ther than make sure they have a few quid in their wallet? Reason is that they have accepted the banks propaganda that we will soon live in a cash-free world where everyone will happily use chip-and-pin and contactless cards for everything. The world, they assure us, will be our Oyster, ignoring the fact that plenty of people are suspicious of smartcards and rather like the security and physicality of cash. What the banks are really doing is evangelising for their own convenience. They want a world in which all their affairs can be conducted by three employees in a windowless office in Runcorn. No more branches, no more tellers, no more old-fashioned human contact., So far they are being thwarted. The British public has fought a fierce rearguard action to save cheques, and now we seem to be reversing the apparently relentless rise of plastic too. According to a new report from the Payments Council and Link, which runs the UK s cash machines, the volume of cash payments rose by 200m in 2012, reversing the year-on-year decline over the past decade. Cash is still a vital part of our day-to-day lives, declares David Hensley, head of cash at the council, with a hint of triumphalism. More than half of all our payments are in cash, reflecting its easy use and its wide acceptance. report reckons the recession is a key factor in the surprising comeback of cash. More people are turning to cash exclusively, possibly to help them monitor the amount they are spending on a day-to-day basis, it says. In +2012, 7.2 million adults made all of their day-to-day purchases by cash, an increase of around 700,000 compared with 2011. That is perhaps the most telling statistic of all: some people are now so broke that they have no reserves to fall back on and are forced to get by day-to-day on whatever cash they have.has been written off for decades, maybe even centuries. The Persians first used cheques 2,500 years ago, and no doubt there were lots of early adopters then insisting the coin s days were numbered. In 2007, Keith Cottrell, the then director of circulating coin at the Royal Mint, told me that on the first day he started in the business back in the 1970s, working for a company that printed bank notes, he was encouragingly told: You do know you ve joined a dying industry. He managed to spend his entire career in it.security, physicality, cultural resonance, even aesthetic appeal of cash will ensure its survival, no matter how much banks or politicians want us to lock into their easily tracked electronic systems. No one would be foolish enough to think cash would ever di e, says Smith. Technology is changing things, but there is no drive to do away with cash." Cash offers freedom, power, security and self-satisfaction, though lying on the floor of a casino amid a pile of? 50 notes is probably a bit OTT.: HOW APPLE WON BACK OUR HEARTS7, the new Mac Pro, apps galore and integration - Apple can still generate irrational lust out of thin air
For a company that was never gone, Apple sure is back. So tweeted technology entrepreneur Aaron Levie. Spoiler alert: on Monday at WWDC, Apple won back the majority of our hearts at The App Business. So this review of the Keynote news will err on the side of optimism. Also, it will not discuss the new (gasps) app icons.
. Say hello to Jony Ive, Editor in Chief of Appleyou hadn t figured that this is now the Jony Ive show from the pre-Keynote soundtrack (Daft Punk, not Bob Dylan), you sure as heck knew two minutes later after viewing Apple s opening motivational video raquo ;. In it, Ive elegantly framed what innovation means at Apple, reminded us of Apple's enduring values, and made us all feel a lot better about owning [Apple] products that do a lot less than the competition - all with a few simple words and a beautiful animation. This set up a keynote that was to be about simplification, unification and integration, and - crucially - the collaboration required to execute this.
. Apple wants to enable * its developers * to take the moon shots has been heftily criticised for its failure to take wild moon shots like Google s self-driving cars. But Apple s message was clear - its gift to the world isn t going to be a stream of wild experiments. Apple s gift to the world is a platform that lets you - the developer community - take the moonshots yourselves, at low cost, and with the chance of incredible reward. That s why the first demo on Monday wasn t by Apple. It was by a relatively small studio which had developed its own self-driving cars which run on iOS.
. Can t innovate any more my ass! declaimed Apple marketing boss Big Phil Schiller as he provided a rare sneak peak of a forthcoming Apple product: the new Mac Pro. This is the meanest looking computer I ve ever seen and Apple s unveiling was more akin to the E3...
