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Apple Announces iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, OS X Yosemite and More
Many outlets are reporting on Apple's iPad event today. Highlights include:
- Apple pay will launch Monday.
- WatchKit -- a way for developers to make apps for the Apple Watch will launch next month.
- iOS 8.1
- Messages, iTunes, and iWork updated and many more new features in OS X Yosemite.
- You can send and receive calls on your Mac if you have an iPhone with iOS 8 that's signed into the same FaceTime account.
- iPad Air 2: New camera, 10 hour battery life, 12x faster than the original iPad.
- iPad mini 3.
- iMac with Retina display.
- And a Mac mini update: Faster processors, Intel Iris graphics, and two Thunderbolt 2 ports.
Except that it doesn't
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
XPS is/was a high end Dell laptop specification and branding touted as being the ultimate in desktop replacements (also marketed with the Alienware badge). The series started in the Dimension line of desktop machines when the Pentium first hit the market (source: have owned a Dimension XPS P60 desktop (since scrapped) and an Inspiron XPS 8200 laptop (which I still use because it's got 2GB RAM and a 1600x1200 screen)). The trademark for the laptop line is a lit "XPS" logo running down the left and right sides of the lid in red or blue, on rare occasions in green (mine has the standard lid because I managed to break the XPS badge). On the show Stargate Atlantis, XPS laptops were rebadged with the fictional logo depicting them as "SGI" laptops (SGI have NEVER made a laptop) but for anyone who's ever owned an XPS, Inspiron or Latitude the chassis were pretty recognisable. The biggest selling point for me with the Latitude/Inspiron PPx chassis wasn't the XPS badge on the high end machines but the fact that they're pretty much completely modular. You can switch batteries, optical drives, hard drive caddies, internal cards, graphics processors etc, among almost the entire line from the lowliest PII/233 up to the P4/2.0 - knowing this because I've been doing it since 2002.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
your understanding is incorrect. Apple has explicitly stated that the transaction is 100% between The Merchant, Your Bank, and you. Apple does not receive a copy of the transaction, they don't know who you've shopped with, and that they don't know that any specific transaction has happened.
The only thing Apple does is act as the facilitator to getting the device-specific account number in to the phone. So Apple could know which credit cards you have setup in your device and that's about it.
I'm not entirely convinced that Touch ID is worth the extra $100. Hopefully the IHS teardown will indicate if there is anything else of value between the two.
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How doesn't it? My understanding is that instead of paying by your credit card, your Apple Account gets hit for the charge and Apple pays the vendor and then Apple charges your linked credit card, just like for existing in-app purchases. Since it's your Apple Account doing the purchasing, Apple is in the loop and sees every transaction that you make.
Except that's not how it works. There's a special chip in the new iPhone that talks to an NFC payment terminal and presents itself as a virtual credit card. The terminal sends that information for example to Visa. Visa works together with Apple and figures out that this virtual credit card actually matches your real debit or credit card, and everything is done as if you had used your normal credit or debit card. The chip is locked away from the OS, even Apple couldn't read what's inside it.
The advantages are a minor bit of convenience (you pay by putting a finger on the fingerprint reader on the iPhone), but a big advantage in security because nobody knows your credit card number and therefore cannot lose it to hackers, and crooked employees cannot read it either.
I suggest you read up on the technology. You could take a look at Swipe as I think it's probably the closest pre-Apple Pay implementation to what Apple Pay is (Swipe, IS an Apple Pay provider, however). Banks are jumping onboard now that the technology appears secure. Apple claims another 500 banks have joined since last month.
Your card details are stored within a secure chip on the iPad. When you make a purchase, the card info hits the CC provider and a token is returned for THAT transaction. That is passed to the vendor who completes the charge and sends it to the CC processor. The CC Processor sends back a response to the vendor that transaction is completed and then a response is sent to the customer.
You can manually enter your CC info or take a picture of it using the iOS device. That image, is verified by the bank/CC company and then the information is loaded into the secure chip.
The beauty is that your CC info is only exchanged with the bank.
If your device is stolen, you can immediately render the CC info stored in it useless by logging into your iCloud account (I would assume, you have 2 factor authentication turned on - which I think Apple is now requiring).
I don't know how this compares to PayPal or Google Wallet as I don't use them. I do know that Apple has made it easy to add Apple Pay to apps and websites, and the user experience counts provided the security holds up. PayPal still looked a complex mess when I viewed the API last month.
> There is a good possibility that the new iMacs can also be used as a monitor as well.
Likely not. The old Mac had a totally typical display. But now it's 5k, and...
Thunderbolt at 10 Gbit/s wasn't fast enough to drive 4K, which needs about 16 Gbit/s. Thunderbolt 2 at 20 Gbit/s can drive 4K, but not 5120Ã--2880, which needs 28 Gbit/s.1 The only promising standard on the horizon is DisplayPort 1.3 at 32 Gbit/s, but that spec is being finalized later in 2014, which means we're probably still years away from anything supporting it.
Marco Arment, January 2014
Wikipedia now says "DisplayPort version 1.3 was released on September 15, 2014." So yeah, no way is this iMac is supporting input based on a month-old spec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
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