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The Auto-Fill-Card Edition Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Apple Rolls Out Apple Card Preview To Select Users, by Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch

Apple Card is getting its first group of public test users today. A limited amount of customers that signed up to be notified about the release of Apple Card are getting the ability to apply for the card in their Wallet app today — as well as the option to order their physical Apple Card.

I’ve been using the card for a few days on my own device, making purchases and payments and playing around with features like Apple Cash rewards and transaction categorization.

We Got A First Look At Apple's New Credit Card, by Anabel Pasarow, Refinery29

I've been using my very own Apple Card since last week, and while I don't yet have my physical card, I'm super impressed with the digital card (which is more beneficial to use than the physical card, anyway — more on this later). Ever since making it my default Apple Pay and Safari auto-fill card, I've been using it exclusively (well, except for places that don't take Apple Pay), without having to whip out my wallet. And I'm here to tell you: it's good.

Want To Know The Real Future Of AR/VR? Ask Their Devs, by Peter Rubin, Wired

While the pool of respondents is larger this year than ever before, the status quo remains unchanged in some ways. Games are still the primary driver of the industry, with 59 percent of developers' current or potential VR and AR projects falling in the gaming space. However, the survey saw pronounced growth in a number of other fields, particularly education (33 percent) and training (27 percent). That growth dovetails with another interesting shift: when developers expect to turn a profit. In past years, Wawro says, most have expected their VR/AR work to be profitable in the medium term, but this year saw a two-fold jump in people who said their projects aren't tied to profitability at all.

Apple Will Provide Special iPhones For Hackers To Test And Offer Mac Bug Bounty, Sources Say, by Thomas Brewster, Forbes

Is Apple opening up?

From a cybersecurity perspective, it appears so. Later this week, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Apple is to announce plans to give security researchers special iPhones that will make it easier for them to find weaknesses in the smartphone, Forbes has learned. It'll also be announcing an Apple Mac bounty, so anyone who can find security issues in macOS will get rewarded, sources claimed. Apple declined to comment.

Stuff

Did You Know Apple Has A Special Playlist For All Of The Music In Its Ads?, by Danny Zepeda, iMore

It seems it puts every major song from the songs in the ads. The latest round of ads focus on Face ID and require some affirmation, so Apple went with Latroit's "Nice," which is first on the playlist.

Notes

Japan's FTC Investigating Apple Over Pressure On Parts Makers: Mainichi, by Chris Gallagher, Reuters

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is investigating Apple Inc over its pressure on Japanese parts makers and whether it abused its power in violation of antimonopoly rules, the Mainichi newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The investigation is the latest by the country’s regulators against the tech giant after they found last year that the company may have breached antitrust rules on the way it sold its iPhones in Japan.

Was E-mail A Mistake?, by Cal Newport, New Yorker

We can acknowledge, with the benefit of hindsight, the reasonableness of the hypothesis that asynchrony in the office would increase productivity. We can also admit that this hypothesis has been largely refuted by experience. To use the terminology of computer science, it turned out that the distributed systems that resulted when we shifted toward asynchronous communication were soon overwhelmed by the increasing complexity induced by asynchrony. We must, therefore, develop better systems—ones that will almost certainly involve less ad-hoc messaging and more real-time coördination.

From this perspective, our moment in workplace history looks rather different. The era that will mystify our grandkids is ours—a period when, caught up in the promise of asynchronicity, we frantically checked our in-boxes every few minutes, exhausted by the deluge of complex and ambiguous messages, while applauding ourselves for eliminating the need to speak face to face.

Bottom of the Page

There is an Apple Pay Cash card sitting in my iPhone wallet, nice and shiny, but when I tap on the Set Up Now button, the phone tells me that Apple Pay services are currently unavailable.

What a tease, Apple.

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Also: still no Visual Voicemail in this part of the world.

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Thanks for reading.