This week on AppleInsider: Samsung pays out, 4-inch iPhone rumors, World AIDS Day & more

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JCPenney prepares for Apple Pay in spring 2016

Long an official Apple Pay partner, JCPenney on Monday was revealed to be finally launching support for the service sometime this spring. This includes not just standard payments, but support for the retailer's store cards as well.

U.S. merchant backing has been relatively weak with Apple Pay, making every new chain that much more important. Some other partners set to go live in the near future include Cinnabon, Chili's, Domino's, KFC, and Starbucks.

Apple marks World AIDS Day

For the fourth year in a row, Apple turned the logos of Apple Stores red to reflect World AIDS Day — an event created by the World Health Organization that's meant to bring awareness of HIV/AIDS and its casualties.

At the same time, Apple noted that its (Product)Red contributions have surpassed $100 million since 2006. Money from Apple's few Red-branded products go to the Global Fund, a charity devoted to fighting not just AIDS but malaria and tuberculosis.

New 4-inch iPhone may come in early 2016 with A9 and Apple Pay

Backing other rumors, including some of his own, connected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that Apple is indeed working on a new 4-inch iPhone that should ship in early 2016. The device will allegedly have both an A9 processor and Apple Pay, bringing an option for people who want modern specs but not the size and cost of an iPhone 6s.

To date, Apple's "budget" iPhones have consisted largely of older models at reduced prices. Even the iPhone 5c was essentially an iPhone 5 with a plastic shell and some minor component tweaks.

Swift goes open source

As promised in June, Apple finally made Swift an open-source programming language, with Linux support. While developers have been coding in Swift for some time, until now the language was restricted to Apple platforms.

Making it open source could potentially greatly expand Swift's popularity, and bring it to new realms like cloud computing.

Beats Music data to be purged Jan. 19

In an email notification, Apple warned Beats Music subscribers that they have until Jan. 19 to transfer their accounts to Apple Music or risk losing things like playlists and preferences. Beats Music's streams shut down at the end of November.

While Beats Music — acquired in Apple's $3 billion takeover of Beats last year — was the foundation for Apple Music, the services differ in their design. Apple Music, for instance, lacks "The Sentence," which was used to find tracks suited to a particular mood or event.

Samsung agrees to $548M settlement with Apple

After years of legal battles and a loss at trial, Samsung on Thursday said it had "made arrangements" to pay Apple a $548,176,477 damage settlement for infringing on iPhone patents with its Android-based smartphones. Former Apple CEO infamously claimed that Android was "stolen" and threatened to go to "nuclear war" over the issue.

As a catch, Samsung claimed the right to reimbursement if Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent is found invalid, or if it can successfully argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

AppleInsider podcast

Our editors chatted about a wide range of topics, including new MacBook rumors, the iPhone 7 ditching a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, and an Amazon Video app finally coming to the Apple TV.