entropys

Bendigo Bank was once a regional credit union that has successfully grown into a bank. Its market niche is regional areas where “The Big Four” have withdrawn shopfront services. It markets itself as a kinda anti-corporate bank. The model has been reasonably successful and Bendigo owns a couple of the smaller banks like Adelaide Bank, and currently has the contract with the Victorian State Government to supply concessional loan programs for rural assistance through Rural Bank. Plenty of stories of typical bank behaviour though.

So to sum up, a littlish bank, but not that little.  Medium sized in the Oz market. I am surprised it tried to develop and promote its own solution rather than just adopt Apple Pay. What a waste of corporate resources and shareholder value.
ANZ is the one of the Big Four that has Apple Pay, and promotes it heavily. The rest of the finance industry that have Apple Pay (a growing list) tend to be smaller than Bendigo.
The remaining three of the Big Four, Westpac, Commonwealth and National are still pushing their own, little used payment apps. They won’t be successful but it will take a while for the self important, MBA execs who championed these strategies to either admit they are wrong or get sacked.

General maintenance or fixing or replacing parts, Soli, is why you would want to do that. Not as important in the days of SSD, but imacs still come with HDD. And things can go wrong, like the GPU issue.  I myself have had to take out and bake the GPU of my 2011 iMac like the above video, the second GPU after the first one died and was replaced in a recall. It cost me four hours of my time because Apple has actively made it harder to get out the GPU that it needs to be. For Apple to fix it I was quoted AUD$945 plus labour.  In a six year old machine.

The best iMac in this regard was the 2005 G5 iMac.  Take the back of the case off and everything was carefully laid out and easy to access. I replaced the HDD twice, once because it was dead, once because I wanted bigger, a ten minute job.  At that time the philosophy promoted was user servicable. I believe Jobs said something like “the inside of our case is more beautiful than the outside of our competitors” . That philosophy didn’t last long, and Jobs moved on to spruking teh thin.

For years there's been an outcry saying that iTunes is a bloated mess that tries to do too much -- but as soon as Apple removes a feature, we're complaining. The update to iTunes 12.7 dropped the ability to download and manage your iOS apps on your Mac, and with it, complaints lamenting the feature's loss. 

Well sure. iTunes is/was a bloated mess. But instead of breaking iTunes up and having a stand alone app management tool, Apple just ditched app management altogether. An app management tool is a better option than just Iveing software.
iMazing is like something that should have been done by Apple in the first place and I hope it doesn’t become victim of some Apple vengeance.

Ive 
v. Ived, Iveing, Ives
1. To aggressively remove hardware or software features in pursuit of a goal of minimalist perfection.
2. To go too far in reducing functionality in pursuit of minimalist perfection.

Yes on a scale of evil, Facebook tops just about any advertising agency known for sheer bad cookie behaviour.

As a grumpy old man, I find Freedom From Facebook liberating, even if I miss out on hearing about all the cool parties.

Definitely want to upgrade from the 6+.

• The price of the X cannot be justified for what it is. Maybe the price is meant to limit sales closer to production capacity, but I think the price also gives nitrous fuel to Apple's critics.
• There are also design and UI elements to the X that don't seem very Apple, eg The Notch, and the two step: Face ID/swipe to get to the home screen that were immediately obvious. It might work better with familiarity.
• The 8's are only incremental refinements over the 7, but have also increased in price.

I hope this isn't a jump the shark moment.