U.S. state Montana on Wednesday banned the CCP-controlled TikTok app, with the state’s lawmakers saying they aimed to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is already banned on government-issued devices in some 30 U.S. states and for employees of America’s federal agencies. Reuters: While blocking apps by geography is not unheard of, the Montana law is notable for doing so at the state level, upending a single-market approach Apple and Alphabet’s Google have long been able to use for their U.S. app stores. Tech companies are now well-practiced in blocking apps at the country level, mostly to comply with U.S. sanctions or for business purposes, like Apple’s blocking of messaging and privacy apps in…

Macworld After about a month and a half of testing, Apple has released iOS 16.5 and iPadOS 16.5, which should be the last iOS 16 update before the first iOS 17 beta arrives at WWDC in June. Like iOS 16.4, it’s a small update with few new features as Apple is focused on delivering new features in iOS 17 this fall. iOS 16.5: New features Here are the most important new features in iOS 16.5: Apple News Sports tab: When you launch the Apple News app in iOS 16.5, you’ll see a new Sports tab at the bottom of the screen. It replaces the dedicated Search tab, which is now part of the Following tab. In iOS 16.4 and earlier,…

Macworld It was decades ago when you could first pay for items online using a credit card; debit card payments followed. The security of such payments was often iffy in the commercial internet’s early years. Database breaches of unsecured information made for easy pickings. These days, a combination of factors has improved the safety of paying online. Firms offering online purchases of goods, services, and subscriptions are held to higher levels of compliance by the banks and processors that let them receive electronic payments. Companies like Stripe and PayPal, among many others, manage to receive card or other payment information directly, so those private and easily copied details are never stored, or even seen, by an e-commerce site. Apple Pay,…

Macworld Content creation is difficult even on the best of days. And if you’re trying to write something and the words aren’t flowing, then it can feel like an effort in futility. Wish there was an app that could write on your behalf? Good news — there is. And since you can get a lifetime subscription to Scribbyo this week at a discount, it’s super easy to afford. Scribbyo is every writer’s best friend. Instead of agonizing over details like sentence structure, word choice, and readability, you just turn your writing projects over to this AI-assisted app. It can instantly create engaging content in 33 different languages, it’ll generate AI images to support what it writes, and it features over…

General Motors is blowing it by barring the widely-used Apple CarPlay (and Google’s derivative Android Auto) that allow drivers to bypass vehicle’s infotainment systems, shifting instead to an built-in infotainment system, Google Automotive, for future electric vehicles. Apple’s next generation CarPlay deeply integrates with a vehicle’s hardware, providing content for multiple screens within the vehicle. John Gapper for Financial Times: Surely I am not the only one to groan at this prospect: many people prefer their smartphone software to their vehicles’ inbuilt displays. As Benedetto Vigna, Ferrari’s chief executive, remarked at the FT’s Future of the Car event this week, “For a car company to become a tech company is not easy . . . We are used to the operating systems we have…

On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we talk through the announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the iPad, the latest iPhone 16 Pro rumors, and more. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos Earlier this week, Apple unexpectedly announced that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are finally coming to the ‌iPad‌. The new pro apps come with a host of multi-touch optimizations, dedicated tools, and high-end features to support intense creative workflows. Each app is available for $4.99 per month or $49 per year with a one-month free trial. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has suggested that since Apple's mixed-reality headset will run ‌iPad‌ apps, the news effectively means that Final Cut Pro and…