“When you look at your smartphone, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about the poor calculator, day planner and digital camera it helped send to the dustbin of history. But starting today, that same phone is taking aim at another victim: your wallet and the credit cards you carry in it,” Mark Rogowsky reports for Forbes. “Both are on ‘deathwatch’ as Apple rolls out Apple Pay for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. While the impact of the new software will be limited at first, it will usher in a new era of convenience and security that will ultimately bring benefits to everyone — whether or not they are iPhone users. Here’s what you need to know.”
“Apple Pay is really two ways to pay rolled into one. The most visible of those will be using your iPhone to pay in retail stores, verifying your ID with the fingerprint sensor. That version of Apple Pay will replace the traditional credit-card swipe,” Rogowsky reports. “The other version is Apple Pay inside of apps. It’s currently iOS only (Macs need not apply) because it requires the TouchID [sic] sensor… Apps that don’t support Apple Pay but want your credit card and address info are going to quickly look archaic; don’t think merchants aren’t aware of this. Buying on your iPhone is about to get a lot easier, for better or for worse.”
“Besides Panera, is anyone going to accept Apple Pay?” Rogowsky asks rhetorically. “First, a clarification. There is no ‘accepting Apple Pay.’ You may have read an article or five suggesting that retailers don’t plan to support Apple Pay, implying there is some special thing they have to do to work with Apple. What a retailer needs is nothing more than a NFC-equipped point-of-sale terminal. Those aren’t everywhere yet. Apple says 220,000 merchants have them; First Data says that’s out of 8 million retail points of sale in the U.S. But if the NFC reader is ‘live’ it supports Apple Pay, whether or not the retailer has a deal with Apple Pay.”
“Apple Pay is,” Rogowsky writes, “a reminder of the company’s ability to lead the world in nearly impossible directions.”
Read more in the full article here.