Zzzzzzzz. Apple would be better spending time on improving that thing they call itunes.

I don't think we're going to find out until the carriers enable it, and people have real world experience with it. Not sure where Ars got that info from.

-David

From the looks of it and initial reviews, I kinda like the iPhone 6. I was disappointed when I upgraded my 4s to 5s considering they're practically the same. But the 6 is different especially the issue with battery life. It's interesting how users will review this once it rolls out.

I was in an Apple store yesterday and saw part of the Cooking show with a few other people. Some commented on the quality of the streaming, which fair enough wasn't the best I've ever seen. One bloke who was looking forward to the watch said that he'd be using his Nano and getting a wrist case for it instead, "it'll probably look better than that and be far cheaper." Another made a comment about different screen sizes and apps scaling to fit them. Someone got a laugh by mentioning the recent naked iCloud hacking and said that Apple were obviously the best people to trust with their wallet. It was a typically mixed reaction with other people thinking everything was brilliant and asking for earlier release dates for all of this.

I found the Apple Watch quite a disappointment myself, will probably upgrade to an iPhone 6 though.

As for the whole iCloud hacking, remember no one proved it was a security breach, it was very likely it was just social engineering and that says nothing about iCloud's security, just about carelessness by the celebrities involved, they need to understand that a lot of information about them is public data(birthdate, pets names and similar information in general), and many people make emails and/or passwords using a combination of these little things, its probably not very hard to extract information on these people.

We should know more in a week or so
http://www.howardforums.com/showthre...g-On-Wednesday

The "hackers" did it through a dictionary password attack (theoretically they could have brute forced it as well). Because Apple never enabled locking out the password after x number of attempts, it essentially gave them an unlimited number of tries to guess their password.

Shame on Apple for not instituting even the most basic brute force protection. Double shame on Apple for blaming their *customers* after the breach happened. The good news is, even though Apple denied it was their fault, they did institute brute force protection on find my iPhone logins. 5 tries and the account locks now. This is the way it should have been all along.

I was wondering, should I trust Apple Pay and store my credit cards on the phone or actual credit cards are still better?

Preface: I was a die hard Android guy until my company forced me into and iPhone and also got me an iPad. Now after two years in the Apple ecosystem, I don't think I could ever go back. Apple does a great job of locking people in. I still like and use both OS's, but there are a few iOS features now that I can't live without (Photo Streams, iMessage, better apps, etc.).

My thoughts on iPhone 6. The good:

Apple Pay: This is something I will use. Other phones have had the hardware, but they just didn't implement it in any useable way (which seems to be an unfortunate theme with many Android devices.) I like the idea of being able to use my CC without having to worry about the next hack into x company exposing my CC/name/address info. I don't really find it to be much easier than swiping a card, but I do appreciate the added security. I will do more research on it as it becomes available.

Wifi calling: This will be all about implementation, but I think this will be huge. There are many places where cell coverage is weak but wifi is abundant. My home office is one of them.

"Flinging" calls/work to other devices: I don't think they mentioned this yesterday (my Mandarin is bad), but in the OS X Yosimite announcement, they mentioned being able to take calls on any iOS or OS X device. Again, I'll use this (but not that often). The other part of this is the ability to send open work documents to other devices. Not quite sure how this will look, but as a road warrior, this will be nice.

The expected:
The screen sizes are nice, but they weren't one of the biggest features IMO. I'm a little worried about trying to navigate with one hand on the larger screen, but we'll see.

And the not so good:

Memory is still 1GB (or at least benchmarks I've seen show 1GB). Come on Apple it's 2014...

Battery life is (again) a disappointment. I don't get why they can't put a larger battery in...

No Sapphire screen. I understand Apple wasn't able to get their supply chain ready for this in time. Oh well. iPhone 6 + S

Maortega15.

I would think your credit cards are relatively safe on your iPhone6. The credit number per se isn't on the phone. What is there is a heavily encrypted (in a special chip built for that purpose) special key that communicates with your credit card provider for a virtual one-off credit card everytime you pay. I know computer forensic specialists have an exceptionally difficult time getting data off an iPhone 5s which is not jailbroken. Could someone eventually get it from your stolen iPhone 6? I expect the answer is "yes," but you can kill the cards remotely and I don't think taking the stolen phone offline will work because I think you need to have a good connection to the cellular network. I have a hardtime imagining a mass remote breach of iPhones.

Consider the alternative? How secure is the credit card in your wallet? I don't think it is overly secure against pickpockets, strong armed robbery, or accidentally leaving the card some place.

Since you are partly from HK, I presume some of your cards are Chip & Pin (EVR), but how many stores in the United States does an EVR card work in? You can easily counterfeit the mag strip on an EVR card and use it all day long in the US.

I can tell you that I wish I had shopped at Home Depot last month with Apple Pay. My Amex Platinum may have been compromised and that is what I use for no currency transaction fees outside the US.

The thing is that until majority of the merchants could take the NFC transaction, I still have to carry all the cards with me. I am really not concern about handing my credit card to someone. I would rather have something like the Coin card where the merchants could swipe it. Maybe Apple could come up with a bluetooth version of Coin card linked to the iPhone's Apple Pay now that I would like to have.

My understanding, and this is why I like it, is that Apple Pay uses a one time cipher (hereinafter OTC) for the merchant. It doesn't share the actual card info or user info with the merchant.

I'm guessing it works something like this: You put the card into Apple Pay. Apple makes an agreement with the card issuer (i.e. JoeBank). When you go to make a transaction at "DeeStore", you bring up the payment method in Apple Pay. Then it sends a OTC to DeeStore and then DeeStore uses said cipher to debit JoeBank (obviously the paying bank info is encoded in the OTC).

What I don't know is if the iPhone creates these OTCs on the fly, or whether they query the bank each time it's needed to get a new OTC to give the merchant. I guess we'll find out more about that later. The downside to the latter is that it would require network service which isn't a given in all stores.

Dubai Stu - I live and work primarliy in Hong Kong but I was born in New York. I have both Hong Kong and U.S. based credit cards. Actually, one of my Amex cards is Chip and signature while my other cards have the "blink" feature where you just tap it. Some merchants offer the tap feature but others don't. I'll look into Apple Pay once more info comes out. I'll consider it. Afterall, I don't like a bulky wallet and there's a saying that cash is still king.

1- 5s deja vu. More doesn't mean better
2 - batteries aren't magic, they take up space. More so than almost any other component. The 6 Plus has a bigger battery with the larger form factor. I'd understand wanting more life in exchange for a bigger size, but not understanding why it can't have better battery life seems odd.

3 - I suspect it's more a cost than an ability. They're using it for the watch and the touch/phone components, so the suppliers know how to work with it. But it's pricy. We'll see how the "ion treatments" work. My kids's devices will still get the insurance plan.

We're in the same "locked into the ecosystem" situation, and I have no real concerns about it. Phones are so converged today, I'd find it hard to believe anyone has a real burning need to move in either direction (other than BB/MS diehards moving away).

From talking to an American retail executive recently Chip 'n' pin will be mandatory for the US next year sometime. He said that they were looking forward to it.