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That's because they are not a OEM that throws hardware together trying to differentiate, no matter what the software using it will be like. Apple added NFC the

That's because they are not a OEM that throws hardware together trying to differentiate, no matter what the software using it will be like. Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type, and that makes them make money but without charging more neither the users neither the merchant, and is interoperable with existing credit cards and banks (including the per-bank customized provisioning process). Putting everything together is several order of magnitude harder than adding a part number to a BOM years before the ecosystem is ready to use it appropriately. They had to get there feature by feature, one at a time. Touch ID was a stepping stone for instance, and that's a whole engineering and design task by itself. It's a multi-year evolution to get to the point of adding a service that incidentally happens to use NFC as one of the many involved technologies. So, no, they did not "add NFC" without Apple Pay.

sigmar 11y ago
>Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type... What specific changes have made it possible for NFC to work in this way? All those things you listed seem possible in 2012.
- ptomato 11y ago
  TrustZone/"Secure Enclave" as apple is calling it.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  They were _possible_ in 2012 but getting everyone on board is difficult. Google included NFC on the Nexus S in 2010. The Nexus S was an atrocious piece of junk compared to its contemporary, the iPhone 4. NFC did nothing to make using the Nexus S more pleasurable. Android beam? Nobody used that. Google did not release the NFC-capable Wallet app until 2011, and at that time the integration between the app, the phone (still the Nexus S) and the payment terminals was ghastly. Nobody used it because it was much slower than paying by any other way and half the time it didn't work. The 2011 Galaxy Nexus didn't make things any better. The NFC antenna was attached to the flexible battery cover and the spring-loaded contacts didn't really work. Google was still pushing Wallet but the merchants didn't care because they weren't getting a better price on transaction clearance and close to nobody had the hardware. NFC was a complete basket case, and still remains that way except for Apple.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    What you just described is exactly how Apple killed NFC adoption. The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful. June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.
    - etchalon 11y ago
      What are you talking about? Passbook was never a payment system, it just had gift cards. Passbook isn't a payment system NOW. Apple Pay is, Passbook is just the app that shows users their credit cards.
      - bduerst 11y ago
        Right, Passbook was Apple's first play at mobile payments. They were trying to build an app ecosystem that used credits to to make mobile payments. It was Apple's response to NFC which wasn't very good.
        etchalon 11y ago
        It wasn't a mobile payments play, though. It was a solution to storing things like movie tickets, airline tickets, gift card vouchers, etc. "Payment" was never in its vocabulary.
- npunt 11y ago
  Market changes - POS credit card machines were scheduled to be phased out in favor of chips and NFC by EOY2015 [1]. Apple Pay didn't come out of the blue. The impending POS infrastructure change created the opportunity to launch a better payments user experience in the 2014-2015 timeframe. Apple knew this, and developed/acquired/refined a better security method (touchID + tokenization) and corresponding user experience to negotiate on favorable terms with banks and merchants, which sealed the deal for many and created momentum toward getting stragglers onboard and reaching broad market penetration. Just adding an NFC chip and calling it a day changes nothing. Few markets are penetrated by hardware - or even hardware and software - alone. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/october-2015-the-end-of-the-swipe-and-sign-credit-card/ http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...
  - bduerst 11y ago
    That's not quite right. That article is about chip & pin only, and not about NFC. Apple made the business decision to build their own payments system and lock merchants in using Passbook, rather than use NFC, which is more open. When it comes to market adoption of hardware, typically the market leader gets picked up for adoption. By forcing their own version of mobile payments (passbook) and not allowing NFC, the market was split and NFC adoption stymied.
    - spiralpolitik 11y ago
      That's not quite right either. Apple Pay does not require Apple-specific contactless payment terminals and will work with Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, and American Express's ExpressPay terminals. So merchants are not "locked in" to passbook. The reason for Apple Pay success is that they worked with the companies in question so that the infrastructure was already in place when the phone was launched. I was in the UK the week of the Apple Pay launch there and the same terminals that 3 months prior were accepting my contactless card were now accepting my iPhone. In other words it just worked.
      - bduerst 11y ago

sigmar 11y ago

>Apple added NFC the day they had the software and the service ready, with all the intricacies in making a secure and private payment system, that works offline, is as fast or faster than swiping a card with no passwords to type... What specific changes have made it possible for NFC to work in this way? All those things you listed seem possible in 2012.

ptomato 11y ago
TrustZone/"Secure Enclave" as apple is calling it.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
They were _possible_ in 2012 but getting everyone on board is difficult. Google included NFC on the Nexus S in 2010. The Nexus S was an atrocious piece of junk compared to its contemporary, the iPhone 4. NFC did nothing to make using the Nexus S more pleasurable. Android beam? Nobody used that. Google did not release the NFC-capable Wallet app until 2011, and at that time the integration between the app, the phone (still the Nexus S) and the payment terminals was ghastly. Nobody used it because it was much slower than paying by any other way and half the time it didn't work. The 2011 Galaxy Nexus didn't make things any better. The NFC antenna was attached to the flexible battery cover and the spring-loaded contacts didn't really work. Google was still pushing Wallet but the merchants didn't care because they weren't getting a better price on transaction clearance and close to nobody had the hardware. NFC was a complete basket case, and still remains that way except for Apple.
- bduerst 11y ago
  What you just described is exactly how Apple killed NFC adoption. The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful. June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.
  - etchalon 11y ago
    What are you talking about? Passbook was never a payment system, it just had gift cards. Passbook isn't a payment system NOW. Apple Pay is, Passbook is just the app that shows users their credit cards.
    - bduerst 11y ago
      Right, Passbook was Apple's first play at mobile payments. They were trying to build an app ecosystem that used credits to to make mobile payments. It was Apple's response to NFC which wasn't very good.
      - etchalon 11y ago
        It wasn't a mobile payments play, though. It was a solution to storing things like movie tickets, airline tickets, gift card vouchers, etc. "Payment" was never in its vocabulary.
npunt 11y ago
Market changes - POS credit card machines were scheduled to be phased out in favor of chips and NFC by EOY2015 [1]. Apple Pay didn't come out of the blue. The impending POS infrastructure change created the opportunity to launch a better payments user experience in the 2014-2015 timeframe. Apple knew this, and developed/acquired/refined a better security method (touchID + tokenization) and corresponding user experience to negotiate on favorable terms with banks and merchants, which sealed the deal for many and created momentum toward getting stragglers onboard and reaching broad market penetration. Just adding an NFC chip and calling it a day changes nothing. Few markets are penetrated by hardware - or even hardware and software - alone. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/october-2015-the-end-of-the-swipe-and-sign-credit-card/ http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...
- bduerst 11y ago
  That's not quite right. That article is about chip & pin only, and not about NFC. Apple made the business decision to build their own payments system and lock merchants in using Passbook, rather than use NFC, which is more open. When it comes to market adoption of hardware, typically the market leader gets picked up for adoption. By forcing their own version of mobile payments (passbook) and not allowing NFC, the market was split and NFC adoption stymied.
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    That's not quite right either. Apple Pay does not require Apple-specific contactless payment terminals and will work with Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, and American Express's ExpressPay terminals. So merchants are not "locked in" to passbook. The reason for Apple Pay success is that they worked with the companies in question so that the infrastructure was already in place when the phone was launched. I was in the UK the week of the Apple Pay launch there and the same terminals that 3 months prior were accepting my contactless card were now accepting my iPhone. In other words it just worked.
    - bduerst 11y ago