New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

http://www.getnobiggi.com/

I'm not sure it's going to stay stuck on, since the back of my case isn't supposed to be supported because it's textured and rubber/neoprene.

haha, really?

Ive really needs to be put out to pasture. I think all that botox is affecting his brain.

I mean it's like exactly where your thumb is assuming right-handed use, or index finger if left

I've adapted but the problem is that the volume buttons are right where my thumb naturally goes when pressing the lock button with my index finger.

I read something in an Apple forum about making the OS give priority to the lock button when both it and volume buttons are pressed at the same time. As it is, pressing a volume button disables locking.

i think yosemite looks fuckin fab

there's a little bit of font strangeness but fuck we had been living with that "lickable" aqua shit for way too long

Pay trip report

used to pay for train fare, let me thru the turnstile, declined charge 2 minutes later
used to pay for lunch at whole foods
tried to pay for train fare again, wouldn't let me through turnstile, declined charge hours later

the train station technically didn't support Pay but rather google wallet so not exactly a knock on the process. transaction at whole foods was seamless and enjoyable

supposedly cvs and rite aid dropped out of apple pay and joined some other qr-code-based shit coming out in 2015. Will be interesting to see how much traction Apple Pay has by then.

yeah from what i understand, the currentC flow is something like:

retailer presents you with a QR code to scan
you scan the QR code
you do something on your phone (choose payment method i would imagine, password maybe?)
you present the retailer with another QR code
retailer scans QR code and the transaction is complete

which is completely stupid and no one will use. that's not even to mention the fact that your bank information is stored on their servers in the cloud

yeah I'm guessing Apple Pay costs them more and they're bucking, but seems penny-wise/pound-foolish. If you're really against it just don't have a phone pay system at all, don't go all half-assed with something no one will use.

Actually Rite-Aid and CVS just had NFC-enabled card readers at POS but until Apple Pay launched roughly zero people had NFC payments set up on their phones. People just started using it all of a sudden and it worked.

oh weird

This is my understanding - banks and retailers hate having to give up money to the credit card companies. Apple is teaming up with those banks to compete against Visa and company, charging less per transaction than usual.
Retailers look at this and say, wait, why should we give Apple anything at this point? Might as well have our system which is essentially a debit card system to draw money directly from bank accounts - or our own store credit cards, of course. So that's what CurrentC is.

It makes sense to them because why change masters from Visa/AMEX/Discover to Apple when you can cut them out completely

Doesn't Visa still get their usual cut? I mean you have to use a normal credit card account with Apple Pay afaik. I thought it was Visa fee + Apple fee = more expensive.

Like I don't think you're really switching from credit card to Apple, you're just using Apple as a new way to take credit cards.

Apple fee's not on top, I think the deal-making is working with Apple making deals for a thin slice of the bank's slice of the txn fee.

garbled sentence but

anyway this "CurrentC" thing basically sounds like a substantially worse version of LevelUp, which already I have never seen anyone use at the places it is available.

good point hurting; i'm a little mixed up

Oh yeah, I saw Level-Up in a takeout place here. I asked about it once because it looked like some creepy bio-surveillance equipment, and the lady said it was for the "loyalty program."

xp I'm not sure either, silby's explanation sounds better

Just saw the grim glass eye of a Level Up pointer xp

AH, I SEE YOU HAVE JOINED THE LOYALTY PROGRAM. A WISE CHOICE.

CVS, et. al. want CurrentC because of the marketing data (Trigger warning: Gruber quote at end)

However, a series of retailers are opposed to the success of Apple Pay because the new system keeps user's transactions private and doesn't collect or track their purchasing history, providing the store with little more than the funds to cover the sale.

Some retailers, including Best Buy, appear to have removed their NFC terminals, while CVS and Rite Aid have turned them off to disable customers from using Apple Pay (turning off NFC also prevents Google Wallet from working).

CVS and Rite Aid belong to a consortium of retailers, led by Walmart, Best Buy, Kmart and 7 Eleven, that has been working since 2012 on CurrentC, a plan to enable payments through a mobile app. Rather than replicating Apple Pay's "fingerprint and tap," the CurrentC app for iOS and Android will require users to launch the app at checkout. The app will then produce a QR bar code that retailers have to scan

...

Rather than working with users' existing credit cards, the QR code will debit the user's checking account or a configured gift card or cards issued under the program. Apple Pay was expressly designed to work with existing banks and accounts in order to allow users to continue to earn the reward points, airline miles or other perks they already do.

Additionally, a series of major retailers have reported massive leaks of customer data and account information, creating poor timing for CurrentC's launch with assurances that "you can pay with peace of mind," given that users' transaction data will be collected and stored by the retailers' consortium.

CurrentC hopes to have its barcode app ready to use by early next year. But some of its partners are blocking already Apple Pay in the hope that users will set up new accounts to continue shopping with them. In addition to gaining access to more data on their customers, CurrentC also wants to avoid the transaction costs of conventional credit cards by directly making payments that bypass banks.

I believe it's safe to assume that CurrentC is an insecure attack vector.

this really seems destined for hilarious failure

Someone needs to tell cvs and rite aid that the old order is rapidly fading

Fab Yosemite http://fffff.at/yosemite-comic-sans-patch/

that process for CurrentC... does not sound good

Betamax. HD DVD. CurrentC.

no tech Billy Joel

microsoft windows back again

Still feeling kind of :\ about the beats acquisition/partnership. Wish they had paired with a legit audio company instead.

If they acquire a legit audio company, it'll be a tiny one working on compression/encoding, possibly to develop Apple-owned on-chip audio IP, and it won't be remotely high-profile. Apple seems to have acquired Beats do to what Apple saw as a brand with immense strategic value, not to mention a streaming music service.

One of the cliche knocks against Apple products is that they're all flash and no substance. That this actually seems to be true of Beats headphones might be a risk to Apple, but there's no reason Apple couldn't invest in improving what goes into Beats. I think we could see Dre on stage at an Apple event introducing something kinda cool.

I'm curious but skeptical about them entering the streaming biz. They seem a little late to the table and it's hard to imagine what they could offer that vastly improves on Spotify, although maybe they're counting on a significant market in people that haven't entered streaming at all but would do it with Apple holding their hand.

As far as the strategic value otherwise, I don't quite get it. Apple products with "Beats Audio Inside"? Seems out of character, plus I think some other PC maker did that and it wasn't a major success. I feel like Beats is a little like the U2 album -- a product that only appeals to one slice of Apple's customer base, where it would be a mistake to push it on everyone.

I never started paying for Spotify because I guess until recently they had two tiers and my regret-minimization circuits were overloaded.

I feel like it might also be a slightly hamfisted play to stay "relevant," avoid looking like purely a boomer company.

well, put it this way, iTunes has sort of screwed the pooch branding-wise, witness everyone itt complaining about it every year, and Apple's music sales ecosystem is bound up in it, and that business is shrinking rapidly YoY. Picking up Beats just for Beats Music, a streaming service with a valuable brand attached (with an Android app no less) could be strategically valuable just for that reason. $3 billion valuable, who knows, but it's not like Apple is worried about wasting shareholder value on an acquisition of that scale given their cash reserves.

lol @ "legit audio company"

afaik beats are pretty ehhh when it comes to sound quality but they're very iconic, have strong build quality, and imo have better artist engagement than the iTunes festival and Apple's repeated U2 interaction. I can't imagine an acquisition of a high-end DAC company or a good independent shop like Grado. Who else would they have bought, Bose? (ugh)

just wanna be clear, nobody here is excited about AppleBeats 'phones, right?

like sure, maybe they'll sell. great.

I don't really see a point in them buying an audio company period, tbh, different competencies. I doubt the "strength" of the Beats brand too, it's still on the new and trendy side, could easily seem dated in a few years (and I already don't see the headphones out that often anymore where I used to see them all the time).

All speculative, I know. Definitely not a huge risk for them in any case.

microsoft windows back again
― pplains, Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Some retailers, including Best Buy, appear to have removed their NFC terminals, while CVS and Rite Aid have turned them off

good luck lolmerica

Beats purchase seems like an obvious attempt to get back the music cachet they've lost, with the disappointments of Ping and iTunes Match

Like they got pretty lazy with iTunes Store being dominant, focused on the apps instead of the music

I wonder what the breakdown is in revenue between apps and music/movies/etc. for the iTunes store

we should sell ILX to apple

It's an opinion aggregator in the cloud