Apple says some services including App Store facing issues

(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Thursday that a number of its services, including the App Store, was experiencing some issues.Other services affected include those related to iCloud, the Mac App Store and the iPhone maker’s Photos application. (apple.co/1Uk10Yx)The issues appear to have started just before 4 p.m. ET (2000 GMT), according to a timeline provided on Apple’s U.S. support page.

More than 18 months after Apple Pay took the United States by storm, the smartphone giant has made only a small dent in the global payments market, snagged by technical challenges, low consumer take-up and resistance from banks.The service is available in six countries and among a limited range of banks, though in recent weeks Apple has added four banks to its sole Singapore partner American Express; Australia and New Zealand Banking Group in Australia; and Canada’s five big banks.Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion last year, the vast majority of that in the United States. That is less than the annual volume of transactions in Kenya, a mobile payments pioneer, according to research firm Timetric.And its global turnover is a drop in the bucket in China, where Internet giants Alibaba and Tencent dominate the world’s biggest mobile payments market – with an estimated $1 trillion worth of mobile transactions last year, according to iResearch data.

If you’re after a tablet in 2016, broadly speaking you have three choices: Android, Apple’s iPad or Microsoft’s Windows 10 tablets.
While the first two are mobile born and bred, spawned from smartphone operating systems, Windows 10 comes from the other side of computing – the traditional desktop.
So-called two-in-one PCs, whoch are half tablet, half laptop, with the ability to transform in some fashion between the two, are about the only sector of PCs and tablets that’s growing. They seem like the perfect combination between a tablet and a computer without having to buy two devices.