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Exclusive: TikTok owner ByteDance moves to shift power out of China – sources – Reuters Canada

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BEIJING/NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – TikTok’s poaching of Disney’s Kevin Mayer to be its CEO was just the most visible part of a broader strategy by its Chinese owner to shift its centre of power away from China at a time of rising global tensions, several people familiar with the plans said.

Tik Tok logos are seen on smartphones in front of a displayed ByteDance logo in this illustration taken November 27, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

The short video app’s parent company ByteDance has quietly made a series of moves in recent months to transfer global decision-making and research capabilities out of its home country, the sources told Reuters.

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The strategy is aimed not only at TikTok, which is not available in China, but all of ByteDance’s non-China focused businesses, the sources said. Such businesses also include units in India like social networking app Helo.

ByteDance has expanded TikTok’s engineering and research and development operations in Mountain View, California, according to three sources. One of the people said it had hired more than 150 engineers there.

ByteDance has also hired a New York-based investor relations director to stay in touch with major investors including General Atlantic and KKR, relationships that were previously managed through Beijing, according to two sources.

The new hire, Michelle Huang, is a former SoftBank investor who worked on the Japanese firm’s investment in ByteDance. Huang did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

The changes come at a time of heightened tension between the United States and China over trade, technology and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as intense U.S. regulatory scrutiny of TikTok, which has rapidly gained popularity around the globe and counts the United States as one of its biggest market.

Formerly Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) streaming chief Mayer, who was dually named ByteDance’s chief operating officer based in Los Angeles, will also be handed leadership for areas such as global corporate development. Many of his responsibilities were previously managed out of Beijing, according to three sources.

More broadly, ByteDance is also recruiting engineers around the world, including in Singapore, Jakarta and Warsaw, online job postings show.

These significant organizational changes are being greeted warily by some ByteDance staff who support the company’s global operations from China, three sources told Reuters. They are concerned they may become less relevant in the next phase of expansion and have started to look for work elsewhere, the sources said.

AMERICAN MIGRATION

For TikTok, the rapid expansion of the U.S. engineering team is part of efforts to migrate its technical resources to the West from China, where most of the work on the app has been done up to this point, according to two of the sources familiar with the company’s plans. It is not uncommon for multinational tech companies like Google to have engineers in China.

Although the engineering team on the app have previously reported to managers in China, TikTok is in the process of recruiting a high-level executive to run the engineering department from the United States, according to two sources. It has approached a senior Google employee in recent months, one source said.

Severing ties with the China-based team will be difficult, however.

Some of the engineers in China support TikTok as well as ByteDance’s Chinese social media app Douyin, the three sources said. Separating development completely would be nearly impossible as both apps share some infrastructure, two of the sources said.

TikTok, which allows users to create short videos with special effects, has become wildly popular with American teenagers doing viral challenges that pair dances with music clips from the app’s library.

Its Chinese ownership has, however, caused concerns in Washington about TikTok’s handling of personal data. The company uses sophisticated artificial intelligence to make video recommendations based on users’ behavior on the app.

Separately from the hiring of 150 staff, the Mountain View team has poached a few dozen data engineers from U.S. tech giants to manage user data security, one source said.

‘ISSUE OF CREDIBILITY’

Since last year, TikTok has faced scrutiny by U.S. authorities over potential national security risks. An investigation by the U.S. Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is focused on the handling of personal data, Reuters reported in November.

Legal experts said regulators would study TikTok’s latest actions to determine if they mitigated any potential risks and were more than cosmetic touches.

“With any attempted restructuring, the issue is one of credibility,” said Paul Marquardt, CFIUS lawyer at law firm Cleary Gottlieb, who is not involved in the TikTok review.

“CFIUS would assess whether it actually believed that the operations were functionally independent and insulated from potentially hostile influence.”

Republican Senator Marco Rubio was among U.S. lawmakers who last year urged CFIUS to review ByteDance’s 2018 acquisition of Musical.ly, a music video app popular in the United States.

When asked about whether TikTok’s recent moves could assuage U.S. regulatory concerns, he told Reuters: “As long as TikTok or any other application operates in a way that gives the Chinese government and Communist Party leverage, it is impossible to separate the dangers of using such an application from the reality that users’ information could be at risk.”

Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in Beijing, Echo Wang in New York and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Editing by Kenneth Li and Pravin Char

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Apple announces Worldwide Developers Conference dates, in-person event – CityNews Toronto

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Apple has announced their annual developers conference will take place June 10 through June 14.

The big summer event will be live-streamed, but some select developers have been invited to attend in-person events at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, on June 10.

The company typically showcases their latest software and product updates — including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AppleTV and Vision Pro headset — during a keynote address on the first day.

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Contributing to a drop in Apple’s stock price this year is concern it lags behind Microsoft and Google in the push to develop products powered by artificial intelligence technology. While Apple tends to keep its product development close to the vest, CEO Tim Cook signaled at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in February that it has been making big investments in generative AI and plans to disclose more later this year.

The week-long conference will have opportunities for developers to connect with Apple designers and engineers to gain insight into new tools, frameworks and features, according to the company’s announcement.

The Associated Press

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iPhone 16 Rumors Point to Action Button and New, Vertical Camera Layout – CNET

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The upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are still months away from their expected launch this fall, but a new set of images published online may give us a better sense of their potential features. Among the revelations, the iPhone 16 may include an action button, similar to the one on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, and it may have redesigned cameras in a vertical stack.

AppleInsider published a series of photos it says show dummy 3D prints of the upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro from an unnamed leaker. Aside from the action button and reworked cameras on the iPhone 16, AppleInsider also said its source found the iPhone 16 Pro to be “slightly larger” than its predecessor. Analysts had earlier said they expect the Pro model screens will grow somewhat.

Read more: iPhone 16: All the Major Rumors on Apple’s Next iPhone

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The new details suggest that a series of expected hardware updates are likely for this year’s new iPhones. Apple typically announces new iPhones around September, and the company tends to offer incremental upgrades to each new phone, introducing, over the period of several years, better cameras, screens and battery life, features that end up seeming like major upgrades when people get around to buying a new phone

Last year, Apple added a new titanium frame, action button and USB-C charging to its iPhone 15 Pro, which starts at $999. For its entry-level iPhone, Apple followed its well-worn strategy of trickling pro features down to the mainstream, adding the iPhone 14 Pro’s well-received Dynamic Island to the $799 iPhone 15, along with USB-C charging.

AppleInsider didn’t indicate whether its leaker had divined a reason for the iPhone 16’s shifted camera placements, but the two lenses will now reportedly be stacked one on top of the other, instead of diagonally. Apple has previously said it uses stacked lenses on the iPhone 15 Pro for spatial video capture, a key new technology the company highlighted as part of its $3,499 Apple Vision Pro headset, released in February.

Though AppleInsider’s leaks appear to confirm many previous rumors, not all renders and 3D prints are accurate, something the rumor blog notes itself in its report. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the veracity of the leaks.

Watch this: What Google Gemini AI on the iPhone Could Look Like

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I Took 600+ Photos With the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Look at My Favorites

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Leaked iPhone 16 dummy units hint at larger sizes and new buttons

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The iPhone 15 Pro Max, with a 6.7-inch screen
(Image credit: Future)

We’re already counting down to the arrival of the iPhone 16 series – most probably sometime in September – and a leak showing dummy units of the upcoming phones has revealed a few of the changes we can expect to see later this year.

These dummy units are usually based on supply chain information, and have various business uses – like helping case manufacturers get their wares ready for new phones before they’re launched, for example. In this case, the images were posted to Chinese social network Weibo, as spotted by MacRumors.

Perhaps the most interesting reveal from these blocks of plastic and metal is that they show the previously rumored increase in size for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max displays – up to 6.3 inches (from 6.1 inches) and 6.9 inches (from 6.7 inches) respectively.

That’s not a huge jump of course, but it does mean more screen space for apps and media. The bezels are apparently shrinking down to accommodate the larger screens, which means the increase in the physical size of these handsets is only a slight one.

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On the button

iPhone 16 dummy units leak

The next iPhones might look a bit like this, but less blue (Image credit: Weibo)

Further reveals from this leak match up with what we’ve heard before: that all four models are going to get the Action button that replaced the Ring/Silent switch on the 2023 Pro models, as well as a brand-new Capture button for getting more creative with photos.

Also of note is the redesigned rear camera module that we think is coming to the back of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. The new vertical, pill-shaped look has been leaked already, but this is more evidence that it’s on the way – taking us back to a design that’s more reminiscent of the iPhone 12, which came out in 2020.

As always with such rumors, be somewhat cautious about reading too much into the look of these dummy units. That said, as more and more similar leaks pile up, it becomes more likely that they’re based on accurate information.

The next big Apple date for your calendar is WWDC 2024 – its Worldwide Developers Conference starts on June 10, at which time we should hear much more about what’s coming this year with iOS 18 and Apple’s other software platforms.

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Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you’ll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

Leaked iPhone 16 dummy units hint at larger sizes and new buttons

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