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Sad but true
6+ and 6 are about 2 yr behind... Barely added NFC... Still crappy camera .. Low res screen... List goes on and on...

Smaller screen but bigger phone on 6+ wtf compare to Note

What makes the camera crappy? I think the camera in the 5S is out of best out there. If your talking about megapixels that doesn't really count.

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Making a fool of Apple? Samsung is the one with disappointing sales and lagging stock price. Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Samsung is in desperation mode now.

You make a great point. I think these ads are knee jerk reaction. There sales are slumping in the mobile space and they need to try anything. Although Samsung will never admit it I believe the Galaxy S5 has not met sales expectations.
 
Of course Android users think 'meh' and reach for their cards. You just made half my point: The Android implementation is severely lacking in usability and financial institution support.

As for the rest, I'm guessing you don't pay attention to the news.

The beginning of this year (well, December) Target was the target of a credit card reader hack that saw millions of credit/debit cards potentially compromised. It meant that millions of people, myself included, had our existing cards cancelled or severely neutered right around the holiday and had to get new cards with new numbers issued. This was not only dangerous (everyone had to monitor their card activity daily/hourly to make sure it wasn't being used by someone else), it was also a major pain in the butt. My card was effectively useless for an extended period of time. Automated bill payments all come to a halt until you change everything to match your new card, and so on.

And, the morning of the frickin' iPhone 6 keynote, news agencies started reporting that an almost identical thing happened to Home Depot: their card machines were infected with malware that compromised tons of cards. The fallout from this has yet to be fully determined.

The kind of NFC tech that Apple has implemented makes this a non-issue. Single use hash tokens that are useless after the purchase and zero identifiable information transmitted during the transaction mean it doesn't matter if someone gathers data from the readers.

The magnetic strip technology is half a century old and highly insecure, as we get proven to us over and over. This is why the banks are jumping all over this as well, they're the ones on the hook financially when these sorts of breaches occur.

This isn't a gimmick. This isn't 'meh'. This is something that's been needed for a long time, and the more credit card breaches that occur at point of sale locations, the more people will be able to look past their biases and realize that, yes, a secure, private non-card based solution is the way to go.

Fair enough, that's interesting but it seems to be more of a Stateside thing (the adoption of Apple pay, not the card fraud). Over here in the UK it isn't something I've seen advertised. However, until and unless Apple Pay is accepted in every retail and service outlet, it remains a gimmick. Maybe one day it won't be, but that day won't be coming in the next 12 months. I'll admit that if adopted across the board, it could be an interesting idea. Just not right now.
 
Fair enough, that's interesting but it seems to be more of a Stateside thing (the adoption of Apple pay, not the card fraud). Over here in the UK it isn't something I've seen advertised. However, until and unless Apple Pay is accepted in every retail and service outlet, it remains a gimmick. Maybe one day it won't be, but that day won't be coming in the next 12 months. I'll admit that if adopted across the board, it could be an interesting idea. Just not right now.

Apologies for my being dense and assuming you were in the US. Hate it when I do that.

If 20-30% of the vendors are configured to use ApplePay (and/or some other similarly secure NFC payment scheme) within short order, I'd consider that a major success. Clearly, there's no way something like this becomes ubiquitous overnight.

As it is, it appear the majority of the vendors that I frequent the most often will be supporting Apple Pay. When I go shopping, I very frequently visit Whole Foods, Target, Safeway, and Petco. A huge percentage of my regular shopping occurs within those businesses. Just today I shopped at three of those spots, and I visit each of them weekly at least. These are all large chains that have locations across the US and they're all onboard with Apple Pay. In other words, this isn't some dipping-the-toe into the pond to test the waters roll-out, this is a major push that will have pretty broad, impactful coverage almost immediately. It means there are far fewer places that can hurt me and my finances if their point-of-purchase hardware gets compromised. Very much not in gimmick territory.

Granted, it'll take some time for there to be enough iPhone 6's (and/or whatever other hardware comes along that can use this form of NFC) in the wild for a major percentage of the population to take advantage of it, but considering those of us that are getting iPhone 6's will be able to do a sizable percentage of our shopping come October? This is a meaningful and highly useful piece of technology.

You want gimmick? How about that ridiculous offering in... I think it was the Galaxy S4... where movies pause if you look away. Holy cow, how annoying would that be? Complicated tech, to be sure, and sounds impressive if you don't think about it too much, but absolutely non-useful and something quickly relegated to the halls of gimmickry.

I'll take the newly implemented hardware, software, and financial infrastructure changes that will protect my bank accounts and make purchases more convenient, thank you. :)
 
Fair enough, that's interesting but it seems to be more of a Stateside thing (the adoption of Apple pay, not the card fraud). Over here in the UK it isn't something I've seen advertised. However, until and unless Apple Pay is accepted in every retail and service outlet, it remains a gimmick. Maybe one day it won't be, but that day won't be coming in the next 12 months. I'll admit that if adopted across the board, it could be an interesting idea. Just not right now.

I think it's fair enough to call it a gimmick. I always thought it was a gimmick in Android phones too. I think the difference now is that Apple has big banks and financial corporations, as well as big vendors backing this. Sure, right now it's only 20% or whatever it is, but what was it before? This isn't something that, as the poster above said, will happen over night, but i think to say the reason it's a gimmick is because it isn't accepted everywhere yet is a bit of a stretch. I think a lot of companies are waiting to see how it works in the real world. I for one will not be using it, at least right away, until it's proven secure and the kinks are worked out of it. But I expect that, given it is proven secure, and given that a lot of people use the system, you will see more and more companies jumping on board. If everything is a gimmick until it's back 100% though, then you have some very high standards.

For instance, Square, while definitely behind over seas, has a good following here in the states because it allows small vendors to become more profitable. Is it accepted everywhere? No. But I wouldn't call it a gimmick either. Though certainly in Europe I would imagine not only is it a gimmick, but it's ancient technology still. :)

Just my 2¢.
 
Still crappy camera

Care to elaborate? iPhone has always held it's own in the mobile photography world despite being a lower megapixel camera. And don't list a bunch of gimmick features Samsung camera phones have. Please keep your opinion based on image quality alone.
 
Those commercials during Sunday Night Football were so long and obnoxious that I thought to go online and see what Twitter thought of the commercials (just searched for "Samsung"). Since Monday, Fandroids have flooded the comment sections of most Apple posts around the internet. They're a very vocal crowd on the internet so I was expecting the same on Twitter.

Much to my surprise, it was the complete opposite. People were calling out Samsung for using random tweets, constantly talking about iPhone rather than their own product, and pointing out that all the 2nd placers are spending their marketing money attacking Apple. Pretty funny to see that Samsung's marketing is actually hurting them in some ways.

I'm fairly sick of Android vs Apple wars. It was fun and passionate in 2011ish but nowadays it's just stale. Wish everybody could just be happy with what they like and let others do the same.
 
I LOVED Nokia's "Don't Fight - Switch" commercials. Especially the one with the brawl erupting at the school play. The end, where the Apple fanboy tears open his shirt to expose the Apple tattoo and screams, "C'MON!!", immediately getting clocked with a folded chair, was pure gold.

That run of commercials is one of my favourite to date. It was great that they pretty much called out both Apple and Samsung fans for being dumb to continually have the same argument over and over again. IMO the wedding fight commercial is the funnier of the two.

For those that are curious, here is a link to the school play commercial and the wedding fight commercial.
 
Funny thing is I ragged on Apple so long and had never used an iPhone, honestly couldn't afford it. I had all the samsung phones up to the s3. Then the first time I played with the IOS on an iPod touch I fell in love, I had to try an iPhone, after that it was over with. I will never will go back to android. IOS is sooooo fluent and I rarely have problems. When people call into Apple and threaten to switch to Samsung because they can't get what they want, I die every time. I'm like oh ok good luck, lol
 
All I have to say is that you will never see a samsung in an apple commercial.

Not while they have an inferior product and their sales are slumping but never say never. They could go back to the same marketing approach they used against Microsoft attacking Microsoft products by name in commercials if at some point the current landscape changed. They've already proven that is not beneath them.
 
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