Enlarge / The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. (credit: Anadolu Agency | Getty )

Apple's earnings report for the second quarter of the company's 2024 fiscal year showed a slide in hardware sales, especially for the iPhone. Nonetheless, Apple beat analysts' estimates for the quarter thanks to the company's rapidly growing services revenue.

iPhone revenue dropped from $51.33 billion in the same quarter last year to $45.96 billion, a fall of about 10 percent. This was the second consecutive quarter with declining iPhone revenues. That said, investors feared a sharp drop before the earnings call.

Notably, Apple's revenue in the region it dubs Greater China (which includes China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) fell 8 percent overall. The company fared a little better in other regions. China's economy is slowing even as China-based Huawei is taking bigger slices of the pie in the region.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting in March with the release of iOS 17.4, iPhones in the European Union have been subject to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a batch of regulations that (among other things) have made Apple support alternate app stores , app sideloading, and third-party browser engines in iOS for the first time. Today, EU regulators announced that they are also categorizing Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper," meaning that the iPad will soon be subject to the same regulations as the iPhone.

The EU began investigating whether iPadOS would qualify as a gatekeeper back in September 2023, the same day it decided that iOS, the Safari browser, and the App Store were all gatekeepers.

"Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance of iPadOS with the DMA obligations," reads the EU's blog post about the change.

Enlarge (credit: Apple/Andrew Cunningham)

Last year, Apple introduced the ability to set multiple timers at once in the Clock app on its various platforms.

“We truly live in an age of wonders,” deadpanned Apple’s Craig Federighi in the company’s official presentation , tacitly acknowledging the gap between the apparent simplicity of the feature and the amount of time that Apple took to implement it.

The next version of iPadOS may contain another of these "age of wonders" features, an apparently simple thing that Apple has chosen never to do for reasons that the company can't or won't explain. According to MacRumors , iPadOS 18 may finally be the update that brings a version of Apple's first-party Calculator app to the iPad.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple is going to announce some new things on Tuesday, May 7, at 10 am Eastern, according to an invitation the company sent out to members of the press ( and posted to its website ) this morning.

The name Apple has given the event (“Let Loose”) doesn’t tell us much about what the company might announce, but the art does: It’s a hand holding an Apple Pencil, which almost certainly means the event will be iPad-focused.

Apple has reportedly been on the cusp of releasing new iPads since late March, and the rumor mill has already delivered most of the key details . The headliner is likely to be a pair of new iPad Pros with M3 chips, OLED displays, slightly larger screens, and refined designs. Riding shotgun will be a refreshed 10.9-inch iPad Air with an M2 chip, plus a brand-new 12.9-inch Air meant to give large-screened iPad fans an option that doesn’t cost as much as the iPad Pro.

Enlarge / The classic Sega Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog running on an iPhone—in this case, as a standalone app. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store's app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.

Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today's announced changes now allow "software that is not embedded in the binary" in certain cases, with "retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games" specifically listed as one of those cases.

Here's the exact wording :

Enlarge / The M2 iPad Pro. The updated version will come with refined designs and new accessories. (credit: Apple)

If you've been waiting for new iPads to come out, prepare to wait just a little longer: Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that redesigned iPad Pros with Apple's M3 chip, plus refreshed iPad Air models with the M2 and a larger-screened option, should now arrive sometime in "early May." Gurman had previously reported that new iPads could arrive in March or April, not long after the updated M3 MacBook Airs.

Gurman suggests that "complex new manufacturing techniques" for the new iPad screens have "contributed to the delay," and that Apple is also "working to finish software for the devices."

The details of what the new iPads will look like hasn't changed. The new iPad Pro models will shift to using OLED display panels for the first time and will have their designs tweaked for the first time since the 2018 iPad Pros introduced the current rounded, slim-bezeled look. Those new iPad Pros will also come with redesigned Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessories, though it's unclear whether those accessories will be totally rethought or if they'll just tweak existing designs to work with the new tablets.