I know that when it comes to tech news, there can be somewhat of a bubble, with writers and readers thinking that certain things are more well-known to the general public than they are. But really, if you’ve walked into Best Buy’s laptop section at some point in the past decade, you probably would’ve seen some of the things the people in the ad are shell-shocked by: two-in-one laptops that fold to become a tablet have been popular since the early 2010s, Intel’s been pushing laptops with two screens since 2018, and PC gaming was a thing before the original IBM Personal Computer that popularized the term “PC.”
Exactly.
The ad has the potential to make a point about expandability and repairability. Fair issues to raise, if you indeed have a better solution. But it insults (badly) the very people it hopes to sway.
When Apple Pay launched, the tech giant got big banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Capital One Financial Corp. and Bank of America Corp. to agree to pay fees that would allow their cardholders to pay by iPhone. But some banks have grown unhappy with the costs, especially after Apple Inc. introduced its own new credit card in 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.
A proposed change:
Currently, banks pay Apple a fee when their cardholders use Apple Pay. Under the planned new process, the fees wouldn’t apply on automatic recurring payments such as gym memberships and streaming services.
Sounds like this change is not yet set in concrete.
The article also digs into the specifics on fees:
Banks agreed to pay Apple 0.15% of each purchase made by their credit cardholders. (They pay a separate fee on debit-card transactions.) Those fees account for most of the revenue that Apple makes from its digital wallet, according to people familiar with the matter.
Interestingly, the fees are specific to Apple:
The terms had the potential to be uniquely lucrative for Apple. Banks don’t pay fees to Google for its wallet.
Feels like a significant amount of tension in the bank / Apple Pay model.
My memories of that brutal, heartbreaking day 10 years ago are scattered and random. I cannot remember driving down to his house. I do remember a hazy October sky and shoes that were too tight. I remember afterwards Tim and I sat quietly in the garden together for a long time.
And:
Steve’s last words to me were that he would miss talking together. I was sitting on the floor next to his bed, my back against the wall.
After he died, I walked out into the garden. I remember the sound of the latch on the wooden door as I gently pulled it closed.
It’s a beautifully written piece, worth reading in full.
A few more bits, embedded below. First, there’s the Think Different commercial with Steve narrating (as opposed to the Richard Dreyfus narration we’re more familiar with).
And, below that, there’s the dedication, back in 2014, of the new Steve Jobs Theater.
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP, Engineering and Infrastructure, in a blog post responding to yesterday’s worldwide outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp:
To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Ironically, Facebook had to turn to Twitter to communicate with the world as its normal communications mechanisms were all down.
The blog post is straightforward, but short on details. If you are interested in the actual cause of the outage, follow the link to this detailed blow-by-blow account of the outage as seen from the outside.
Great reporting by Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx. Someone should option the movie rights to this.
It takes a lot of energy to light up and refresh that display, so the fewer times it has to redraw what you’re looking at, the better. Other devices with high refresh rates might adjust based on what is showing on the display. For example, if you’re watching a film shot at 24 frames per second, the display might refresh at 24 or 48Hz. If you’re playing a game, it might refresh at 120Hz.
And:
On the iPhone, that’s still true, but Apple took it further by quietly included a remarkable way of deciding what refresh rate to use. Your iPhone 13 Pro or 13 Pro Max literally measures the speed of your finger on the screen, and then adjusts the refresh rate of the display.
And:
Reading a tweet, the iPhone 13 Pro drops down to 10Hz. If you start to scroll slowly, it might choose a faster refresh rate, say 60Hz. If you scroll quickly, it can ramp up to 90 or 120Hz. Apple doesn’t say exactly how many different refresh rates the display uses, only that it designed the system to match the refresh rate to the speed of your finger.
Great read.
In my opinion, ProMotion is an under appreciated feature. It works everywhere on the 13 Pro models, scrolling is smooth as glass, and there are no artifacts that hint at refresh rate changes. Beautifully implemented.
