> I again called the credit card company and this time, told them to cancel all the digital wallets (there were 99 of them!). There is no way to do this online.
This is highly dependent on your bank. For example, Bank of America lets you view and delete any cards that have been added to a digital wallet right on their website.
Only digital wallets, or also any merchant that saved the card using a token? The latter is getting more and more common, but usually happens transparently to the cardholder.
Theoretically, it would allow a pretty neat feature of being able to manage all merchants that have a copy of the card in the banking app and revoke said copies – but since token use is not mandatory, that would be fairly confusing, so I haven't seen this yet as far as I remember.
FWIW, India has taken a pretty radical step towards that future at a regulatory level by effectively mandating merchants to no longer store the underlying card number and use tokens instead. I suspect that such an interface would be more common there, but I don't have any personal experience.
Half of my cards can't even be added to non-iPhone devices without a verification phone call to some poor support agent who's never heard of a "Pixel Watch", has no idea what the workflow is on his end to manually verify cards being added, and just wants me to "use the iPhone app to verify".
Heaven forbid if I try to add a card to an Apple Wallet on a Mac where no iOS or Android app exists.
I still don't understand why MacBooks support USB4/Thunderbolt 4/5, but NOT USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. So you can get 20-40Gb/s speeds with more expensive external disks, but only 10Gb/s with the cheaper, more commonly available ones that advertise 20Gb/s.
I believe it’s that MacBooks support Thunderbolt primarily and USB only where absolutely necessary beyond what’s coded into one of the TB specs; and I assume TB doesn’t define 3.2x2x2 as part of any TB spec <=5?
> If you actually go to the used market, it's easy to find a gently used machine that is much better.
A huge percentage of the population (at least in the US) is completely unwilling to buy any used consumer products. For some it is the ick factor, for others it is fear of being scammed.
> Any MacBook Air with an M2 and 16GB of RAM is a better purchase.
Is this really a better alternative if it stops getting macOS updates several years sooner? I wouldn’t buy an 8gb laptop, but they are fine for many use cases.
It seems like macOS updates have a lot more to do with underlying hardware and specs than year of release alone.
Going back to the iPhone 5C example, that phone lost updates much earlier than the 5S released the same year because it didn’t support 64-bit processors.
There are also a number of Intel and PowerPC systems that weren’t supported long due to architecture transitions.
I could very easily imagine a future version of macOS only being available on systems that shipped with 16GB of RAM.
Although on the other hand, I think Apple decides on support based on userbase as well. I imagine if they find a device is barely used or don’t sell well in the first place they would perhaps be more likely to drop support.
> They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.
In the US, it was banned in most places until 2018. The Supreme Court invalidated the ban that had been in place until then.
Fewer and fewer countries. I think none of the countries I've been too where I've purchased a SIM without ID allow that anymore. It is required to try to limit purchase by scam call centers and to enable phone number portability.
> I don’t know how they do things nowadays, but it used to be the case that the same SKU didn’t even guarantee you the same hardware. Two machines of the same order could even be slightly different, requiring different drivers.
Apple is guilty of this too. For example, two iPhone's purchased at the same time can have displays from different manufactures, with noticeable quality differences between them.
And unless you looked it up, you'd never noticed the difference (save comparing the two side-by-side). Whereas the cheap laptop requires one to know the difference so you can get the right driver, or other jackery because your WiFi card was a mid-year change. It reminds of me of mid-year production changes on cars, where VINs XXX-YYY need part number ZZZ, but VINs AAA-BBB need part number CCC.
I have kept all my favorite sets. They don't take up much space. Just two 24x24x24” boxes. Maybe a big deal if you are moving internationally, but I have always been able to find space for them, even in some very small homes.
This is highly dependent on your bank. For example, Bank of America lets you view and delete any cards that have been added to a digital wallet right on their website.
reply