Macworld When the Apple Store goes offline it’s usually an indication that Apple is about to launch a new product. There is no surprise that Apple has taken the store off line today, Monday June 5, 2023: The company is getting ready to kick off its Worldwide Developers Conferences (WWDC) with a keynote event later today (10am PDT). The fact that the store is down is a good indication that there will be hardware announcements to accompany the anticipated software announcements. Read on to find out what might be coming, including a new 15-inch MacBook Air. Why is the Apple Store down? Having trouble browsing the Apple Store online? There are a few reasons why the Apple Store might be…

Apple in mid-April launched a new Savings account with a 4.15% yield, 10 times the national average for banks. “We are very pleased with the initial response,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts in early May. Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards by automatically depositing their Daily Cash into a high-yield Savings account from Goldman Sachs. Carleton English for Barron’s: Apple doesn’t aspire to be a bank, but it’s pushing deeper into financial services, aiming to generate extra income while keeping its one billion-plus iPhone users hooked on the Apple ecosystem. The company is expanding into payments with its Apple Pay service. It has built a credit-card business with Goldman Sachs Group, its partner for…

Apple in mid-April launched a new Savings account with a 4.15% yield, 10 times the national average for banks. “We are very pleased with the initial response,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts in early May. Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards by automatically depositing their Daily Cash into a high-yield Savings account from Goldman Sachs. Carleton English for Barron’s: Apple doesn’t aspire to be a bank, but it’s pushing deeper into financial services, aiming to generate extra income while keeping its one billion-plus iPhone users hooked on the Apple ecosystem. The company is expanding into payments with its Apple Pay service. It has built a credit-card business with Goldman Sachs Group, its partner for…

Macworld It was decades ago when you could first pay for items online using a credit card; debit card payments followed. The security of such payments was often iffy in the commercial internet’s early years. Database breaches of unsecured information made for easy pickings. These days, a combination of factors has improved the safety of paying online. Firms offering online purchases of goods, services, and subscriptions are held to higher levels of compliance by the banks and processors that let them receive electronic payments. Companies like Stripe and PayPal, among many others, manage to receive card or other payment information directly, so those private and easily copied details are never stored, or even seen, by an e-commerce site. Apple Pay,…

Google today announced that it is introducing support for passkeys, providing an easier and more secure login method for Google accounts. Apple integrated passkeys into iOS with the launch of iOS 16, and it is also available in iPadOS 16.1 and later as well as macOS Ventura. Passkeys are an industry standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, so Google's passkey integration will work on Apple devices as well as on other devices that support the feature. As Google notes: Last year — alongside FIDO Alliance, Apple and Microsoft — we announced we would begin work to support passkeys on our platform as an easier and more secure alternative to passwords. And today, ahead of…