“We had some time to talk to a well-connected developer at Macworld who was building an app that— among other capabilities— includes NFC reading for the purpose of mobile transactions,” Seth Weintraub reports for 9to5Mac.
“The developer told us that he had no hardware knowledge, but he had spoken to Apple iOS engineers on multiple occasions, and they are ‘heavy into NFC,'” Weintraub reports. “I asked how confident he was, and he said, ‘Enough to bet the app development on.'”
Weintraub reports, “Ed McLaughlin, who heads emerging payments at MasterCard, had an exchange with Fast Company that went as follows: When asked to give an estimate for when smartphone payments would become commonplace (in other words, would 2012 be the year of NFC or contactless tech?), McLaughlin demurred–and may have dropped a hint about Apple’s future in the industry.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
This all going to be very chicken or egg.
Will there be enough vendors accepting NFC to make it worthwhile pending extra to get a NFC capable phone?
Will there be enough NFC capable phones to make it worthwhile for vendors to install NFC accepting systems.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ll wait until the kinks are ironed out.
If Apple builds NFC into every new iPhone model, there will be plenty of phones with NFC.
That isn’t even a question.
My thought is it will take years for this to become a useful way to pay, but, then again, these companies that produce and market card swipe authentication may be willing to update their units to catch the wave and make it easier for people to spend.
I doubt if anything will happen in the US, the financial system is slow to adapt to new technology. The US still doesn’t have chips in their credit cards and debt cards. Europe has had them for over 5 years and Canada for around 2 years.
If Apple wanted to crack NFC payments they would partner with VISA not MasterCard.
VISA is the golden goose.
Who says it has to be an exclusive agreement?
Not when it comes to NFC. I believe Mastercards’s PayPass is considerably bigger.
A6, iOS 6, iPhone 6 (or, rather, iPhone 4G since outer design will be hardly anything like super-thin droplet-shaped — “4G” is too power hungry to allow that shape).
Who says it even has to start with the USA.
Right
The USA is way behind in credit / payment technology. Asia is using NFC in many locations already. Can’t lend any insight to how secure it is however.
i would bet apple will develop their own solution. why leave the money to mastercard? but we will see. one thing is for sure though: apple won’t call its 6th iphone “iphone 5”.
Certainty is often a chancy thing. The next iPhone will most likely be dubbed ‘iPhone 5’ unless Apple decides to make a break from numbers (e.g. Final Cut X). If you continue to believe that Apple will name the next iPhone the ‘iPhone 6’ just because it will be the sixth generation device, then I recommend that you reevaluate your basis for such certitude.