The stage may have belonged to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice-president of software engineering, but the star of the show was, not for the first time, the iPhone.
The company used its annual worldwide developer conference in San Jose, California, to unveil new features for its smartphone, notably a service that enables users to pay money to their friends and family.
Pay Cash will allow friends to split a meal at a restaurant, say, by sending a message or simply by telling Siri, Apple’s embedded “intelligent personal assistant”, to pay someone using the credit and debit cards they have stored in their phone’s wallet app.
The service is part of a drive to boost the company’s Apple Pay contactless payment service and to make the iPhone indispensable.
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Apple also revealed it was taking on Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home speaker with a Siri Home Pod smart speaker.