As others have said, it's Apple and they do not take kindly to other people leaking their technology/announcements ahead of time.
See also: the time that ATI's CEO told his employees that their chips would be powering Apple's to-be-announced hardware a few days before the announcement. Steve Jobs responded by pulling all of ATI's hardware from its demo units at the announcement, not mentioning ATI at all, cancelling a joint demonstration of the Radeon card that was going to be in the system, and never partnering with ATI again.
From the linked article, it was a press release, not just to his employees.
> The incident began Monday when ATI, which supplies graphics cards for all Apple's current models, issued a four-paragraph news release that stated its Radeon processor would be featured in three new Mac models -- none of which were announced by Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) until CEO Steve Jobs' Wednesday morning keynote address.
Except of course shipping ATI hardware for years afterwards, then also using nvidia, then dropping nvidia and only using ATI/AMD until transitioning to Apple Silicon.
1. They kept existing designs, since even Jobs wasn't so crazy as to demand a complete re-architecture of existing laptop models on a whim; plus they probably also had contractual obligations/pre-purchase arrangements
2. They switched to nvidia, but from everything I know they also hated working with nvidia (IIRC Jobs accused nvidia of stealing Pixar tech)
3. AMD is a different company than ATI (technically), and Apple of that era was different than the Steve Jobs temper tantrum era.
For violating an embargo and publishing a press release announcing products of another company that hadn’t been debuted? What “non-dick” response do you think is appropriate against a prospective partner that violated clear guidelines that defined their partnership which basically included “#1: Keep your mouth shut”, exactly?
Most people don't like wire and don't care about genuinely good sound through wire vs. artificially sweetened (DSP-ed) sound through Bluetooth. That's what Apple is targeting at, the mass consumer.
Honestly that "most people" seems to be more marketing driven than real opinion.
When you simply can't purchase one thing, then you move to the next thing.
I have several wired and wireless headphones, all for different uses, and the existence of wireless headphones don't make the wired ones less useful for their particular strenghts.
I believe that the action does reflect Jobs' ego in the following way.
Namely, his belief that CEO == company.
Jobs would never take the view that the action of the CEO of ATI is actually one bad actor acting alone which doesn't represent what ATI wants as an organization, and is unfair and damaging to that organization and all of its employees.
The reason he would not take that view is because then he would not be able to believe that he is the single most important thing at Apple, overshadowing everything else.
If the leak had been the responsibility of some rank and file employee at ATI, with appropriate action taken against that employee by the ATI CEO, it is likely that Jobs would likely have reacted differently, because it then would not longer be seen as a personal matter between him and the CEO, where the corporations are just pawns in a game of teach-you-a-lesson.
It's anywhere close to open and requires vendors to seek approval from Apple for every implementation - Apple just has the market share to make everyone dance to their tune.
Apple Pay works on any terminal that supports NFC tap to pay payments. There are thousands, tens of thousands of terminals in the US that are not "Apple Pay" that you can use it on
Same here in australia. We had NFC payments ("tap and pay") since ~2006. Nearly a decade before apple pay launched in Nov 2015. For us, apple pay was like "oh, I can use my phone instead of my credit card? Neat."
People use it everywhere here, just because its easier than carrying around a card.
Most developed countries I've been to use NFC/Apple Pay. Where you see the use of QR codes is in China, Africa, and other countries that VISA/MC/AMEX hasn't penetrated (for either political or socioeconomic reasons).
Many countries in the world have local systems for quick, direct bank transfers encoded with QR codes to be used by local payment systems or local banking apps.
See also: the time that ATI's CEO told his employees that their chips would be powering Apple's to-be-announced hardware a few days before the announcement. Steve Jobs responded by pulling all of ATI's hardware from its demo units at the announcement, not mentioning ATI at all, cancelling a joint demonstration of the Radeon card that was going to be in the system, and never partnering with ATI again.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001216031800/https://www.zdnet...