Month: February 2015

Friday, February 13
Thursday, February 12

Starbucks iOS App Now Supports Apple Pay

I don’t visit Starbucks anywhere near as much as I used to, but news of Apple Pay support in the latest update1 brought a smile to my face nonetheless. Using Apple Pay to reload the card is easy as pie and certainly beats typing in my account password. Now, we just need Dunkin Donuts to follow suit.

There’s some trepidation over the fact that the Apple Pay integration only allows you to reload a stored card balance. I’d welcome a pay-at-the-register option, but removing the need for password input to reload is a huge improvement.

  1. How is it still not optimized for iPhone 6/6 Plus? ↩

Saturday, February 07

Photos for Mac

Everpix was the perfect photo back-up and sharing service for me and ever since it folded, I’ve been waiting for Apple to come in and fill the void.1 for the last year and a half I’ve been limping along with Picturelife, a service that mostly checks all the boxes for what I need2, but with less elegant execution than I’d like3.

But with my ballooning photo library pushing me into a pricier storage tier with Picturelife, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Photos for Mac, announced last summer at WWDC. And this week, after the mysterious case of the disappearing Photos for Mac references on Apple’s website, we finally see new signs of life in the OS X 10.10.3 Developer Beta. There are certainly still many questions left to be answered, not the least of which is, “Can we really trust iCloud with our precious photos?”

My hope is that Apple recognizes the importance we place on our digital memories. They seem to get it with the iPhone4, but their attention, or lack thereof, to iPhoto and Aperture and recent issues with iCloud don’t exactly instill the greatest confidence in the minds of the public. Apple seems to be taking their time with Photos, and my optimistic take is that they’re being deliberate, working diligently to ensure the syncing mechanism on the back-end is rock solid. The early reviews of the front-end sound promising, at least for iPhoto power- or Aperture light-users. I participate in Apple’s AppleSeed consumer beta testing program, so I look forward to taking Photos for a spin soon.

  1. I still don’t understand why they didn’t just buy Everpix. It seemed like a perfect fit.↩
  2. Comprehensive back-up and archiving, photo/album sharing with privacy controls, and library sync including edits made after the initial upload.↩
  3. And was recently sold to Streamnation.↩
  4. The iPhone is now the second-most prolific camera among Flickr uploads.↩
Monday, February 02

Compensating

When Apple hired Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts away from the venerable fashion brand, I wondered how they managed to poach a CEO from a fairly large and growing fashion brand to be a lowly Senior Vice President1. Well, now we know at least the monetary part2 of the pitch. No question $73 million would buy a lot of plaid.

From where I sit, it’s difficult to tell what significance, if any, Ahrendts’ presence had on Apple’s most recent quarterly results; The biggest part of Apple’s business is the iPhone and the iPhone 6/Plus were certainly already well on their way to production by the time she stepped in. But the results in China, supposedly Ahrendts’ specialty, were astounding and even if she played no part in that achievement, the compensation package would hardly stand out on Apple’s most recent quarterly balance sheet3.

While money could easily be a stumbling block for this type of recruiting (if the number is too low), I bet it’s rarely the most persuasive part of the package. I imagine the same type of person who would aspire to be the CEO of trend-setting luxury fashion brand is probably the same type of person who could find a challenge ushering in a new era of retail at Apple. Hiring Ahrendts pretty much substantiated rumors of an Apple Watch, at least for Apple followers, because “luxury fashion” is exactly the approach Apple would take to bring their not-yet-announced take on wearables to market. Not much about what they’ve done since announcing Apple Watch late last year would refute that. Couple that with Ahrendts’ previously mentioned success in China and the role almost seems perfect for her.

  1. Any argument about the relative size of Burberry compared to Apple’s retail business underestimates the specific character traits of the type of person it takes to be a CEO.↩
  2. See above. Along those same lines, money is often also not a primary motivator, though I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.↩
  3. Especially considering a lot of the compensation is in company stock.↩