Why Apple Pay is a big deal

[N-OS X-tasy!]

vision63 wrote:
Also, Apple gives the impression that buying stuff is the only use for NFC. I hope they don't limit it to just that.

Give them time. Even Apple can't (re)build Rome in a day.

[sekker]

I think the Verge article did a great job summarizing.

I encourage everyone to read it through.

[rjmacs]

N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
[quote=vision63]
Also, Apple gives the impression that buying stuff is the only use for NFC. I hope they don't limit it to just that.

Give them time. Even Apple can't (re)build Rome in a day.
They're already talking about using it to open hotel doors, etc.

[deckeda]

vision63 wrote:
Apple Pay is cool but the only problem I see is it seems to be available only on Apple phones. Which means it's going to be on a large but minority of phones. Instead of killing its competition in the crib, Google, Softcard etc, can make the same deals with their vendors and quickly be on par. It's not like they're going to do nothing. They're already in the game using the same terminals I believe. Apple Pay needs to be on Android and Windows phones.

Part of this is, it's a new thing and unreasonable to think it should have appeared out of the gate on non-Apple hardware, yes? We can't know what will happen later.

The "bigger problem" isn't lack of phones capable of using Apple Pay, it's the less than 3% of merchants ready to accept it today. At least 40% of new smartphones are iPhones, with each launch being more successful than previous generations. Even only counting the new iPhones, that's will soon be "plenty" of phones out there given the numbers of merchants signed up right now.

As the Verge's article said, no competitor could get the kind of cooperation from banks Apple did, and they started earlier.