Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Yes, but Android shipped devices outstrip Apple 5-to-1 in Europe alone, 9-to-1 in Asia, and only 2-1 in the USA.

My point was never an Apple vs Android argument and, in fact, my first point covered Google increasing the proliferation of the technology by upping their game with Google Wallet in response.

My point was that Paypal were going to be squeezed into radically shifting their business model or face destruction at the hands of both.

Typical of an Android user to mistake that for anti Android though ;)

aww bae I am not your next door evangelist but I know a thing or two due to day job .. plus its a discussion innit

Typical of an Android user to mistake that for anti Android though ;)

Actually I hate the pro-Android arguments too. But I use Android because it's the only one that allows me not to buy-in to the entire ecosystem of Apple vs Google vs Microsoft. One can use Android and turn off the vast majority (if not all) of the Google stuff without lessening the experience... and in many ways making the experience better and more personal.

PayPal I don't think will be locked-out, in the same way that Stripe aren't being locked out: https://stripe.com/apple-pay

Payments providers can build on top of Apple Pay... they are not disintermediated by it.

That's an essential thing to understand... the addition of new hardware and software to enable these payments has not removed a single intermediary.

This is why I referred to it as an additional slice being taken out of a transaction, and why consumers ultimately pay more for this. It isn't changing who takes the slice, it's adding another small slice to enable something that has been available in Japan to now exist in the rest of world.

In your analogy I'd suggest that Apple are maybe more akin to American Express

I wonder if google would sacrifice the couple of points they may take on payments but rather track what the payments are for and add to their advertising profiles. It would be a whole new rich seam of data and the lack of commission would encourage the take-up.

It strikes me as one of those things that people would be upset about in principle but would then sacrifice for convenience (like Gmail scanning emails).

I wonder if google would sacrifice the couple of points they may take on payments but rather track what the payments are for and add to their advertising profiles. It would be a whole new rich seam of data and the lack of commission would encourage the take-up.

There are a lot of laws that prevent this in almost every country. Payment providers can barely offer you your own data categorised and sorted. Pretty much the only people they can share data with are law enforcement and other government agencies.

We're safe from that for a while yet. It is the dream of most payment providers though... so who knows, maybe in the future a loophole may be found that allows them to do it.

There are a lot of laws that prevent this in almost every country.

I LOL'd.

That's some great info right there TRA (from p.261), thanks.

Retailers desperately do want mobile payments to work, and the catch is that they will only accept 1 or 2 systems. There is only the surface area near tills, only the connectivity, and only the budget for 1 or 2 systems.

For a long time we're going to have places accept just Apple devices... and those retailers are going to have valued customers feel negatively towards the retailer for treating them as 2nd class customers. And this will work in reverse too... Android solutions will emerge very fast, and probably based on the NFC tech that is already proven and that has already rolled out over the past couple of years.

I could be wrong here, but isn't apple pay meant to work with standard contactless readers, as in the ones that are already popping up around the UK to work with the new generation of contactless cards that banks are now issuing? If so thats something that android can already interact with, but it seems to have been held back somewhat in the uk by carriers and banks wanting to control this by making users go through their own apps such as http://explore.ee.co.uk/cashontap. This was meant to get better with host card emulation that was included with kitkat but there seems to have been little said about it in the uk since it introduction. So I could be completely wrong, but in theory android should be able to interact with the same readers that apple pay can do, but the lack of apps to do this through is the main thing holding it back. So in theory apple's influence should hopefully lead to more contactless readers being installed around the uk which is a good thing for pretty much everyone with an nfc enabled phone as soon as the right apps arrive on other platforms

I could be wrong here, but isn't apple pay meant to work with standard contactless readers, as in the ones that are already popping up around the UK to work with the new generation of contactless cards that banks are now issuing?

No.

https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/Getting-Started-with-Apple-Pay.pdf

Apple Pay uses a different system based on using tokens as an abstract but trusted representation of the payment method... rather than the payment method itself.

It's a difficult thing to explain, but it's actually more secure as the tokens can be verified and are usually single-use only (the requestee/retailer has to declare the type of token they want).

Anyhow... different system, it's may be compatible with the readers deployed today... but it isn't compatible with the software infrastructure deployed against those readers today.

Right, so they'd require vendors to have to have apple specific software that would break existing compatible payment methods then?

Something like that. But it's actually that the payment providers who directly manage these bits of hardware need to implement token based auth according to Apple's spec.

Most small vendors are likely to use something similar to Square and choose a small third party device and process the payment separately from the EPOS in the near future.

The larger vendors will takes a while to implement as the depth of impact of these changes is fairly immense if you have, say, a roll-out to thousands of supermarkets to manage.

That document only covers Apply Pay in apps, for physical and "in-app" purchases. It doesn't cover payment in physical locations.

They were clear during the keynote that the payment uses standard NFC equipment and that the transaction actually happens between the banks and Apple.

Aha, I've only been reading the documentation they've published.

In which case it still takes time to roll-out as most of the equipment in retailers is leased from, and belongs to, the merchant/payment provider. Meaning that if Apple are pushing those guys out, then Apple still needs to provide their own hardware and integration with EPOS as the equipment isn't usually owned by the shops (until you get to the big boys, but then they need to rewrite their EPOS to know about Apple).

One interesting thing about paypal, it's heavily used in the US to pay friends. Banks make it fuck off hard to transfer money between places, so paypal/venmo are used instead.

Given how long it's taken america to get away from cash (umm still haven't, even here in SF most bars are cash only), I don't think we're in for a revolution any time soon

Maybe that's why Apple want to tap it up...

Tap, geddit? I did a pun.

Must've spend a while brewing that up.

I'm having a bit of trouble with my computer's Wifi (Macbook pro, OS X 10.9.4) and I'm wondering if anyone has ever experienced similar. I'm currently not having much success googling the problem.

If you look at the following screenshot, you’ll see that my Wifi is turned ON according to the status bar (although it displays no available networks despite being sat next to a functioning router), while it is turned OFF according to the system preferences window. In both cases the “Turn Wifi on/off” buttons have become entirely inert, and so no amount of clicking can either enable or disable the Wifi.

This has been happening since yesterday morning (at two different homes and at work) and can sometimes be solved by restarting the computer although on several occasions it has required more than one restart. However, it then inevitably breaks again and I'm not yet sure what causes it to go wrong.

@ewanmac
That's a weird one. Do you have location on automatic?

I'm presuming this problem has occurred post a system update?

Might be worth forgetting all previous networks and re-setting them? Also toggle the "show wifi status in menu bar" a few times.

if none of that works go to system info/hardware and check that the wi-fi has no hardware issues.

@ewanmac
also:
http://www.imore.com/how-fix-mavericks-wi-fi-zapping-bluetooth

Potentially?

OK, who THE FUCK let U2 onto my iPhone!?

haha, reason enough to ditch iOS and go android

definately

^^^ Has already made the most read list on BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29157217

Thanks for the help @TRA. Mercifully (and mysteriously) it hasn't gone wrong since this morning. I had read about the sleep issue and have tried putting my laptop to sleep and waking it a few times but that doesn't seem to cause any problems now.

I'm still a bit puzzled because I didn't do any updates or anything yesterday. I did install a new programme (called QGIS, which also required me to install some other addons including something from Java) so maybe that was the problem...