Rumor Roundup: Jump to conclusions [Updated]
It's autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, which means the leaves are turning, pumpkin-spiced everything, Christmas music beginning promptly in mid-October, and the annual firehose of Apple rumors is streaming down to a tiny trickle.
The gigantic iPad Pro will have significant competition (BGR)
Source: Digitimes
Chance it's true: None
From the article: "Digitimes has learned from Taiwan-based suppliers that several companies are working on large-size tablets supposed to launch next year in the first or second quarter."
Translation: Digitimes has strung together some random tech-related verbs and nouns into a typically vague, incoherent swill of a "report" that rumor blogs like BGR eagerly lap up in spite of the fact that Digitimes hasn't said one single provably correct thing this year.
Digitimes is the laughingstock of the tech world, and anyone insipid enough to still take them seriously needs to take a long, hard look at their life.
NFC-Equipped iPad Air 2 Sparks Speculation of Future Apple Pay Registers for Small Businesses [Updated] (MacRumors)
Source: Reading way too much into things
Chance it's true: None
With that [Updated] suffix, you just know this is going to be entertainingly awful.
From the article: "In a new article, Gigaom examines the reasons why Apple might include but not activate this hardware in its tablet device, speculating that the chip may eventually serve to help small businesses process payments."
I saw some random Twitter speculation about this very thing a few weeks before the new iPads launched, and I got really excited. I thought this would be a genius move on Apple's part; lots of retailers are already using iPads as a POS terminal (that's Point of Sale, not Piece of Samsung), so having NFC reading capabilities built into the iPad would be an ingenious method for encouraging the spread of adoption not only of Apple Pay, but of the iPad itself. It would be a boon to small retailers and a huge lift to Apple's burgeoning payment system.
Unfortunately, GigaOm and the re-reporting done at MacRumors missed a simple gotcha: the iPad Air 2 has an NFC chip, but no NFC antennas. In fact, 9to5 Mac's sources (whoever they might be) claim the NFC chip in the new iPads just the secure element for Apple Pay for in-app purchases.
It isn't terribly surprising that, in the chase for pageviews and the rush to be FIRST!, so many outlets ran with this story without first checking to see if it made any logical sense. Given that the source of this speculation was based on an iPad teardown in the first place, it would have been so trivially easy to do a few minutes of fact-checking the rest of the teardown to see if the rest of the components necessary for contactless payments existed in the iPad Air 2.
Instead, jump to conclusions, write it up, hit publish, then wind up with egg on your face. Mmm, eggs.
And Apple, if you're listening? This iPad as payment terminal idea is definitely worth exploring. You should maybe get on that, like, yesterday.
