All of this suggests that Apple was all set to call its super-sized phone the iPhone 14 Max right up until fairly late in the day.

Apple takes credit for Apple Messages feature

As we’ve covered on previous News Bites round-ups, Google has been pushing hard for Apple to adopt the RCS messaging standard in order to improve cross-platform messaging. Whether deliberately or not, Apple has just claimed credit for some of the work that Google has done to this end. Over on the Apple website, the company has listed SMS tapback emojis as a feature of iOS 16 when it was actually something Google hard-coded into Google Messages. Zing.

YouTube may soon charge for 4K streaming

YouTube is one of those elite applications that’s used across a huge range of devices, regardless of size or brand. That’s why we sit up and take notice when any major changes are announced in relation to it. Just such a major change may be incoming, as there’s evidence that Google is testing out treating 4K video streaming as a top tier privilege. A number of YouTube users have reported that attempting to stream video content at this top rate is currently accompanied by a request to upgrade to the Premium paid tier, while the YouTube team itself has confirmed that this is merely part of an “experiment.” A sign of things to come?

Apple Music celebrates 100 million songs

Apple has trumpeted the fact that its Apple Music service now offers access to 100 million songs. In a related news post, Apple claims that this is “Simply the biggest collection of music, in any format, ever”. It also quite pointedly notes that this figure is “More music than any other platform”. While it doesn’t name names, Apple is clearly taking a pop at Spotify, which continues to be the leading music streaming service in the world. Apple also uses this post to promise that it will continue “investment in human curation” over simple algorithmic recommendations.

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