Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2016/08/thursday-morning-news250816/
Coles, the Australian Payments Clearing Association, and the Australian Retailers Association have all expressed support for CBA, NAB, and Westpac to collectively negotiate with Apple before agreeing to accept Apple Pay. Coles says it’s against the “technical lockout” that many consumers didn’t realise would be the case when they purchased their device, while the APCA has said that allowing the banks to negotiate will encourage greater innovation and enhance competition, as reported by ZDNet.
Yesterday marked Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fifth anniversary at the helm, which unlocked $100 million in stock bonuses to the Apple CEO recommended by Steve Jobs to Apple’s board of directors in 2011. As detailed by MacRumors, there are additional bonuses available to Cook, depending on how Apple performs relative to the S&P 500 index.
Graphs of Tim Cook’s Apple over the past five years show that by any measure, the company is a lot larger than it was five years ago. While recent quarters haven’t kept up to speed with previous ones, both revenue and margins are up relative to where they were five years ago. R&D spending is up, Apple has even more cash than it has ever had before, and while the iPhone has seen an increase in unit shipments, that’s about the only product that has.
The New York Times has a story on how Apple has become a green energy supplier with itself as a customer. If you’ve been to an Apple store lately, you’ll have seen the words on glass that say the store runs on 100% renewable energy, but there’s a lot more to Apple’s environment initiatives than that.
It was probably about time the macOS Sierra beta revealed its secrets, and now, it has. Code discovered reveals the possibility of faster USB connections, with support for USB 3.1 gen 2 in upcoming Macs, possibly as part of support for Thunderbolt 3, which also includes support for 10Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2.
For all the possibly-real leaks we see out of China, it’s almost refreshing to see something that’s very likely fake. AppleInsider points out the inconsistencies on “iPhone 6 SE” packaging, which is mostly about attention to detail and knowing that Apple would put a space between iPhone and 6.
Apple Music has come under fire from labels and one music critic, after the Universal Music Group CEO wrote a letter that ends all future exclusives with Universal artists. Lucian Grainge says exclusives will end up ultimately hurting the industry, specifically calling out Apple Music and saying Apple should be investigated by the government for anti-trust.
John Gruber’s Vesper post-mortem examines what happened to the iPhone notes app, which was originally released in June 2013. He says that the right order to do things would have been to build a Mac app first, then a syncing service, then the iPhone and iPad versions later, instead of the iPhone-only version to start off with. Being good isn’t good enough — you have to be lucky, too.
The Nike+ Running app has rebranded into Nike+ Run Club. There’s a complete visual overhaul as well as a focus on tracking watchOS runs.
As of writing, there’s about six hours left to purchase MacUpdate’s Summer Bundle. There’s probably about three apps (Waltr, DaisyDisk, iStat Menus) I’d really recommend from the package, but if you already own one or two you may be better off purchasing the others directly from the developers.
