Apple Daily: Apple Visitor's Center; iPad Sales Fall Again; Third El Capitan Public Beta

Want a better look at Apple's "spaceship" campus once it's finished without having to work for Apple? It looks like you'll be able to, thanks to a new visitor's center that's said to be going up on the site. In addition, iPad sales continue to fall (but there's hope they'll jump up again later this year), and Apple released the third public beta for Mac OS El Capitan.

Concept Art, Blueprints Emerge for Planned Apple Visitor's Center

Apple has been much more open to the public in recent years, and in that spirit, the company is reportedly ready to build a new visitor's center at the upcoming "spaceship campus" that will have a cafe and an observation deck for a better view of the campus itself (via the San Jose Business Journal).

Visually, the building will be "a super-modern glass-walled structure topped by a carbon-fiber roof with extended eaves, punctuated by large skylights," and it will have a 10,114 square-foot Apple Store as well. The project has apparently been in the works for some time, as the Journal found documents pertaining to the visitor's center that were filed with the city of Cupertino in April.

There will be 684 parking spaces "below grade" to accomodate the visitor's center, and elevators will take the visitors up to the center itself. The report also notes that Apple's neighbors in a single-family home community won't have to worry about being bothered by all this, as there's a "screen" blocking the view.

Apple is currently planning to finish construction of the campus as a whole by late 2016.

Report: iPad Sales Continues to Fall

Apple may remain the king of the tablets, but its market dominance is on the wane. The numbers for IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker came out today, and they show that the company "only" sold 10.9 million iPads during Q2 of 2015 compared to 13.3 million from the year before. Not bad, but it means that Apple's market share went down from 27.7 to 24.5 percent in year-over-year.

But the numbers also show that the tablet market as a whole is declining, and the chief competition is coming from low-cost alternatives from complanies like Lenovo, Huawei, and LG, all of whom saw growth in the last quarter. (There's also a nebulous "other" category, which accounts for a massive 45.6 percent of the market.) Longtime Apple rival Samsung even saw its share slip to 17 percent after it sold only 7.6 million tablets.

Recent rumors have suggested that Apple could break this trend if its fall lineup manages to impress. This year, Apple is expected to release its long-rumored (and highly anticipated) 12.9-inch "iPad Pro," in addition to a new iPad Air and an updated iPad Mini with the same specs as the iPad Air 2.

Apple Releases Third Public Beta for Mac OS X El Capitan

Apple continues to plunk out of the public betas for Mac OS X El Capitan. Just three weeks after the original public beta for the upcoming operating system went live, the third public beta is already here.

This public beta comes just days after Apple seeded the fifth developer beta, and it's currently thought that it contains relatively few surprises — for the most part, it just tidies up previous problems and squashes a few bugs.

Still, that might mean it's a good time to jump in and try El Capitan, which includes better window control, improved Photos and Notes apps, and improved Spotlight searches. If you've never tried out Apple's beta testing program, you can sign up for it here.

The operating system itself is expected to launch sometime in the fall.

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