Tim Cook has again talked about the Mac Apple will build in the US later this year. The Apple CEO told US politics website, Politico that the US-produced Mac, the first to be made in the country since 1994, will be a new version of an existing product and that as well as being assembled in the US, many of its components would be made there.

‘We’re going very deep in this project,’ said Cook.

The Apple CEO told NBC last year that the company would invest $100m in moving production to the US, though he also added ‘This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.’

AppleInsider reported in April that Apple had advertised a number of vacancies and was looking for engineers to develop and test processors.

Last year, Fortune speculated on the Mac most likely to be made in the US. It said that the $100m figure pointed to a facility which could produce one million units a year. Only the Mac Pro and Mac mini sell fewer than one million a year. It also said that the Mac Pro made sense because it cost more to ship than any other Mac and that the additional costs of US-based production could be more easily absorbed into its relatively high price tag.

Apple confirmed today that the 50 billionth app has been downloaded from the App Store. The milestone was reached when a man from Ohio, Brandon Ashmore downloaded Say the Same Thing from Space Inch yesterday, shortly after Google made several announcements, including the launch of a streaming music service, at its I/O developer conference.

‘Apple would like to thank our incredible customers and developers for topping 50 billion apps downloaded,’ said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. ‘The App Store completely transformed how people use their mobile devices and created a thriving app ecosystem that has paid out over nine billion dollars to developers. We’re absolutely floored to cross this milestone in less than five years.’

Apple said that apps are now being downloaded at a rate of more than 800 per second, or two billion per month. The 40 billion milestone was reached in January, and if the current rate is maintained the 100 billionth app will be downloaded in June 2015. That rate is likely to increase, however, as the reach of Apple’s mobile devices grows the number of apps on the Store increases.

Ashmore received a $10,000 App Store gift card to mark the milestone.

Google used the keynote at its I/O developer conference today to launch a streaming music service, the snappily-titled Google Play Music All Access.

The new service, which is integrated with the Google Play music store, allows users to stream music on-demand, in a similar way to Spotify. It will only be available in the US at launch and costs $9.99 per month. UK pricing has not been announced.

Apple is reported to be readying its own streaming media service, dubbed iRadio, for launch later this year. But that is reported to be more radio-like in its operation; users won’t be choose individual tracks to listen to immediately. Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director couldn’t resist having a dig at Apple, saying ‘This is radio without rules.’

Google has signed deals with Sony, Universal, and Warner, which means it will have millions of tracks available when the service goes live. Apple is believed to have agreed a deal with Universal, but the Financial Times reported earlier this week that while a deal is close with Warner, protracted negotiations with Sony have delayed the launch.

International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield’s video of Space Oddity was recorded on an iPad using Garageband, according to his son Evan.

In a discussion on Reddit, where the idea for the song originated, Evan Hadfield confirmed that his dad had recorded the vocal in space using his iPad. Hadfield, who is credited with producing the video said it had taken six months to put together and that the most difficult part of the process was securing permission from the song’s writer, David Bowie and from NASA. ‘It was planned before the mission began and fleshed out as we realised what was possible,’ he told The Independent.

Hadfield sings in several bands while on Earth, said the Independent and ‘enlisted his friend, Emm Gryner, to play piano over his vocals. Gryner, a former Bowie band member, then worked with her fellow Canadians, Joe Corcoran, a producer, and filmmaker Andrew Tidby to finish the film.’

Bowie was impressed enough with Hadfield’s version of his song to tweet:

CHRIS HADFIELD SINGS SPACE ODDITY IN SPACE!“Hallo Spaceboy…”Commander Chris Hadfield, currently on… fb.me/24sZNW5ly

— David Bowie Official (@DavidBowieReal) May 12, 2013

Hadfield returned from the ISS yesterday after five months in which he has tweeted photographs of Earth taken from the space station and provided insight into what its like living in a weightless environment.

The long-awaited new album from French duo Daft Punk is now available to stream on the iTunes Store. The album, Random Access Memories, is due for release on 21 May and can be pre-ordered for £8.99.

The full, 74-minute album, which includes the current UK number one single Get Lucky, is available to listen to free. Apple hasn’t said how long the stream will last.

Apple’s long-rumoured streaming music service, dubbed iRadio, has been delayed due to Apple’s inability to reach agreement over licensing terms with Sony Music, according to the Financial Times (registration required).

Agreement has been reached with Universal and is close with Warner, said the FT, but negotiations with Sony are protracted. Apple opened its negotiations with an offer of a rate of 6 cents for every 100 songs played, according to the report, half that paid by rival Pandora. It then increased that to 12.5 cents to match Pandora, but whether Universal accepted that or held out for a higher offer isn’t known.

Some music industry executives argue that cash-rich Apple should pay a higher rate than Pandora, which had 70m “active listeners” in April, because of its broader ambitions for iRadio. These include using data it already has from hundreds of millions of iTunes users to predict the selection of tracks they will enjoy, and a plan to allow listeners to purchase songs seamlessly via the iTunes store.

In addition to a royalty, Apple has apparently offered music companies a share of advertising revenue and a guaranteed lump sum.

It is believed that Apple’s streaming music service will be closer to Pandora than Spotify as users won’t be able to choose which tracks they want to hear.

The FT also reported that users won’t be charged for the service which will generate revenue through Apple’s iAD advertising network.

Magazines on the iPad. Three years ago, it seemed like a no-brainer. Designers would use simple tools to turn pages for print into pages on screen. Apple would make it easy to sell them as apps. Freed from the costs of printing and distribution, everyone could be a publisher. An industry would be transformed.

Yet here we are in 2013, and digital publishing is still complicated and expensive. There’s no credible software for creating magazine apps from scratch, and dozens of competing systems for generating them from page layouts created using existing desktop publishing packages. Since most of them charge hefty fees to actually publish your app, you’ll want to choose carefully. But where do you start?

In MacUser Vol 29 No 6 (June 2013), on sale from today, we look in depth at the digital publishing market. Our cover feature explains the state of the art and the issues to consider. Then we summarise the features and pricing of 21 of the leading solutions, including those from Adobe and Quark themselves, the alternatives for both InDesign and QuarkXPress users, and some emerging rivals with different approaches. Whatever the size or nature of your publishing project, don’t miss it – you won’t find an overview like this anywhere else.

Finally, our Desk of the Month winners should inspire you to send your own workspace snapshots to mailbox@macuser.co.uk. As always, you could win a beautifully made Just Mobile accessory.

Find us at newsagents, supermarkets and bookshops; on your doorstep when you sign up here; on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch via Newsstand in the App Store; or to read on your Mac or iPad. Missed a crucial issue? Find it online here.

iPad users are ‘frustrated’ because ‘They can’t type. They can’t create documents,’ according to Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates. And Android users are equally fed-up with having to type on-screen.

That’s why, said Gates in an interview with CNBC ‘we’re providing them something with the benefits they’ve seen that has made that a big category but without giving up what they expect in a PC.’

The ‘something’ to which Gates referred is, of course, Microsoft’s Surface tablets, announced to great excitement last year, but yet to sell enough to put a dent in the market share enjoyed by the iPad and Android tablets.

‘If you have Surface or Surface Pro, you have the portability of the tablet but the richness of terms of the keyboard, Microsoft Office of the PC,’ he said. The Surface Pro is Microsoft’s $899 tablet which runs Windows 8, has struggled with bugs and has yet to launch outside of the US.

The Financial Times reported this morning that ‘Microsoft is preparing to reverse course over key elements of its Windows 8 operating system, marking one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since Coca-Cola’s New Coke fiasco nearly 30 years ago.’ Other reports, however, suggested the changes planned to Windows, code-named Windows Blue, amounted to no more than an update to Windows 8.

Adobe has announced that the current version of Creative Suite, CS6, will be the last. It said that it will continue to release maintenance updates, but that there will be no CS7 nor feature updates for CS6.

At the opening of its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, the company said that from now on the only way to access Photoshop, In Design, Illustrator and the rest of what used to be Creative Suite will be by subscribing to Creative Cloud.

The component applications will be renamed Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, etc and will get major updates next month. Among the new features in Photoshop CC will be a Smart Sharpen tool and a new upsampling feature which attempts to enlarge images while keeping it sharp and retaining detail.

Creative Cloud currently costs £46.88 per month including VAT, or £27.34 per month for the first year if you have CS3 or later. There’s a student and teacher edition for £15.88 per month.

You can also subscribe to individual applications for £17.58 per month.

Creative Cloud comprises Creative Suite apps, Adobe Touch mobile apps, the TypeKit font library, 20GB file storage, file syncing, and a range of other apps and services.

Adobe is developing an iOS app that will allow Lightroom users to view and edit RAW images stored on their Mac on an iPad device.

According to The Verge, the app is in the early stages of development and uses the lossy DNG previews which arrived with Lightroom 5 to minimise the demands on the iPad. The app was shown off by Adobe’s Tom Hogarty during an appearance on The Grid, Scott Kelby’s online photography show.

During his appearance, Hogarty used an iPad 2 to zoom and scroll inside a large 5D Mark III RAW image, tweaking adjustments to shadows, highlights, and color temperature. While the app looked very primitive, most of the controls you’d expect from a mobile version of Lightroom are already there (pictured below), although things are still very sketchy. Hogarty said that selecting some of the controls would “make the iPad explode.”

Edit data from the iPad is stored as small data files and edits made on the iPad are synchronised with the Mac version of Lightroom.

The final version of the app is still some way off. Hogarty described it as ‘just the beginning of the conversation.’