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 to make way for the ill-fated Zune Marketplace and other similarly abysmal content delivery products. 

Sure, Zune had long since been panned by consumer electronics blogs, but gen 3 hardware was legit.  The desktop software would still hold up against Spotify and Apple Music in terms of usability and vastly outclasses either in style.  The music exploration and recommendations were excellent.  I still miss the playback visualizations.  They had social features baked in and had a web music player that was a first class citizen in their ecosystem. You could cast music between devices before the word “casting” had been coined.  Zune Pass gave you access to unlimited streaming of 14 million tracks and let you keep 10 each month.  While Apple was raising digital downloads to $1.29/track, Microsoft was offering discounted annual subscriptions at $149.  It was the equivalent of buying 10 songs on iTunes each month plus $1.75/mo for unlimited streaming.

Zune lost the battle of mind share, but 13 years later I’m still waiting for someone to step up and revive the golden age of streaming music.

lightvox88 said:

Exactly. It was already more than cable before, and now it's just ridiculous. 30% increase!?! Who would be interested in this? People with money to burn...

mpantone said:

Google had worked on this before Apple did. 

Google had a physical debit card long before Apple Card: it was the Google Wallet card which was discontinued in 2016.



Up through 2015, the Google Wallet card had NFC, something Apple Card does not have. In this case, Apple cribbed from Google.

Of course, none of the underlying technology is new.

The Japanese have been using cellphones as NFC contactless transit passes since 2005. The Suica card can be used as payment at many stores as well.

Many technology companies' offerings are copied from others. Apple did not invent any of this. They did encourage adoption.

Hell, the NFC contactless chip isn't even theirs. It's from NXP, a Dutch semiconductor company that was spun off from Philips. The old Amex Blue cards from the late 90s-early 2000s had a Philips cryptocontroller chip embedded in the card. There was a corresponding USB card reader that you'd plug into your PC that basically acted as a form of two-factor authentication for online purchases.

In the early 2010s, most of my credit cards had NFC contactless chips but adoption in the USA was so poor that the major credit card issuing banks stop issuing these cards and by 2015, most of my cards had gone back to being dumb pieces of plastic.

The United States consumer finance market is anywhere between 10 and 20 years behind the rest of the industrialized world. It is really slowing down the speed of innovations in this area.