misa

mobius said:

But...there's already a handgun, a bomb, a knife and a sword...so what was Apple's response when they were proposed? Or perhaps they were introduced at a time when Apple did not wield the persuasive power it currently does.

I think everyone is missing the logical reason:
1) There is already a "gun weapon" emoji http://emojipedia.org/pistol/ , It's defined as "a police officer's weapon that can cause great harm" , adding more variations of gun is pointless. Note that Microsoft makes this a "toy gun" on Windows, and most other versions are the 6-shooter.
2) The average person outside the US does not have access to legal firearms, nor knows the difference between the 6-shooter and a longgun (for hunting.)
3) Nobody wants to encourage more gun violence.

The Kitchen knife(hocho) and dagger exist as separate emoji. The crossed swords implies "combat" , The bomb is the cartoon bomb with lit fuse symbol and universally known as a bomb from everything in cartoons to video games. Real bombs don't look like that.

The Rifle is still included in Unicode 9 but has no color emoji. Vendors can include one if they want but it won't be supported.

More to the point, "gun emoji" might be triggering to some people but this is just something that has to be addressed (see the "cartoony" pistols) as a UI/UX thing.

The patents actually suggest a wrap-around screen http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/06/14/apple-patent-shows-company-might-toying-wrap-around-iphone-screen/#gref
However I'm not sure I like this idea very much.

A curved screen reduces utilitarian use of the device, and makes it that much less durable. Only doable with AMOLED's which Apple has pooh-poohed already, with most of the rumors suggesting we won't see it till maybe 2019. AMOLED's are not very durable either. Samsung's "edge" phones don't seem to outselling their conventional phones so this seems like the wrong path to even be staring down.

Curved screens, especially convex curved screens, are substantially less useful because instead of being able to have apps presume a flat screen, now you need to crop the output so it doesn't go to the edge since the edge isn't going to be visible from all angles, and it makes watching video or reading text absolutely ridiculous.

Still it's not the worst thing. The worst thing would be removing the headphone jack without having two lighting ports. Having to share the charging with the headphone jack would make the iphone much less useful. In fact most people would rather the phones be thicker just so that the battery lasts all day. If Apple removes the headphone jack just to make it water-proof and that becomes a selling point, maybe I'll forgive it, but that's the only situation where I would.

foggyhill said:

mac_128 said:

Yet another indicator the headphone jack is going away. BT 5 could possibly be the improvement Apple has been waiting on to go reliably wireless and address convenience issues with pairing devices. 

Blue Tooth pairing is slow and unreliable, not sure why its such a PITA.

Bluetooth is unreliable because it's wireless. Wireless is not efficient. Wireless is subject to interference. Wireless drains the battery the more noise it has to deal with.

This is the main objection to dropping the headphone jack. I do not want wireless earbuds/headphones. That is yet another set of batteries that need to be charged and wireless signals going through your head.

gatorguy said:

macxpress said:

So I have to ask...how secure is Samsung Pay vs ApplePay? To me, its more than just the convenience of using my phone to pay for things, its also the amount of security it provides. I think a lot of people forget this...Apple didn't just invent ApplePay for the convenience, but also (and maybe more importantly), the fact that its far more secure than simply swiping your credit card. 

The security aspect is often misunderstood. Here's a link that describes some of the feature differences between Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and where security is discussed as well. In a nutshell your transaction is just as safe using Samsung Pay as it is using Apple Pay or Android Pay. http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apple-Pay-vs-Samsung-Pay-vs-Android-Pay-comparison_id77632

Hahaha.... No, absolutely not. MST = swipe card operation. Since Merchants are being told they are responsible for magstripe payments, merchants aren't allowed to use the magstripe unless overridden or it's the only option in their POS system. Like in Canada, if the NFC fails, you have to insert the chip, and if the chip fails, then you use the swipe card, and only after the merchant OK's it. 

There is nothing stopping someone from "playback" attacks with MST, or even using stolen card numbers from the internet with the MST. In fact it would be less conspicous for someone using a Samsung phone to be using stolen card information this way, instead of stolen or cloned cards.

So this web-app lacks the all of the safety parts of Apple Pay, so it seems like it might just be a mea culpa to Apple so that online sites that only support Samsung Pay (eg Korea) operate on all devices in order to get Samsung Pay adopted. 

The ultimate solution is to just have entering card numbers online stop and require an Apple-pay/Android-Pay/Samsung-Pay, etc secure element payment gateways like what happens with Paypal already. No more card numbers, there has to be some physical verification of the card being present. Too bad desktop NFC/chip readers aren't common or we'd have done it back when Chip+Pin was new or even back in 1994 when EMV was new. Maybe that should be the new thing. Remember the TPM chip? This would have been something that the TPM chip could have been used with to secure a hardware configuration. I suspect we'll see "secure elements" being introduced into computer screens at some point.

I've been using Apple Pay in Canada with the American Express, and I always get asked "how'd you do that?" by people who have smartphones.