“EBay Inc Chief Executive John Donahoe often quotes a merchant saying NFC stands for ‘Not For Commerce’ – and dismisses the prospects of Near Field Communication technology used to turn cellphones into mobile wallets,” Alistair Barr and David Henry report for Reuters. “He got some support this week from Apple Inc, which did not embed NFC chips into the iPhone 5.”
“‘Anyone hoping NFC would be a reality soon is disappointed,’ said Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. ‘Many in the industry were hoping inclusion in the iPhone would be a springboard for more adoption. This takes the impetus away,'” Barr and Henry report. “Like many new technologies, NFC is hampered by a chicken-and-egg problem. Mobile phone makers like Apple are reluctant to take on the extra cost and engineering effort of embedding NFC chips because many merchants can’t accept payments this way yet. Meanwhile, merchants won’t install NFC until more consumers have the technology on their phones.”
Barr and Henry report, “Apple did not include NFC because it is not clear the technology solves any current problem, marketing chief Phil Schiller told AllThingsD on Wednesday. Instead of embracing NFC, Apple is developing Passbook, a mobile app that pulls together loyalty cards, tickets and coupons on the new iPhone. Many analysts consider this an early version of a digital wallet, except Passbook does not let users link their credit and debit cards yet.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple does not do things simply for the sake of doing them or to gain a checkmark on some spec shootout sheet. Apple will deploy proven technologies when and if they are useful and ready to be used by the majority of users.
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