Morning Report: Rite Aid vs. Apple Pay, Handoff on Older Macs, Bitcasa Changes

Apple Pay has only been available to the public since Monday, and already one retailer has decided to wall off their NFC payment terminals from iPhone 6 users. Our Friday Morning Report has the details, along with Bitcasa's decision to strong-arm unlimited storage customers into more expensive plans, and a glimmer of hope for older Mac owners to get Handoff working. Let's close out the work week with some news!

Rite Aid Intentionally Blocks Apple Pay Users

Although Rite Aid isn't on Apple's official list of retailers supporting Apple Pay, the drugstore chain uses point-of-sale hardware fully compatible with NFC-equipped smartphones. According to MacRumors, customers with iPhone 6 models were able to make contactless purchases at Rite Aid starting with the arrival of iOS 8.1 on Monday, but the retailer quickly closed the door on such purchases by Wednesday.

As noted by user Josh Hudnall and confirmed by MacLife.com with mid-week purchases at two different Rite Aid stores, Apple Pay transactions appear to go through normally, but the last transaction details show a blank amount. More troubling, the screen on the POS terminal specifically notes "Apple Pay is not supported," despite having successfully worked earlier in the week.

According to Hudnall, Rite Aid corporate recently sent stores an email explaining that Apple Pay will not be accepted by the chain, presumably because the retailer supports the competing (and as-yet unreleased) CurrectC system. Coincidentally, whatever Rite Aid did appears to also be affecting Google Wallet users, who are also now blocked from making NFC payments at the register.

Bitcasa Forces Infinite Subscribers to Expensive Capped Plans

Cloud storage underdog Bitcasa is up to its old tricks again: Only 11 months after switching to tiered pricing and raising the cost of its unlimited "Infinite Drive" storage from $99 to $999 per year, the service this week announced that grandfathered users who have continued to pay the lower amount are being kneecapped completely.

Bitcasa says the change is being made because the company has spent the last year working on "a new and greatly improved backend storage system, which will make uploading, downloading, and loading your files faster!" As a result, users will have to install new desktop and mobile software that supports the updated system, but which is incompatible with the old one. (Also worth noting: Bitcasa has pulled the trigger on this change without having a new iOS app ready, which they claim is being held up by App Store approval.)

Existing grandfathered users are being given until November 15 to upgrade their accounts to one of two plans: 1TB for the same $99 per year, or 10TB for $999 per year (or $99 per month), which effectively replaces the previous unlimited plan. Bitcasa users have lashed out on social networks and the company's support forums, noting that the short cutoff date doesn't allow them time to download terabytes of content, which will be purged should they fail to upgrade to the new plans.

Github Tool Said to Enable Handoff on Unsupported Macs

The new Continuity features introduced with OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are pretty fantastic, unless you have a Mac model released earlier than 2012. MacRumors reported Thursday there may be hope for such models, thanks to a new Github project called Continuity Activation Tool. Created by Dokterdok, the tool performs a compatibility check prior to creating backups of the original system drivers, and then disabling Bluetooth code that effectively blacklists unsupported models.

Continuity Activation Tool reportedly works straight away with MacBook Air and Mac mini models from mid-2011 without additional hardware, but older Macs without the necessary Bluetooth 4.0 hardware require installation of new wireless cards, which may scare off average users from attempting such a modification. Full details are available from the Github portal.

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(Image courtesy of The Chronicle-Telegram)