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Apple’s buy now, pay later system is finally available to all customers in the US after its soft launch back in March. To pay later and begin making equal payments over the course of six weeks, you must be set up on Apple Pay with an eligible debit card.

There is a limit, though. Pay Later only works for purchases that cost between $75 and $1,000 made on iPhone or iPad through a vendor that accepts Apple Pay. The company says during the repayment period you won’t accumulate interest and there are no late fees. However, in the fineprint, Apple says your bank could charge you extra fees “if your debit card account contains insufficient funds to make loan repayments.” After opting to finance a purchase during checkout, your Pay Later loan and payment history gets shared with credit bureaus.

In a video tutorial, Apple breaks down how to start. Simply choose between paying in full through Apple Pay or paying later. If you choose the latter, the tool will automatically tell you how much each payment will cost every two weeks, which is subject to approval. You need to confirm your personal information and ‘Agree & Apply’ before beginning a repayment program.

Once you start making payments, Apple makes it easy to track your progress. Your total remaining balance, upcoming and previous payments are all laid out through the Wallet app. Here, you can set up autopay and change the bank or debit card you’re sourcing your payments from and if you’d like to, tap to pay early. Apple also integrated the calendar tool with the Pay Later feature so that an iPhone user can see everything they owe in a single place to keep tabs on progress.

The introduction of Pay Later puts Apple in competition with other digital repayment apps like Afterpay, Klarna and Affirm, which partnered with big tech giants like Amazon to expand their services. Roughly three in four US iPhone users have activated Apple Pay, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The popularity of the company’s tap-to-pay tool among iPhone users could help it gain a foothold in this new market.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-pay-later-is-available-to-everyone-in-the-us-174654047.html?src=rss 

Intel may have downplayed a killer feature for its new 14th-gen processors, which can reach 6GHz. The company hasn’t marketed the chips’ new Intel Application Optimization (APO), but an enterprising Reddit user (via Tom’s Hardware) reports that it offers attention-grabbing performance boosts for supported games. Why the lack of advertising for such a potent feature? One guess is that APO seemingly only supports two older titles at launch: Rainbow Six Siege (2015) and Metro Exodus (2019).

One of the more dramatic examples of APO upgrading performance was detailed in the Intel subreddit by u/LightMoisture. With their setup using the Intel i9-14900K, the feature boosted Metro Exodus’ frame rate from 273 FPS to 339 FPS, a 24 percent increase. Rainbow Six Siege had even more eye-opening gains, going from 659 FPS to 867 FPS, a nearly 32 percent enhancement.

The Redditor notes that they ran the games in 1080p resolution on low settings with a high-end memory setup to test what APO can do in ideal conditions. It won’t likely reproduce those numbers on higher settings, and we don’t know how it would handle newer and more graphically demanding games.

The Verge’s Tom Warren tested the feature on “very high” presets at 1080p resolution. APO boosted Rainbow Six Siege (with a Core i9-14900K system and an RTX 4090 GPU) from 615 FPS to 688 FPS, nearly a 12 percent increase. Meanwhile, Metro Exodus Enhanced on the same rig rose from 177 FPS to 207 FPS, almost a 17 percent rise. Those numbers aligned closely with Intel’s guidance, which estimated a 13 percent increase in Rainbow Six Siege and a 16 percent increase in Metro Exodus.

Unfortunately, in addition to APO’s slight problem of supporting just two games at launch, the feature also has a clunky setup. You’ll need to track down motherboard drivers (always a fun task) that support Intel’s Dynamic Tuning. (To make matters worse, not all vendors have posted them online.) Once you find and install the right ones, navigate to your PC’s BIOS settings to enable the feature.

After that, you’ll want to install the APO app from the Microsoft Store, which lets you manage settings and toggle it quickly. Adding even more joy to the task, several Redditors reported that following external links to the Microsoft Store won’t work and that you’ll need to open the storefront and search for Intel APO manually. In addition, if you haven’t installed all of the necessary drivers, the app installation will reportedly fail. However, once set up, the feature should automatically detect compatible games (hopefully more than two before long) once you launch them. If future setups are easier and Intel adds new game support regularly, it could wind up outshining 6GHz as the new chips’ marquee attraction.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/an-overlooked-feature-for-intels-14th-gen-chips-boosts-gaming-performance-with-one-click-183335312.html?src=rss 

Back in May, Google announced it was working on a feature called “about this image” that gives users verified data regarding any photo on the internet. Well, it just rolled out as part of search, so you won’t be able to get away with passing off somebody else’s photo of a 1988 Burger King Alf plushie as your own.

Here’s how it works. Just use Google Search, select an image and click on the three dots on the right-hand corner to access the tool. You’ll receive a whole gob of useful information, including when the image was originally published, if it’s been published since then and where it’s popped up throughout the years. A veritable cornucopia of metadata.

The obvious use case scenario for this is verifying whether or not an image used to accompany a news event is legit, or if it’s been taken out of context from something that happened in 2007 to drum up misinformation. To that end, the tool also shows you how other sites use and describe the image, similar to how search already handles factual information via the “perspectives” filter and the “about this result” tab. Google says you can also access the feature by clicking on the “more about this page” link, with more options to come.

Of course, there’s a little thing sweeping the world right now called artificial intelligence. The images generated by AI platforms can be tough to distinguish from the genuine article, so Google’s tool also lets you know if an image has been AI-generated or not. However, this depends on the metadata including this information, so the original image creators would have to opt-in. Google says its own AI-generated images will always feature the appropriate metadata.

That’s not the only tool Google’s rolling out to provide increased nuance for image searches. Fact Check Explorer, a handy app for journalists, will soon expand to include images. As for non-image based searches, the tech giant also announced software that creates AI-generated descriptions of websites, helping users research lesser-known entities.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-new-image-verification-tool-combs-metadata-to-find-context-and-sniff-out-ai-fakes-165339778.html?src=rss