puggsly

lkrupp said:

To be honest cities spend a lot of money for fire and police protection, utilities, roads and infrastructure that support these large companies and their employees so suggesting they pay more isn’t necessarily a “shakedown”. And it looks like Cupertino and Apple have a working relationship strong enough to produce a win-win solution.

You have got to be kidding me! Apple got approval from the city. It did the traffic impact studies and made an agreement that was solid enough that they decided to spend 5 Billion dollars to build a new office. This represents about 50 million dollars a year in new property taxes for the City to help pay for fire police etc.. Not to mention the 24,000 people who are buying homes, paying taxes and doing business in the city which creates more jobs, more tax revenue etc....

They moved into that building less than 2 years ago, so although I agree that things can change it seems like a money grab to change the rules this quickly after such a HUGE investment in the city was completed.

What do people keep down playing the cash back percentage. 2% is as much as the industry gives back on every purchase. Sure it is only on places that Accept ApplePay but that is most places (walmart, lowes and home depot being a few big exceptions). But for a no fee card 2% on every purchase is as good as it gets in this industry, even if others offer the same, you don't have to one up everyone to have a great offer. I will say that if it offers nothing to extend warranties, as others do, that sounds like a missing piece. I just didn't know we knew one way or the other on that piece.

gatorguy said:

AppleInsider said:

Apple also keeps all of your data private, and the issuing bank Goldman Sachs is disallowed from ever sharing or selling that data as well.

I don't think that's true. There was very specific wording used by Apple, "for ads and marketing". I think it's almost assured that information will be shared with at least the credit bureaus if not others that "need to know", and no the initial reason can not be for ads according to the disclaimer. That does not mean it cannot find it's way into marketing at another juncture down the line, but that does not mean it will either. Entirely possible it may not find its way into marketing, but Apple does not say it won't be shared at all. 

TBH I'm actually not afraid of ads, it's the other stuff that done with private data that concerns me. 

Of course they have to report to credit bureau's, but that is balance and payment data not purchase data.

Anachr0n said:

Apples free solutions are view only. I don’t need unattended access, just co-navigating. 

Try talking your aging parents through a change in system settings when you can see their screen but not control their mouse.  “click the blue OK button... No No No, not he Cancel button!” *facepalm*

This is simply wrong! Back to my mac gives you full control of the other mac but it was designed to control only your own mac's and you had to understand how things worked to use it to support family. In those cases you needed to create a login for you that you connected to your iCloud account through. Then those systems will also show up on your system.

lkrupp said:

Security? More likely redundancy like the article surmises. I never used it personally but that’s just me.

There is nothing redundant about back to my mac. It is totally unique and is not at all file sharing or screen sharing. Back to my mac is a service that allows two mac's that are both registered with the same AppleID to be able to find each other over the internet and create a secure VPN tunnel between them. Once that tunnel is established, you can use file sharing or screen sharing. Back to my mac is a zero configuration VPN Tunneling service that works like magic. Let apple know it is not ok to kill this off. https://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html