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Contactless iPhone Payments May Be Just Around The Corner

Andrew Orr ·

Contactless iPhone payments could be enabled in a future iOS update, Mark Gurman wrote on Wednesday. It means that small business could accept credit card payments directly with an iPhone, without needing a terminal such as Square. Jeff Butts has more information here.

In order to accept payments on an iPhone today, merchants need to use payment terminals that plug in or communicate with the phone via Bluetooth. The upcoming feature will instead turn the iPhone into a payment terminal, letting users such as food trucks and hair stylists accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone onto the back of their device.

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ID.me CEO Admits Company Uses '1:Many' Facial Recognition

Andrew Orr ·

ID.me CEO Blake Hall wrote in a LinkedIn post that his company uses 1:many facial recognition. Cyber Scoop explains how this contradicts a press release saying ID.me does not use this technology. 1:many means the technology can identify people within mass databases of photos. It’s the opposite of the 1:1 face match proposed in the IRS + ID.me verification.

“We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer wrote in a message posted to a company Slack channel on Tuesday. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

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Apple M1 Max vs Intel Alder Lake Core i9 - Who Wins?

Charlotte Henry ·

Benchmarks are out for Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9 chip. The raw numbers look like a win for PC users, even when compared with Apple’s M1 Max. However, as Macworld pointed out, there is a bit more to consider when making comparisons.

Geekbench 5’s OpenCL graphics benchmark results look dramatic. The PC laptops PCWorld tested have expensive discrete GPUs that offer peak performance, and it shows in the results. But a more applicable comparison is to examine the results for the integrated GPUs. In this case, the M1 Max and its 32-core GPU posts a 183 percent increase over the Alder Lake’s integrated GPU, an Iris Xe.

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Analysts Confident Apple Ahead of AAPL Earnings Call

Charlotte Henry ·

Some analysts believe that Apple has managed to deal with supply-chain issues caused by the Covid pandemic better than its rivals at the end of last year. It could also surpass Wall Street growth targets of six percent when it announces its latest earnings on Thursday. Reuter has a nice round-up of analyst opinion.

We expect Apple to reach its highest market share in China since Apple entered the market in 2008,” said analyst Nicole Peng of Canalys. Investment firm Wedbush Securities forecasts record iPhone sales of more than 40 million units during the holiday period from Black Friday to Christmas. Morgan Stanley estimates total holiday quarter iPhone shipments at 83 million, representing a 4% increase from the previous year. Wall Street analysts expect Apple to post about $118.7 billion in revenue, representing 6.48% year-over-year growth, and quarterly earnings per share of $1.89, according to Eikon data as of Tuesday.