jdw

thedba said:

I'm very surprised that in Japan you can not reliably use Apple Pay (or contactless payments) other than public transport.

It has nothing to do with "reliability" and everything to do with "ApplePay is simply not accepted at most places in Japan."  

Japan has long had contactless payments in the form of Suica.  But keep in mind that Japan is still mostly a cash-based society and some places do not accept credit cards at all.  This is explain a little bit in this article:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/25/13401092/apple-pay-japan-suica-felica-nfc

Apple provides a way to transfer a Suica card to an iPhone via the Wallet app, after which the Suica card will no longer be usable:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207155

You can then use "Apple Pay" in places that accept Suica, but technically it's still Suica as opposed to what you folks in the US know and use as Apple Pay.  Meaning, although you can "reload" a Suica card, you are limited to a max of ¥20,000 (about US$200):

http://www.jreast.co.jp/e/pass/suica.html

The benefit you folks get in the US is that when you go to an Apple-Pay-Accepted location, you will charge to your credit card, which certainly won't have a $200 limit.  The other benefit is Apple Pay is tied to your credit card instead of Suica, so unlike Suica you don't have to prepay (locking up that ¥20,000 until you actually use the card).

You can use Apple Pay in Japan that is not tied to Suica, but as I said, the number of locations that accept that are very few and far between.

Incredible and shocking that the US apparently has so few tech-savvy people that we need to go to such extremes over a immigration ban from a mere 7 countries (most which are rather insignificant on a global scale). (It's also interesting to consider that there are about 50 Islamic majority countries in the world, so banning 7 cannot be deemed a ban on Islam.)

Soli said:
1) Why should you or I "feel bad" (or "feel good," for that matter) that Dell had a certain number of unit shipments in a quarter. Their unit shipment mean nothing to me as a Mac user. 

Laughable insofar as the entire article focuses on that data which includes Dell.  If the article had excluded all those companies which "mean nothing to you," then the article could not have been entitled "Mac sales stabilize in Q4 amid worldwide PC shipment decline."  In other words, those PC companies that OTHERWISE wouldn't matter to you and I matter very much to give this article life.  Those stupid Windows PC companies are the "frame of reference" on which the article stands.

With that in mind though, the article title is clearly NOT talking about Dell, as per the data.

If those new 2016 MBP's are as great as some people make them out to be, the data should have showed Apple besting Dell.  But that isn't what we see.  And for those people bragging about how many 2016 MBPs Apple sold, imagine how much more they would have sold had the machine been a proper BRIDGE machine -- bridging the USB-A & SD card needs of today with the USB-C requirements of tomorrow.  Just 1 USB-A port and retaining the SD card slot would have silenced most of the critics.  I myself had a 2016 MBP 15" fully loaded machine on order with ADORAMA for a month.  I had to cancel because even well into December they could not tell me when it would ship.  I considered that a Divine command to buy a fully loaded 2015 15" MBP (with dGPU) instead, and I am so glad I did.  The only thing I really miss is TouchID.  Other than that, the 2015 model has it all and is truly PRO.  

The main thing I see from that data is that Dell had more growth than anyone else. That fact should not make any one of us in the Apple camp feel good about ourselves. The fact also remains that Apple still disillusioned a lot of people with the 2016 MBP. That is nothing new, even though I personally love FCPX, Apple disillusioned their FCP user base some years back with the big change from the FCP7 UI, and now a huge number of video editors use Adobe Premier Pro instead. It doesn't matter to me if Tim Cook is different from Steve Jobs. It's time he stop being himself and start being more like Jobs, taking more interest in what his engineers are doing and start kicking fanny to wow and impress us all. What they are doing now is nifty, but it is not innovative and stunning.