Slashdot Mirror
Apple Announces Smartwatch, Bigger iPhones, Mobile Payments
Today at Apple's September press conference, they announced the new iPhone 6 models. There are two of them — the iPhone 6 is 4.7" at 1334x750, and the iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5" at 1920x1080. Both phones are thinner than earlier models: 5S: 7.6mm, 6: 6.9mm, 6 Plus: 7.1mm. The phones have a new-generation chip, the 64-bit A8. Apple says the new phones have a 25% faster CPU, 50% faster GPU, and they're 50% more energy efficient (though they were careful to say the phones have "equal or better" battery life to the 5S). Apple upgrade the phones' wireless capabilities, moving voice calls to LTE and also enabling voice calls over Wi-Fi. The phones ship on September 19th, preceded by the release of iOS 8 on September 17th.
Apple also announced its entry into the payments market with "Apple Pay." They're trying to replace traditional credit card payments with holding an iPhone up to a scanner instead. It uses NFC and the iPhone's TouchID fingerprint scanner. Users can take a picture of their credit cards, and Apple Pay will gather payment information, encrypt it, and store it. (Apple won't have any of the information about users' credit cards or their purchases, and users will be able to disable the payment option through Find My iPhone if they lose the device.) Apple Pay will work with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards to start. 220,000 stores that support contactless payment will accept Apple Pay, and many apps are building direct shopping support for it. It will launch in October as an update for iOS 8, and work only on the new phones.
Apple capped off the conference with the announcement of the long-anticipated "Apple Watch." Their approach to UI is different from most smartwatch makers: Apple has preserved the dial often found on the side of analog watches, using it as a button and an input wheel. This "digital crown" enables features like zoom without obscuring the small screen with fingers. The screen is touch-sensitive and pressure sensitive, so software can respond to a light tap differently than a hard tap. The watch runs on a new, custom-designed chip called the S1, it has sensors to detect your pulse, and it has a microphone to receive and respond to voice commands. It's powered by a connector that has no exposed contacts — it magnetically seals to watch and charges inductively. The Apple Watch requires an iPhone of the following models to work: 6, 6Plus, 5s, 5c, 5. It will be available in early 2015, and will cost $349 for a base model.
Apple also announced its entry into the payments market with "Apple Pay." They're trying to replace traditional credit card payments with holding an iPhone up to a scanner instead. It uses NFC and the iPhone's TouchID fingerprint scanner. Users can take a picture of their credit cards, and Apple Pay will gather payment information, encrypt it, and store it. (Apple won't have any of the information about users' credit cards or their purchases, and users will be able to disable the payment option through Find My iPhone if they lose the device.) Apple Pay will work with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards to start. 220,000 stores that support contactless payment will accept Apple Pay, and many apps are building direct shopping support for it. It will launch in October as an update for iOS 8, and work only on the new phones.
Apple capped off the conference with the announcement of the long-anticipated "Apple Watch." Their approach to UI is different from most smartwatch makers: Apple has preserved the dial often found on the side of analog watches, using it as a button and an input wheel. This "digital crown" enables features like zoom without obscuring the small screen with fingers. The screen is touch-sensitive and pressure sensitive, so software can respond to a light tap differently than a hard tap. The watch runs on a new, custom-designed chip called the S1, it has sensors to detect your pulse, and it has a microphone to receive and respond to voice commands. It's powered by a connector that has no exposed contacts — it magnetically seals to watch and charges inductively. The Apple Watch requires an iPhone of the following models to work: 6, 6Plus, 5s, 5c, 5. It will be available in early 2015, and will cost $349 for a base model.
Apple doesn't middle-man the banking/merchant transaction in their model.
Unlike Google/Samsung/Amazon, they are not collecting or monetizing transaction or location info of buyers. They limit their liability and focus on where they make real money.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Actually, I suspect that this is more efficient than "toss it on the pad" simply because the variables are closely controlled. The watch goes onto the charger in a particular way, which means all the magnetic fields are aligned precisely allowing for as much optimization as is possible. Besides, this opens up a market for fancy stands to hold the end of the charger, allowing you to have a little holder on your nightstand that you put your watch on, letting it double as a bedside clock or whatever. trust me, there will be all sorts of hipster "hand crafted bamboo AppleWatch charging stands" within a month or so.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
They're quoting CmdrTaco, who used those exact words to describe the original iPod upon it's announcement. Damn kids these days....
If it works like everything else on it's on your backup, which, if you're smart, you only do locally. It's a good question if they'll put it in the cloud backup -- I don't use the Cloud backup features.
Reimporting the cards doesn't seem to be a big deal, you just have to take a picture of it with the camera, frankly I wouldn't mind doing that every time I get a new phone.
Given what we know, if Dread Pirate Roberts made me choose between having my wallet stolen or my phone stolen, TAKE THE PHONE. It's clear that the information in phone form can do a lot less damage.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Right. Because... Actually I don't even know what conspiracy you could imagine someone engaging in.
Like I can't even come up with a sarcastic story for what's going on in your head.
One bum note is that they are no longer selling the iPod Classic as of today, quietly ending thirteen years of scroll-wheel iPods.
That's too bad, as it's a much better music player than the iTouch and the iPhone, with its larger storage capacity and controls with tactile feedback.
Just this year Apply wrote a very long, detailed white paper about exactly what the difference is. The short story is that, on a 5S, things like your password keychain, the unlock password itself and the signatures that sign the system and certificates is kept either in a secure enclave chip, or on a block of the flash media that the secure enclave can read and write, but the regular flash controller itself cannot address. This is a security tier itself that sits above the normal full-disk encryption of the phone (where your photos live), which is done with your unlock password.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You do realize that they already have credit card numbers for over 500 million customers, right? And practically anything at all is more secure than what the US uses right now for retail payments. Based on what they said in the keynote, the phone stores your information in a dedicated hardware chip that's separate from the rest of the system, never transmits it to Apple or the retailer, makes use of one-use codes for actually making the payment, and secures it all behind a fingerprint scan. Given that my current options are either cash or a plastic card that can used by others if it's ever copied, memorized, stolen, or skimmed, this seems like a step in the right direction.
(also worth noting: the nude pics things affected pretty much all of the big tech players, not just Apple, and stretches back for years, though it obviously only just came to light in the last week or two when the images actually leaked into the general public)
> So if you lose or upgrade your phone you have to re-setup all your stored cards
Ummm, what do you do if you lose your wallet? Re-set up all your cards, very rapidly, using a *phone*. Then you wait for days while they arrive. Or you go in person to a *bank* and get a new one.
Whereas with this you simply take another photo of your card.
> If not then they're storing it in your device
Wow. Did you even bother reading ONE SENTENCE about how this works before coming here to complain?
Really, this is just making you look foolish.
Because Apple confirmed it was the case, security researchers confirmed their claim by investigating the hacking circles responsible for this stuff, and Apple wasn't the only one whose platform was hit (Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and others were also affected). All of which has been readily-accessible public knowledge for over a week now.
https://www.nikcub.com/posts/n...
Perhaps you should watch or read before you comment. You make the mistake of thinking that there's only one way to do an NFC payment system. Apple's payment system is indeed new, and does away with all the known security holes of your Android phone.
Apple's system isn't simply an NFC chip as used in payment cards in Europe. It gets a one off payment code from VISA or Mastercard or whoever for each transaction, using the device ID and TouchID. Unlike your device, a hacker can't just sniff this protocol and misuse it.
You're moving the goalposts, but before I address your question, let's consider the alternatives that this is intended to replace: swipe or chip-and-PIN. Yes, Touch ID can be cracked, but it requires extended physical access to the device, a copy of the fingerprints, significant expense (around $2000 for the type of printer used and the various other consumable materials), and a day or so to go through the multi-step process of creating the fake fingerprint. All of which means it won't be done casually by unscrupulous cashiers or amateur thieves, which is something Americans face today (my parents are dealing with this right now, in fact). And by the time a person who's actually invested in this stuff manages to go through the whole process of creating a fake fingerprint, the owner of the lost device would be likely to have already revoked Apple Pay access remotely anyway.
Contrast that with swipe: if you compromise physical access to the card, you compromise everything. Or chip-and-PIN, which only adds the additional barrier of a PIN that can be procured by just looking over someone's shoulder at the right time. In comparison to either one of those, it's both more convenient and more secure.
So, to answer your question, no, it's not foolproof, but considering amateur card theft is still rampant in America and perfectly possible overseas, we can say that this system is significantly more secure than what we have now for payments at physical retail locations. It's also more private, since I never have to expose my information to the retailer. And it's more durable, since I don't need to worry about magnetic stripes failing due to wear and tear. And it's also more convenient, since it means less things to carry and less interactions necessary to complete the transaction.
Which is all to say, it's good to point out that Touch ID has been cracked and that that is indeed a vector for a possible form of theft, but let's put that fact in context and recognize that our current systems are significantly less secure and that this represents a massive improvement over them.
You take a picture of the card and that information is used to confirm with the bank that you're the card holder. The phone then gets a digital certificate that stored in the encrypted enclave and the photo is zapped. No credit card data is stored on the phone, nor on Apple's servers.
When you go to buy something the phone uses the cert to generate a one-time token and security code that's given to the merchant terminal via NFC and unlocked via TouchID.
The merchant doesn't get a name, doesn't get a card number, doesn't get a security code, and doesn't get a pin number, and as such, the thing is about a million times more secure than the existing magnetic swipe card system.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
They did have the first iPod, no doubt. But as far as the first portable MP3 player, no. Try PJB100, invented by Digital Equipment Corporation.
They did have the first iPhone, but that was not the first smart phone, no. Sorry again. Palm.
They did have the first iPad, but that was not the first tablet computer, not by a long shot. GRiD was first.
Oh yeah, that GUI they claimed to invent and sued Microsoft over? Yeah, not theirs, either. Xerox. Sorry.
Apple is a marketing company, not a technology company. They have brazenly stolen others ideas and (quite successfully) marketed them.
Enjoy your lock-in.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Sign up for what? Xcode is a free download from the app store, and you can use it to install Homebrew and be a single command away from having gcc4[345789] installed. There's almost literally nothing they could do to make that easier other than shipping Xcode with OS X, but that would be a waste of storage for the 99.9% of users who wouldn't ever use it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If I'd say I'm underwhelmed, it would be a big understatement.
Every major device announcement that Apple made in the recent years was always driven by one thing: It had a purpose. It provided something that was lacking in the world. Not a totally new invention in many cases, but a solution. Smartphones existed before the iPhone, but it is clear that the smartphone market history can be divided into "before the iPhone" and "after the iPhone" - just look at pictures of smartphones from those two periods.
iWatch? I know it was rumoured for two years or so, but in all that time I couldn't see which problem it solves and what meaning to life it has, and I still can't. It seems the Jobs spirit has left, because this is clearly a device that was made in response to the rumours about it, not because someone knew what he was doing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org