Apple

Eight users have complained to Shanghai's consumer watchdog that their iPhone 6 series handsets spontaneously combusted or exploded.

The US tech giant said it had conducted tests on the devices and had found "no cause for concern with these products".

One technology analyst told the BBC she did not believe it to be a widespread problem.

Apple said the iPhones had external physical damage "which led to the thermal event".

The phones with this fault were manufactured between September and October 2015, it said in a statement.

Affected devices will suddenly stop working even though the handset's battery has plenty of charge.

Anyone with an eligible phone who takes up the offer will get a free replacement battery for their handset.

No response

Touchscreens on smartphones that have this problem gradually become unresponsive.

The fault was highlighted by gadget sites which said it was caused by a manufacturing issue that meant some screen controller chips became loose.

Apple was criticised by one expert who said it was the phonemaker's responsibility to fix it.

Apple is charging $149 in the USA for the service that will only be available on phones that are "in working order".

Loose chips

However, a new report from a security firm suggests Apple's online syncing service iCloud secretly stores logs of its users' private information for as long as four months — even when iCloud backup is switched off.

Russian digital forensics firm Elcomsoft discovered that Apple's mobile devices automatically send its users' call history to the company's servers if iCloud is enabled, and stored that data for up to four months.

In its ever-escalating war against connectivity ports, Apple’s latest computers do away with the SD card port, a full-size USB port, and the HDMI port.

Instead, you’ll need a dongle to convert those “legacy” connectors, as Apple put it on Friday, into the new, smaller USB-C port.

The company showed off a collection of shiny new tech products Wednesday morning ahead of the holiday shopping season.

As expected, Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) debuted an all-in-one Surface PC called Surface Studio ($2,999), which has a strong focus on creativity. It's clear the company wants users to start thinking of its products as more than just productivity tools.

At an event held at its headquarters, the company showed off new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks. Both include a new display called the Touch Bar at the top of the keyboard.

The display, positioned where the function keys used to be, allows you to control Mac apps with your fingertips. It will adjust in real time based on what software, such as Photoshop, you're using.

"We are already in an age where incredible amounts of people's personal data is online and that is rapidly increasing," says Joe Westby, a technology researcher for the human rights group.

Snapchat and Skype were much lower down the list and Westby warns that "there won't be any privacy in the future".

Part of the research looked at how open companies are to requests for data from governments.

Brisbane's Courier-Mail, said dozens of photos were taken without knowledge or consent and that other images were stolen from customer phones.

Apple confirmed an inquiry and said "several" jobs had been terminated.

But it said its inquiry had so far not shown that any photos had been stolen.

End-to-end encryption doesn't mean that your iMessages are secure enough to hide your trace because Apple not only stores a lot of information about your iMessages that could reveal your contacts and location, but even share that information with law enforcement via court orders.