schwabsauce

Looks like a reference to depth focus, like the Lytro. I suspect all phone sizes will get dual lenses.

It's kinda too bad, though, that they are dropping the dualism of "the Apple Store and the App Store".

Yeah it's a bit of a head-scratcher to me that Angela Ahredts wants people to say "meet me at Apple" and then hang out there and use wifi. The locations I've been to are typically pretty crowded, and they haven't stopped targeting the most precious real estate on much of the planet. I suppose they can gradually shift the customer education that goes along with the sales pitch into group lessons rather than 1-on-1 Q&A -- or maybe people will accelerate in figuring out that there is no actual competition for many of the products; they can check out in place, recycle the all-paper packaging, and then shuffle over to the 'fun' area while onboarding their watch, haha.

Perhaps this is to be viewed less as a problem for the phone's owner and more as a problem for the banks.

If the only way to prevent this attack is to try to reverse the charges after receiving a notification, that means these customers become more expensive for their banks to serve.

Not to mention that people will probably find a way to turn off or ignore these notifications once they become annoying (which they are) and then delaying their response to the fraud will make it even more expensive for the banks, as some of the funds will become a lot less recoverable.

We already have a huge issue in the US with banks not doing business in poor neighborhoods. This is why some politicians have considered whether post offices could offer financial services (which is clever but impractical). Hopefully the frequency of fraud won't explode overnight, but factors like this are not going to help banks move into those neighborhoods. Withholding legitimate financial services leaves these people to fend for themselves with check cashing establishments and interpersonal loans that incur a proportionally higher cost in both dollars and time and energy and emotional willpower.

I suspect that Samsung executives realized a lot of this and decided to pull the trigger anyway so they could attempt to utilize the legacy hardware to "pull ahead" of Apple Pay. That's the kind of cultural issue that will affect a business and its customers in the long run. Maybe not right away, but if you continually leech value out of the lives of your customers, through security nightmares, bugs that waste time and aggravate and confuse, and products that don't last (or receive updates), you're doing little more than slowly kill the planet. A lot of the responsibility for these phones remaining popular should be laid at the feet of journalists who strive to maintain a semblance of parity so that their own work will be a reference point for customers to make decisions with.

Pandora selects music based on several hundred attributes, annotated by hand, most of which are technical, some of which are emotional. It's excellent data that could improve Apple Music's (already great) algorithms and curations. The problem with Pandora was that the only vector to get on a path was to name a single song or a single band. They never put any nuance into their interface - but the underlying data is something they invested in by contracting with thousands of professional musicians to do data entry!