“The most impressive number from Apple’s earnings call this week wasn’t how many iPhones it sold or how much money it made. Those numbers are monstrous quarter after quarter,” Marcus Wohlsen reports for Wired. “More striking was CEO Tim Cook’s revelation that about 800 million people now have accounts on Apple’s iTunes service. And most of those accounts are tied to credit cards.”
“That number is astonishing — by comparison, Amazon.com has some 237 million active customers — and it could point toward a new Apple future,” Wohlsen reports. “As countless rumors hint at the imminent arrival of new Apple products — rumors Cook did nothing to confirm or dispel — the company’s credit-card trove means one new tool is almost inevitable: a payments service. Apple may soon become a way you pay for all sorts of stuff across the web, inside mobile apps, and maybe even as you walk to the counter at a brick-and-mortar retail store.”
“PayPal, the reigning king of payments on the net, runs 143 million active accounts, and that’s impressive — except in comparison to Apple,” Wohlsen reports. “Owning an iPod, iPhone, or iPad makes little sense without an iTunes account for filling up those devices with music, podcasts, videos, and apps. Every piece of Apple hardware doubles as a store for itself. As a result, Apple is in a position to capitalize on its market dominance and create a broader payments service, one that could help you pay for all sorts of stuff. Such a service might let you buy things online, as PayPal does. But as Cook indicated with that nod to the iPhone fingerprint reader, Apple could also turn the iPhone into a secure way of paying for stuff in the real world, inside brick-and-mortar retail stores. Hold your iPhone up to a scanner on the counter, and you’re done — or with iBeacon, don’t bother coming up to the counter at all. With your credit card already on file, your fingerprint would be the only signature you’d need.”
Much more in the full article here.
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