Bel.Air
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US government steps up oversight of Apple Pay and rivals
In my mind one of the (many) reasons for Apple's lasting growth and success especially in the services area is how they leveraged having hundreds of millions of credit cards on file (Jobs would specifically mention this in keynotes) when the iTunes Store was smashing new records, way before the iPhone. This paved the way to the (profitable) App Store by bringing micropayments into the mainstream.
But guess what? All of this was supported by a preexisting, highly regulated yet successful financial payments system. It never really bothered anyone and actually helped Apple thrive (and yes innovate) in a safe an reliable environment. To all the naysayers, I'd suggest looking up the fail rates in the payments industry (like the Visa network). It goes for decades without any serious outages. And it's still one of the most heavily regulated and scrutinised industries...
But I guess people have been hearing stories about how "big government" is taking and wasting their money for so long that they've been lead to believe the market stability we've been enjoying since the better part of a century has nothing to do with regulations (it absolutely does) and we may as well do away with them.
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EU's latest demand on Apple about geolocking is unforgivably naive
This article should be marked as opinion or even hot take. Apart from what other commenters already stated, there are other misunderstood concepts here about Apple app store restrictions:
1) Apple requires the country on your Apple ID account to match the country of the credit card on file. And the App store content is quite different depending on country (which, if you had asked someone from an EU country you would know.).
2) For those still skeptical a simple example of why this is an annoyance: as a EU citizen you travel (visa-free, without a passport - thanks EU!) from Denmark to say, Greece. There, you have NO extra roaming fee (thanks EU!), public health insurance (thanks EU!), and say you want to download the local public transit app for Athens. And surprise surprise, Apple tells you that the app is not available in your country's App store!
From a EU standpoint this is a ridiculous limitatiom, it's non-compliant with single market regulations and the free movement of goods and services across the EU, so of course the European Commission is doing its job by enforcing it. Basically there should be another tier available (call it Region) that developers should take advantage of, instead of only toggling between Global/1 country. It isn't at all that complex and shouldn't be that big of an issue.
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iPhones stored for forensic analysis unexpectedly reboot, causing problems for police
Call me old fashioned but I've actually been restarting my iPhone quite regularly (say monthly) and find it quite beneficial, definitely much better than force quitting apps (which I see people doing obsessively ALL the time, even on brand new 16 Pros). Of course those that crash I do force quit, but on a case by case basis.ashsaturday said:Well I never restart my iPhone,
It's incredible how stable and reliable iOS has been since its inception, especially compared to the software landscape that came before it. Even more impressive is how this is still the case even as the system has become so more complex and feature packed.
And amazingly (compared to Windows, Samsung and the Chinese offerings) there is still zero sense of bloat, what a blessing (I mean, we get what we pay for I guess).
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First-world problems drives Apple's robotics development
dewme said:But for those folks who need additional assistance due to physical or mobility imitations, having a robotic helper to help them have more independence can be a major quality of life issue.
Apple has pretty strong track-record for innovating accesibility on iOS, but let's be honest, they are not going to foray into an entirely new product category to cater to a "niche". Their entire credo is heavily reliant on making mass-market, so (almost) everything they touch has to have that potential at least.
The way I would see it is they invent a use-case we had not previously thought we needed (as DAalseth rightly pointed out), that would turn out to be highly attractive selling proposition and might just ALSO be a great improvement for people with specific mobility needs.
So some kind of creature comfort, usually innovative tech means less friction- at start it could be "as simple" as appliances plugging themselves in when needed (or one another).
