Supposedly, it is more convenient if you don’t have to carry multiple credit cards or cash. So, the only thing you need is your phone. This is kind of weird to me though. What if your phone dies? Then you must give someone BJ for taxi ride or something. It’s pretty easy to just carry a credit card or ATM card as back up. However, if that is the case, you might as well just pay with the card.
I have been thinking about this, and one demographic that might warm up to phone payments is teenagers. These guys do not have credit cards yet, so they are not reliant on credit cards. However, they are used to buying Bieber and other stuff on iTunes. So maybe if they never ever use credit cards, they will just keep using phones forever.
Not to mention the fact that there are still a number of other cards that people typically carry, anyway: Costco cards, drivers licenses, health insurance cards, etc… Unless everything is digitized, you still have to use a wallet. And if you’re carrying a wallet, who cares if you have a couple of additional credit cards in there?
Not so sure. The banker I was speaking to just came back from a credit card conference on it. He said most machines have the ability to use Apple pay, because Apple designed the thing to work with older wireless card readers. He said it was the only one backwards comptabile due to Apple’s handy work, but I’m not technical enough to understand or recall what they actually did. He said most vendors just don’t realize their old stuff can do it, which is why they were demoing it at the conference.
The 220,000 figure came from Apple, so they’re probably including older NFC-capable terminals rounding up. But that’s interesting if a large number of these businesses won’t take Apple Pay because they don’t even know that they can.
I bought something at Duane Reade the other day and noticed ApplePay was an option. I have my iPhone 6 but haven’t registered any of my cards. I admit, I was curious as to how it works.
As for Ohai’s comment, if your phone runs out of juice, you don’t have to give a BJ for a taxi ride home, you just need to power up your phone for a little bit, which is probably more like a HJ kind of thing. You could probably even charge it in the taxi driver’s cigarette lighter jack, and perform the HJ while you’re on the way home: a time saver for everyone.
(I suppose it’s possible that the ApplePay might be more like RFID and not require power or be able to borrow power from the reader. However, my assumption is that it’s also tied to the fingerprint reader in the phone so someone who steals your phone can’t buy a bunch of stuff, so probably it does need power.)