gregg thurman

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gregg thurman
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  • Leap Motion passed on multiple $50M acquisition efforts by Apple because of founders' atti...

    gregg thurmangregg thurman
    Jobs took the same attitude when approached by IBM, Sun-Micro and some others back in the dark days.

    Rejecting a suitor isn't always a bad thing, even if the suitor is Apple.
    viclauyycbeowulfschmidtgatorguyleavingthebigg

  • Here are all the Apple Pay banks added during 2018 and 2019

    gregg thurmangregg thurman
    lkrupp said:
    Cynflor said:
    Great to have all these smaller U.S. banks coming on board, but I'd like to hear about efforts to sign on bigger retailers like CVS, Home Depot, etc. 
    You forgot Walmart. They are still trying to force their payment system on people. CVS and Home Depot were big supporters of the never-launched CurrentC as I recall. In my opinion there are two reasons some retailers don’t like NFC systems like Pay. First, they have little to no access to customer data from credit cards becasue of the advanced security. Second, they don’t want to pay yet another processing fee to a middleman like Apple. A personal friend of mine ran a local pharmacy. He had the credit card terminal that supported NFC but he never activated it. I asked him once why and he said the fees involved were prohibitive for him. First, the terminal supplier wanted extra monthly fees for activating the NFC feature. Second, the transaction fees were in addition to standard credit card fees. He felt he just couldn’t justify the additional expenses for a relatively few customers who wanted to use NFC.

    When it comes to any payment system the retailer is hounded with fees from everywhere in the transaction chain. The bank gets its cut, Apple gets its cut, MasterCard or Visa gets their cut, etc. Where I live we have a number of independent restaurants and ice cream shops that accept only cash and have a third party ATM machine near the door so the customer gets to pay the fees and the owner gets a cut from the ATM supplier.
    Your "friend" is not being honest with you.  Apple gets its "cut" from the issuing bank, not the retailer.  The only fees retailer's pay for installing NFC capability is a one time charge for an interface to their banking account.  It's part of a setup fee.

    Until the current generation of tech-phobic retail operators retire there will be all kinds of fallacious reasons given for not supporting mobile pay of any flavor. 
    chia

  • New patent lawsuit targets Apple over voice control tech in Siri- & HomeKit-enabled device...

    gregg thurmangregg thurman
    dewme said:
    Patent portfolios are also good for defusing large, costly, and drawn out disagreements between competitors/adversaries, or even once-friends that have become competitors/adversaries.
    A great example of "once-friends" is from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) dealings with Intel.  DEC was shopping for a second source to manufacture its Alpha processor.

    At the time Intel's X86 architecture had hit a clock speed wall.  Pushing it any further made it unbearably hot.  After examining the Alpha's design (at DEC's request) Intel incorporated significant elements of that design into its next-generation processors called Pentium.  DEC sued and Intel agreed to buy DEC's fab and the Alpha design.

    Funny thing about the Alpha chip.  Motorola was running into a clock speed wall itself with the 68000 family of processors.  Jobs approached DEC about using the Alpha in future Macs.  DEC's founder and CEO (Bob Olson) refused to consider Apple's overture as he believed the Mac was doomed.  Shortly after the settlement with Intel Olson was forced to step down and the Company was sold to Compaq Computers.
    watto_cobraAlex1N

  • Apple self-driving car fleet grows to 66 vehicles in California

    gregg thurmangregg thurman
    " It is unclear what the current goal for Apple's work is, "

    What if Apple sees driverless cars as nothing more than street mapping tools.  Instead of Google's Street View vehicles, that probably were on the road for about 8 hours a day, Apple's cars could be roaming streets 24 hours a day/7 days per week.  What if these vehicles weren't just learning to map by GPS coordinates, but also visual landmarks, entry points, etc.

    Expensive solution?  Yes, but the development of the artificial intelligence/machine learning engine to do that would have applications all over the place.
    longpathclaire1rhinotuffstompycornchip

  • Apple's new macOS Mojave optimizes the Mac for iOS users, not PC switchers

    gregg thurmangregg thurman
    ElCapitan said:

    International pricing is also an issue when a moderately configured 2016 MBP 15" set you back over $3700, that is also not very good. 

    International pricing is not just a currency exchange rate thing.  Most countries (if not all) outside the US employ a national sales tax (in varying degrees) known as VAT (Value Added Tax).  It is the lack of a national sales tax in the US that makes buying a Toyota/Mercedes in the US cheaper than it does in Japan/Germany.

    Unlike the US where the price of an item is advertised WITHOUT sales tax, outside of the US the advertised price INCLUDES the national sales tax.  If you were to deduct the national sales tax and convert local currency to US$, you will find pricing to be quite close to each other.
    StrangeDayswatto_cobra