The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is on sale starting at $229.99 at multiple retailers. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner, but if you can’t wait until then, July 4th often brings deals on a host of tech. We’re still about a week out from the actual holiday — which seems to commemorate our independence as much as capitalism itself — but you can already take advantage of a few sales right now at Adorama, Amazon, and a number of other retailers. They include discounts spanning a range of popular tech, too, from 4K TVs and speakers to smart lighting and robovacs. Not every Fourth of July sale is worth…

Apple is reportedly in talks with banks and regulators in India to launch Apple Pay and its credit card, Apple Card. The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, met with HDFC Bank CEO and MD Sashidhar Jagdishan during his trip to India in April. Apple Pay Two sources familiar with the matter said that Apple is looking for a partner bank in India to issue Apple Card. The company is also seeking regulatory approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Apple Card is a co-branded credit card issued by Goldman Sachs and Apple. It was launched in the United States in 2019. The card offers a number of features that are designed to appeal to consumers, including no annual fee, no…

In macOS Sonoma, Apple has changed the widgets landscape. No longer do widgets have to be hidden offscreen and largely forgotten in the Notifications Center panel. Now they live right on your desktop – and they're interactive, too. It's worth noting from the off that widgets can still be parked in Notification Center, but now they can also be dragged out onto the desktop. The first widget can be placed anywhere, then Apple provides placement guidance for subsequent widgets by displaying a widget-shaped outline, indicating where they can be snapped into position in relation to the others. Alternatively, if you right-click on an empty space on the desktop, the menu that appears includes a new "Edit Widgets..." option. Selecting this…

Apple Pay uses NFC technology, and it requires you to effectively touch the terminal to make a connection. | Image: The Verge Tap-to-pay services like Apple Pay may soon no longer need the actual tapping part to work. That’s because NFC, the technology that enables you to pay at shops by touching your phone to a payment terminal, is getting new capabilities over the next next two to five years, such as a communications range boost, more powerful wireless charging for tiny devices like earbuds, and more (via Android Authority). NFC, which stands for Near Field Communication, is inside thousands of devices today ranging from smartphones to video game-enhancing figurines. Now the body that decides how to standardize the technology,…

Apple CarPlay is the safest way to interact with your iPhone in the car. You never need to touch your iPhone while driving – something you should never ever do anyway. Instead, you control navigation, communication, and entertainment with voice control and a simplified interface on your car’s screen. What if your car doesn’t have a built-in display? What if it has one that doesn’t work with Apple CarPlay? The good news is you don’t have to go out and buy a brand new car. In most cases, you can have a really good in-dash system installed for anywhere from $200 to $1,000. Picking the right solution before you make the investment is important. more… The post Best Apple CarPlay…

Macworld “Passkey” is the name for a simplified login process to websites that arrived in its full glory later this year with macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16. A passkey relies on broadly supported industry standards to let you carry out an encrypted login with almost no effort on your part after the initial setup. You can try a passkey without installing the public betas of these upcoming operating systems, as Apple built passkey support in a preview form into Safari across all its operating systems in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and Safari 15 with macOS 12 Monterey. With the full release of passkeys in a few weeks or months, and Google and Microsoft’s announced support for compatible technology, you’re…