Analyst: Less than 1% revenue generated from Apple Music

Michael Hatamoto | Business, Financial & Legal | Jul 2, 2015 4:47 PM CDT

The latest competitor in the streaming music market, Apple Music, publicly launched on June 30 - and received quite a bit of media attention. The streaming music service and the Beats 1 live radio station may not win over users from Spotify, but will give other music listeners another option - $9.99 per account, or $14.99 for a family plan.

It looks like the service won't be a source of major revenue, and is expected to amount to less than 1 percent - around $1.8 billion - towards Apple's revenue next year.

"Apple Music matters because music is fundamental to the mobile phone experience," Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffra, in a statement published by CNET. "Interestingly, Apple Music will also be available on Android and Windows, which doesn't matter from a revenue standpoint, but could help Apple attract incremental iPhone buyers from competitive platforms."

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Spotify pulls Prince's music catalog, per the musician's request

Michael Hatamoto | Business, Financial & Legal | Jul 2, 2015 4:40 PM CDT

Prince is only a fan of Jay-Z's Tidal music streaming, as his representatives have asked for his music to be removed from Spotify, Apple Music, and Rdio. It looks like Prince is trying to negotiate new rates for songs played, and streaming services will have to agree before they have access to his music again.

"Prince's publisher has asked all streaming services to remove his catalog," a notification on Prince's Spotify page reads. "We have cooperated with the request, and hope to bring his music back as soon as possible."

The official Prince music channel only has "Breakfast Can Wait" listed, as his team also has been quick to use Web Sheriff to remove music online. Prince has been vocal about artist compensation in regards to music streaming - and is the latest artist to speak out against services offering free listening tiers.

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Xiaomi nearing 35 million smartphone units sold worldwide in 2015

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has sold 34.7 million smartphones during Q1 and Q2 of 2015, an impressive 33 percent year-over-year increase. Xiaomi's sales have slowed down slightly in China, but expansion into new territories seems to be going well for the company.

Xiaomi's home market of China has generated the bulk of sales, but the company has ambitious expansion plans for India, Brazil, and other select markets. The company is still taking baby steps in the United States, and doesn't want to rush into mature markets without developing a strong foundation.

"Roughly 90 percent of Xiaomi's volumes have been in China in the past, followed by India in a very distance second," said Bryan Ma, VP of IDC Asia, in a statement to CNET. "Sure, the US and Western Europe are important markets (especially in terms of influence), but in terms of numbers, these smartphone markets are each only just over 10 percent of the worldwide market right now. India, on the other hand, is expected to be larger than the US in unit terms by 2017."

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Radeon R9 Fury X will feature updated radiator, solves loud pump noise

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Jul 2, 2015 9:12 AM CDT

After a week with the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, one of the things that has annoyed me was the very loud noise coming from the pump. It sounds like coil whine, and under heavy stress, the Fury X really begins to sound quite loud.

But it looks like a member of the AnandTech has noticed that AMD is shipping an updated version of the radiator with the latest batches of the Fury X. It looks like the first batch that mostly went to selected press and a handful floating out into the world is the only one effected, with the second batch and hopefully beyond including a radiator that isn't as noisy.

The unit that the news of the revised radiator was from SAPPHIRE, so we should expect other AIB partners to use the revised pump as soon as possible.

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Synology's new NAS systems can support over 1000TB (1PB) of storage

Anthony Garreffa | Storage | Jul 2, 2015 8:01 AM CDT

If you thought the 24TB+ NAS systems we're seeing these days were good, Synology has just announced two new business-focused NAS systems that will blow you away. The new RS18016xs+ and its expansion unit RX1216sas have some insane expansion capabilities, and more.

Synology's new RS18016xs+ is capable of 3.9GB/sec with 348,000 IOPS, which is just insane. On top of that, if you're using encrypted share folders, it's still capable of pumping out over 3GB/sec, meaning you can have super-secure data, with huge performance. The new Synology RS18016xs+ native supports SATA 6Gbps and SAS, and can be upgraded all the way up to 32GB of ECC RAM, and 10GbE, with the RX1216sas providing a next-gen scale-up system capable of stacking 14 of the RX1216sas expansion units together, delivering a 180-drive cluster.

The full run down on Synology RS18016xs+ systems:

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The first major iPhone 6S images leak, virtually the same design again

We all know a refreshed iPhone is coming out later this year, but we have been split on rumors: is it the iPhone 7 or iPhone 6S? According to the latest leaks, we're looking at Apple unveiling the iPhone 6S later this year.

But there has been a big leak on the iPhone 6S, showing off everything - inside, outside, the style, no dual lens camera, and everything in between. We should hopefully see Apple cram in a more capable rear-facing camera that is hopefully 4K capable this time, but it's the inside of the new iPhone that has been upgraded versus the exterior, which is usually the case for the 'S' upgrades on the iPhone.

Inside of the iPhone 6S, we can see that there are new mounting points for the logic board, but the volume buttons, SIM card slot, and sleep/wake buttons on the iPhone 6S are in the same spots, so there's nothing new there.

Continue reading: The first major iPhone 6S images leak, virtually the same design again (full post)

Facebook is investing considerably into AI and VR technologies

Facebook may have over a billion daily active users, but where does the company see itself in 10 years time? During a Q&A on his profile yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg talked about what his company has in store for the future.

Zuckerberg says that he thinks the ultimate communication technology will allow you to send thoughts to another person, where he elaborated: "You'll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you'd like". But since we're not quite there yet, Facebook is putting its effort into artificial intelligence (AI), as the company "think[s] more intelligent services will be much more useful".

Not only that, but Facebook sees VR as the future - after all, it did acquire Oculus VR last year - where it says VR is the "next major computing and communication platform". The social network didn't leave out its Internet.org project, with Zuckerberg adding that it's "the most basic tool people need to get the benefits of the internet," including jobs, education and communication".

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AMD partners up with Hollywood on all things VR

AMD has just announced a new partnership with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Hollywood, where it will provide Hollywood creatives with Liquid VR. This will allow Hollywood directors a better channel to work with AMD to create immersive VR experiences.

AMD's Corporate Vice President of Alliances, Roy Taylor, said that the most important part of VR isn't just about gaming. He said that the entertainment industry is investing "an order of magnitude more money and talent into VR than the game industry is". Taylor added: "Los Angeles has become the epicenter of virtual reality, not Silicon Valley. I meet a dozen new people every day in Hollywood that are interested in VR".

But with NVIDIA owning three quarters of the GPU market share, what can AMD do when it comes to VR? Taylor says that AMD has an advantage over its competitor, thanks to its "hardware asynchronous compute" technology, something we covered not too long ago.

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Unity CEO: VR to create 'staggering orgasm of the new'

Virtual reality seems to have hardware designers and software developers quite excited, even though there are plenty of skeptics. Joining the growing list of those excited about VR is Unity CEO John Riccitiello, and he recently shared thoughts about how his company is contributing.

Unity currently boasts "the best system for creating content for VR," Riccitiello said during his E3 keynote. He expanded his thoughts during a recent interview with GamesIndustry:

"We have the highest market share [in VR] right now, so we're already there. It's interesting that a company like Valve, which makes its own engine, is showing demos for VR, and all but one is built with Unity."

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Fable Legends game director discusses DLCs with TweakTown

Michael Hatamoto | Gaming | Jul 1, 2015 2:53 PM CDT

Anytime I've written about Fable Legends in the past few months, it seems talk always turned to downloadable content (DLC) in free-to-play games. Lionhead Studios is going in a bit of a new direction with Fable Legends, and wanted to try to clear the air a bit regarding the controversial inclusion of DLCs in its upcoming free-to-play action role-playing game. We recently spoke with David Eckelberry, game director at Lionhead Studios, so here is what he had to say.

The addition of DLCs brings a high level uncertainty among many gamers, and some of you have already questioned it regarding Fable Legends.

"That's a reasonable thing to be unsure of. I'm unsure about free-to-play in some games!" David Eckelberry told TweakTown. "I believe it's up to the game developer. Some games I love are free-to-play, and I don't think it's a coincidence that first and foremost they are good games, regardless of how they get to market. It's also not a coincidence that these games seem legitimately fair: they don't let a player buy his way to victories, and the things you can purchase seem pretty fairly priced."

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