felix01

I use Apple Pay with my Apple Watch anyplace it's accepted. Incredibly handy and fast and secure. If the Apple Pay adoption rate is lower than expected, I blame it on two primary reasons: failure to put Apple Pay logos on the payment terminals and cashier education on the Apple Pay process.

Due to the lack of Apple Pay logos on many business payment terminals, people don't try to use Apple Pay. Consequently, I've gotten into the habit of asking before pulling out my wallet. But even that's not foolproof, earlier this summer I stopped at a local soft freeze ice cream store, saw no Apple Pay logo, asked and was told they don't accept it. So I happened to mention it to my wife and she said "Sure they do, I use it." And she was correct, the next time I had a different cashier and got a different answer and used my Apple Watch to pay. So it's also an employee education problem. Apparently there's no monetary incentive (percentage kickback or something) for businesses to install the equipment to accept Apple Pay. If there was and the usage fee was cheaper than credit cards, you can bet merchants would embrace Apple Pay and make it obvious it's accepted. Plus, they'd ensure Apple Pay was on the training syllabus for new employees as well as continuing education for existing employees. 

Gotta spend money to make money. If Apple wants to see that acceptance percentage increase significantly, take a page out of the Square business model with respect to terminals and readers. 

slurpy said:

People still give a shit about consumer reports? Really? Not a single human being I know consults them for anything. Not even "recommended"? Fucking laughable. They're an insanely well designed product and work incredibly well. 

I see a few hundred people wearing Airpods a day. Insanely popular. Galaxy Buds? Pretty much zero. 

I used to think CR was a good place to start if looking for a washing machine or a toaster or something similar (certainly not electronics) but they've been a party to recommending so many stinkers in the past decade, I wouldn't subscribe if it were free. 

mdriftmeyer said:

red oak said:

The actual cost to sign up new users is actually close to $0.   The on boarding is right there in the Wallet.  All it takes is notifying the user it is there

This $350 estimate tells me this analyst does not know WTF he is talking about

It tells me Goldman Sachs is fabricating a cost investment for this new business venture so they can write down and lower their total taxable assets.

Obviously Sachs has substantial sunk costs plus a hefty kick-back to Apple but the big cost in any such venture ... advertising ... is minimal. So I tend to agree with both of you, this is an accounting maneuver.

It would be silly to make any irrevocable manufacturing decisions if Cook can be taken at his word that the US industrial base just isn't available to do the job in the numbers required and the assembly job still can't be done without very skilled human intervention despite the use of extremely sophisticated robotics.

Trump is destined to be a short termer and you can bet the next president and Congress will move quickly to end this trade war with China. While I applaud the goals, the pain outweighs the gain. 

As two or three posts have already alluded to, there's a big difference in the Catalina file structure (bifurcated) and generating a bootable backup of Catalina is going to require a lot of work by the developers of SuperDuper! and CCC before they have a shippable (non-beta) version.

And as of now, the back-up drive will have to be connected directly to your computer as opposed to being on a network.   

For anyone planning on jumping on the Day One upgrade wagon, suggest reading the developer blogs on the Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! websites. You'll glean a lot of 'under the hood info' about Catalina and might just decide to delay things a bit.

This article talks about having a good backup prior to the Catalina upgrade but they haven't addressed how you back up Catalina (including the Time Machine limitations with Catalina) the day after you've upgraded.