Apple Pay: The Easy Way to Pay Securely

Did you know that the Credit Card with its magnetic strip was invented 50 years ago? To me, it is amazing that it has been around that long because nobody has come up with a better, more secure payment system. With news in the past several months about Home Depot and Target getting their systems hacked into and their customer’s credit card numbers being stolen, sure makes me feel uneasy about using my card anywhere anymore.

In September 2014, Apple made an announcement of a new payment system called Apple Pay. The way Apple Pay works is when you make a transaction at a store, you pay using a temporary credit card number that is linked to your credit card account. The temporary number is only valid for that single transaction. After that, that number becomes invalid. Compare that to swiping or handing your credit card over to the merchant where they now possess your actual credit card number where by they can just about do anything with it. It costs Financial Institutions billions in credit card fraud and Identity Theft for the consumer as well.

Apple Pay has a two stage secure system. First, it does not store your credit card number. Second, it requires your fingerprint in order to access Apple Pay. Using an iPhone 6, you would hold it over the credit card terminal and the iPhone 6 lights up and then you place your finger or thumb on the iPhone’s Home button and then once Touch I.D. scans and identifies your fingerprint, the transaction is instantly and securely paid for. The cashier then hands you a receipt. It is that simple.

Unfortunately, there is another payment system that is coming out this year called CurrentC. Retailers that have a contract with CurrentC are not allowed to accept other payment systems like Apple Pay. The biggest problem with CurrentC is it does not accept payments from major credit cards like Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. Instead, you have to sign up with CurrentC with your Checking Account information so that CurrentC can have access to your bank accounts without assuming any liability for your account information if it gets stolen. It gets better. CurrentC also wants your Social Security number and your HMO healthcare information to boot. Why is this? So CurrentC and the merchant can track you even beyond what you purchase. Apple Pay does not track you. The transaction payment is between you, the merchant, and your financial institution. That’s it.

I for one am planning to Boycott retailers and fast food restaurants that are connected to the CurrentC payment system. Here is a short list of businesses that are working with CurrentC and are not accepting Apple Pay; Walmart, Best Buy, Sears, Home Depot, Kmart, CVS, and Rite Aid, to name just a few. If you care about your privacy and security, I urge you to do the same and stop doing business with these companies. It also wouldn’t hurt to write directly to these companies and tell them that you won’t do anymore business with them until they start accepting Apple Pay. By October 2015, the Law on credit card liability is changing. All retailers that use credit card terminals will need to upgrade those terminals to accept contactless payments like Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and CurrentC. If retailers don’t upgrade their payment terminals, then that retailer will be liable for any fraudulent transactions.

I have created a new Apple Pay page on the MacMobile site. Please check it out.

The Super-Thin iMacs

When Apple introduced the new Super-Thin iMacs at the October 2012 Event, I couldn't believe my eyes. Apple, with their flagship desktop computers have officially put design before function. I just read an article that describes in detail how far Apple has put design before function. The company iFixit took apart the 21.5-inch iMac. It's gotten to a point where the new iMacs are serviceable only by Apple now. The 21.5-inch iMac has no User-Serviceable Parts. Apple claims that in the 27-inch iMac that the user can replace the RAM.
This new line of iMacs is the first to not have a built-in DVD Superdrive. If you're into video editing and want to put your project on a DVD, (which was one of the big features Apple use to tout about for the iMac) you will need to buy the external Apple Superdrive. When you need to connect external drives to your computer because of how the computer's design changed, it makes that computer that much less elegant and a lot less as easy to use.

If you are thrilled with the new design of the iMac and are dead-set on purchasing one, I strongly recommend purchasing the AppleCare extended coverage which will extend the standard one year warranty to three years total. I personally can't recommend these iMacs because of how far over-the-line Apple has taken the Design over Function philosophy.

Running Mountain Lion on your Mac (Update)

With OS 10.8 Mountain Lion coming out soon, I thought it would be good to talk about upgrading to Mountain Lion. Apple has issued a very specific list of models that Mountain Lion can be installed on. After doing some research as to Apple's list of Macs, I discovered it wasn't necessarily the Mac itself but it's video card that is the issue. Mountain Lion is relying more heavily on the Graphics Processing Unit or GPU than in past versions of the Mac Operating System. One interesting question I've come across a few times is, "If you have an older Mac Pro tower and you were to upgrade the video card, would that older Mac Pro become compatible with Mountain Lion?" The answer is unfortunately no. The first Mac Pros have 32-bit Firmware and in order to run Mountain Lion, the software would have to include a 32-bit OS X Kernel to be compatible with the early Mac Pro's 32-bit Firmware. Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion is a fully 64-bit operating system and is only compatible with Mac Pros with 64-bit EFI Firmware.

Below is Apple's exclusive list of compatible Macintosh models that can be upgraded to Mountain Lion: 

Your Mac must be one of the following models:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

Also, you can contact John here at MacMobile and he can find out if any of your Applications are not compatible with Mountain Lion before upgrading. If you have further questions or you would like MacMobile to do the upgrade for you, please Contact John. Thank You.

8 VERY USEFUL FEATURES IN MOUNTAIN LION OS 10.8

It has been rumored that OS 10.8 Mountain Lion with be released July 25th. I have looked over this new Operating System from Apple and I think there are a lot of improvements over the previous 10.7 Lion release from last year. I will point out here what features I thought were very useful in this new release of OS X. Here is Apple's official list of 200+ New Features if you are curious.

AUTO SAVE
Auto Save was introduced in OS 10.7 Lion where when after you initially Name & Save your document, the software would automatically continually save the changes in the document as you were working on it, there by having separate versions of that document. When you are finished, all you would need to do is close the document. You won't get the usual "Save Changes?" sheet that would come down from the top of the window anymore because your "changes" have already been saved. What OS 10.8 Mountain Lion has added is a new File Directory connected to Apple's iCloud service. This feature is extremely convenient if you have other computer and/or Apple Devices like the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. You would have access to your documents on any of your devices. iCloud will offer a Document Library for your documents.

BUILT-IN SOCIAL SHARING
Built-in Sharing will allow you to easily share any information with Twitter and Facebook throughout the Operating System and supported Applications. For Example, you wouldn't need to copy some text that you want to share and switch over to your web browser and log-in to your social network in order to share. In OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, there will be a new button that you can click on to share any text that is highlighted.

DICTATION
Dictation is now built-in to OS X. There is no voice pre-training. It works from the get-go. You can use it anywhere you type. The more you use it, the better it becomes. There is one thing though, in order to use it, you need to have an Internet connection for it to work.

MAIL
Mail in OS 10.8 Mountain Lion will have a new VIP mailbox which will look out for messages from a person you designate. Also, your Mail Preferences with be pushed to iCloud so that your email settings will be the same on your other Apple devices.

NOTES
Notes is a new application included with OS 10.8 Mountain Lion. Notes' entries will be Pushed to all your Apple devices via iCloud. Be able to drag Photos & Attachments into Notes. Format your Notes with different fonts, rich text, bulleted items and numbered lists. You will also be able to Pin Notes to your Desktop.

NOTIFICATION CENTER
A new feature of OS 10.8 Mountain Lion will have a hidden place on the right-hand side of the screen that will group current information from applications such as Calendar and Mail to name just a couple. To access Notification Center, there will be an Icon in the upper right corner of the screen that once clicked on, a sheet will slide out from the right side of the screen listing alerts and current events going on with your other Applications. Notification Center is also the place where you can send a Tweet or Facebook entry right from the Desktop.

PREVIEW
Preview which comes with every version of OS X and is equivalent to Adobe Reader, adds access to Documents in the Cloud, the ability to Fill out PDF forms and Insert a page from your Scanner.

REMINDERS
Reminders is a new application that's included with OS 10.8 to help you stay organized with To-Do Lists and Location-based reminders. Be able to add a location to a reminder and then receive a notification via iCloud on any of your other Apple devices when you Depart or Arrive at that location using GPS. Reminders also works with Google and Yahoo calendars.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Back in the early 80s I started using PCs and learned how to program them using DOS (Disk Operating System). I had to type everything, line by line. I typed thousands of lines of code. There was nothing onscreen to point and click on. There was no Mouse or TrackPad. I remember one day in 1984, I was in downtown Santa Rosa California. I walked in Santa Rosa Computer Center to look around to see if they had anything new. I walked up to this small beige box. It had a 9-inch black and white screen with a graphic drawing of a Japanese girl. It had a small keyboard and this other little box with one button and a cable attached to it, I had no idea what it was. The graphic was amazing looking, the detail that it had, I've never seen anything like it on a computer screen before. In those days computers could only display text and the displays came in two colors; Green and Amber. Even though the graphic drawing was in Black and White, I was impressed with how detailed it was. After seeing that first Macintosh computer, I tried to learn everything about it and the company who made it, Apple Computer Inc. I read the history of how the Macintosh became to be. Steve Jobs co-founder of Apple, wanted to create a computer that was as easy to use as a kitchen appliance. He wanted to take the computer code off the screen and have everything in plain english. He wanted to take it a step further and have a pointing device and graphic objects called Icons that you could click on in order to reduce the need for typing. The graphics on the screen were laid out to represent the top of a desk with Icons that looked like sheets of paper and folders. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen was an Icon of a Trash can. With the mouse, for example, you could click on these Icons and drag them around the screen. You could drag the sheet of paper icon and put it into the folder icon or the Trash icon. I couldn't believe how simple it was to use. It seemed to good to be true! Well, ever since then, I used the Macintosh as much as I could and eventually stopped using DOS altogether. Before the Mac, I never thought a computer could ever be so easy to use. I thought computers had to be complicated because it could do so many things and in order for it to doing anything, you had to tell it what do to using lines of complicated computer code. Steve Jobs will be missed. If it wasn't for Steve's Innovative thinking, companies and consumers around the world wouldn't have the technology we have today.

Coddingtown Mall

Every time I go to the Apple Store in Santa Rosa it's always full of people. Normally, that would be a good thing, but the problem is that the Apple Store at Santa Rosa Plaza is practically a hole in the wall. With a city as big as Santa Rosa, Apple picked the wrong city for their experiment of testing their smallest stores. I have a solution to this problem. Santa Rosa's first big shopping mall Coddingtown would be a perfect location for either a second Apple Store or one big one for Santa Rosa. Coddingtown needs more business coming in and since the Apple Stores are doing such great business right now, it seems like a no-brainer to put an Apple Store in Coddingtown. With the kind of attraction the Apple Stores have right now, it would benefit Coddingtown and its tenants immensely. There is one problem, since Simon, one of the biggest mall management companies, owns both Santa Rosa Plaza and half of Coddingtown, it creates competition between the two malls. Now, like my Dad told me, it's possible in the Apple Store's leasing agreement at Santa Rosa Plaza that Apple can't have another store within so many miles of each other and/or in a neighboring mall owned by Simon Management. I think Codding Enterprises, (original owners of Coddingtown) made a bad decision by selling half of Coddingtown to Simon Management. It's not good to become partners with your competition. Unfortunately, by doing that with Simon Management, Codding Enterprises put Coddingtown's future in jeopardy. Even though there is a new Whole Foods Market at Coddingtown now, I don't think it will bring enough business in to keep Coddingtown going. I think having an Apple Store in Coddingtown Mall would get it back on its feet again.

Mac OS X 10.7 LION

Since Apple's announcement of the next release of Mac OS X 10.7 code named "Lion" I've been getting my MacBook prepared for this new Operating System release. In the past few weeks I've been playing with a pre-release version and it does have a different "feel" to it and yet it still has all the familiar things that we are accustom to on the Mac. With the release of the "Magic Pad" and the "Magic Mouse" last year, being Solid State devices and using technology borrowed from the iPhone touch screen with the Swipe & Pinch gestures, I can now see what Apple was preparing to do in this upcoming release of Mac OS X "Lion". If you use the TrackPad on your MacBook or you have one of Apple's new Pointing Devices, then you'll be able to move within your Mac a lot faster and efficiently using different Swipe & Pinch gestures. Apple announced that there are 250 new features in this new release. Playing with the pre-release and going through those new features, Apple is beginning to take the Macintosh to the next level of Ease Of Use. When the Macintosh first came out in 1984, I understood where Apple was coming from. With this next level of Swipe & Pinch gestures, there may be no need for a file system as we know it today, because Apple has incorporated a full auto-save system within Mac OS X Lion. In the next new versions of your favorite Applications running in Lion, they will no longer have the Save Command under the File Menu. You just do your work and Lion takes care of the rest. Lion can also remember where you left off the last time you shut down your Mac if you choose, again to speed things up and make your Macintosh experience more efficient.

By the time Mac OS X Lion is released some time this July, I will be ready to help you get started and you'll end up with a greater user experience than ever before. You can contact me here for any Apple Product related help or any questions you have.