8 ms·

Sadly, it's much easier to just pay with Apple Pay on the iPhone.

by Bahamut 11y ago

pbreit 11y ago
Happily, it's much easier to pay with a credit card than all of them.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  That will change when Chip & Pin are common. Instead of just swiping, yes, yes, done, it will be inserting the card into the reader, the reader fails to read the chip, spitting on it, then trying again, and finally entering the pin and yes, yes, done. Don't misunderstand, chip & pin is something the US has long since needed. But the chips are unreliable and entering a pin on some terminals is annoying. A phone with NFC might be easier than that, just fingerprint to unlock, and then press a single button on the phone.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    As a european who has always had chip cards, it has never happened to me[0] that the reader failed to read the chip. Granted, I don't use the card very often, but I would say in the last 10 ten years I have probably used it a few hundred times. Chip & signature, is usually slower. OTOH, NFC credit cards are now also becoming more common in europe too, i.e. https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/ [0] EDIT: it might have happened and I can't remember it, which is effectively the same thing in context.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      You assume too much. I am from the UK, and the chip failing to read is a common occurrence, and some readers are well known bad (e.g. the cashier will be like "yeah it has been doing that all day" as you spit and polish the chip contacts). But I do use my card(s) a great deal. So much so that the contacts on the chip are changing from gold to brown.
      - amyjess 11y ago
        Yeah, thanks to your post, I'm not looking forward to chips becoming more popular in the US. I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Only times I've had a swipe fail has been when I mis-swiped the card, and that's entirely on my own klutziness, not any kind of mechanical failure. The future shouldn't be worse than the present, but it looks like that's the road we're going down...
        jessaustin 11y ago
        I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Although it seems less common over the last several years (perhaps because now physical cards are often replaced several times before they nominally expire?), this used to be a serious problem. The most common fix for a read failure was to put the card inside a plastic grocery bag, pull the bag tight, and then reswipe it. I have no idea how this fixed anything, but I witnessed it working many times.
      - asherkin 11y ago
        Once you've worn the contacts away you can hardly call them contacts any more (and it's unsurprising they fail regularly). Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better.
        Someone1234 11y ago
        > Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better. My mum is a cachier. It is a constant headache where she works. Some tills the staff avoid using until last because the reader sucks so bad. But, to you, C&P is an infallible technology that doesn't comfort to our normal rules of physics, so I'm sure nothing will convince you.
      - diegomsana 11y ago
        A gentle lady on the cashier once took card out of my hands and rubbed on her hair. It worked lol.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    You might be right. Chip & sign is pretty bad. Chip & PIN is awful.
  - asib 11y ago
    Swipe is very rare in the UK - Chip & Pin is the norm, at least it used to be. Contactless cards were introduced relatively recently, where you just tap and go - no verification required (as such there's a limit on the amount you can pay using contactless). These are very speedy, I think more so than Apple pay, and are becoming increasingly popular. In London (and possibly other places in the UK, I'm unsure) they have actually integrated contactless card readers into public transport, meaning you can hop on a bus/tube and pay for the journey with your card. Essentially, you can carry around a single card to commute, buy your lunch, go shopping and everything else.
    - jaddison 11y ago
      Chip & Pin and Contactless are commonplace in Canada as well at stores. Not all have it, but most get it as they upgrade their systems.
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      Honestly, contactless cards, and this push to merge a few of the cards, kind of terrify me. I already carry around my driver's license. I already carry around the access card to my school. I already carry around my student ID. I already carry around 3 different library cards. I already carry around my public transport card. I already carry around my debit card. I already carry around cash. Even if you remove a few of those I still need to carry my wallet with me, so what difference does it make? I mean, other than the loss of separation of identities that comes with the territory. It's fine that my public transport card has low security, because you can't cash it out easily, and it only carries a very limited value anyway. Neither of those apply to my debit card.
      - davnicwil 11y ago
        But with a pretty low limit on daily spend with the contactless card, it effectively has limited value too - assuming you'd cancel it within 24 hours of it being lost or stolen in most cases - and is therefore difficult to 'cash out' on for a thief. So actually both do apply to your contactless debit card, really. Actually there's likely more incentive to pickpocket a wallet for its cash contents, rather than the contactless card(s), given in a lot of wallets this will be both greater and, by definition of course, easier to cash out on! So it seems like carrying contactless cards doesn't add any particular incentive for theft above what has existed forever with carrying cash. Also, any other security vulnerabilities with the debit card, unrelated to contactless, still exist exactly as they do today. So, it seems to me that merging cards, i.e. adding contactless and the ability to use it for transport, and other things, seems to just add marginal convenience with essentially no added risk of theft or fraud[1]. So yes, it's not a life-changing technology and it won't mean you no longer have to carry a wallet, but it represents a small win and certainly a step improvement for everyday convenience, so that's good right? I for one simply think the fewer cards I have to carry, the better, to be honest. [1] though I have, to be fair, heard about the issue of thieves 'skimming' contactless cards in people's pockets, I don't know if that was always just a scare story or if it's actually a real exploitable vulnerability - but this seems likely to be a pretty far-flung edge case anyway.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    In the 5 years I've had a C&P card I've had it fail approximately once.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      I've had it for 8-9 years in the UK and I've had it failed many many times. More than I can count on both hands. The chips wear out, the readers wear out, the two get dirty, etc. it is a common nuisance, just ask any cashier.
      - Nullabillity 11y ago
        Sounds like your card is about to expire then, anyway.
        Someone1234 11y ago
        I am talking about multiple cards. I had at least four in that time.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    > That will change when Chip & Pin are common. Chip & PIN is not coming to the US. Chip & sign, yes, but no PINs.
  - smackfu 11y ago
    The readers I've seen in the US are a bit slow. And sometimes you run into ones where you insert your card and then the clerk says "that's not turned on yet", but that will shake itself out. Haven't seen any issues with bad reads.
  - patmcc 11y ago
    Canada has transitioned mostly to chip and pin (anecdotally, 95% of debit transactions I've done lately), and I've seen a really low failure rate on my cards. I can think of once in the last year I got chip errors on the reader.
    - jholman 11y ago
      I'm Canadian. I've never had a mechanical failure on chip&pin. A friend of mine seems to have failures constantly at a certain liquor store; dunno if it's the debit card she's using, or the store's reader, or both. But back when we used mag stripes, I used to see failures all the time. The anecdata in my life says chip&pin is FAR more reliable.
  - ersii 11y ago
    I use my bank/credit card often, which is Chip&PIN/EMV. I have never had a problem with any of my cards in that way, ie. the reader being clunky and failing to contact the card. I have however worn out a card that has been in use for a couple of years. I would beg to differ that the chips are unreliable. Other solutions might be easier, don't know about that though.
- jkelsey 11y ago
  That's your take. I find paying w/ Apple Pay on my iPhone very seamless and I far prefer it over dealing with a card. I'm sure there's others out there that share that opinion.
  - azinman2 11y ago
    When it works. im often having to do it multiple times and sometimes just switch to CC
    - jkelsey 11y ago
      I never have problems with it, and I use it every chance I get, but I certainly don't discount your experience. It sucks that you're having such a bad experience with it. If lots of folks are having the same experience, Apple's going to need to get those problems figured out if they want to win the war to replace cards.
      - mikeash 11y ago
        My own experience is that Apple Pay works well when it's available. The problem is playing the constant game of "Does this terminal/merchant accept Apple Pay?" It's not always easy to tell. For example, Home Depot for several months had terminals that claimed to support NFC, but got hung up authorizing and eventually timed out if you actually tried to use it.
        spearo77 11y ago
        I live in California, but went back home to Sydney for a few weeks this year. I used my apple watch to pay in about 90% of transactions, including parking meters! Almost all merchants support "Visa PayWave" (aka NFC) so moving my wrist up to the terminal to pay was a fun talking point. Not one checkout clerk had seen the apple watch used before, because the Aussie banks haven't reached an agreement with Apple yet.
        11y ago
- Haul4ss 11y ago
  I've found that if you already have your phone in your hand, using Apple Pay is quicker than getting your wallet out. If you need to fish your phone out of one pocket, it's probably just as easy to fish your wallet out of another. I like the idea of Apple Pay. It's not accepted at enough places yet to make it really worthwhile, but I could see contactless payments being a big thing in the future.
- heywire 11y ago
  I currently pay with Apple Pay for two reasons. Security and Discover double cash back. Definitely not convenience. I always end up screwing up the double tap to pull up the cards and people give me looks because I'm holding up the line. That said, there really just aren't many places nearby that are taking it yet.
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    I had intended to use Apple Pay simply because of the Discover double cash back but hardly any retailers around me actually accept it so it's pointless for me.
  - gergles 11y ago
    You don't need to double-tap. Just touch (don't press) your thumb to the Touch ID sensor and put the back of the phone on the reader. The phone will wake up and automatically pay with your default card, as long as your registered finger is on the sensor.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Seriously. Does the US not have tap-to-pay credit and debit cards or something?
  - ctdonath 11y ago
    Nope. We have a VERY large network of point-of-sale registers, all built around the old swipe-to-pay (often requiring signature) credit card model. Replacing practically every POS register in the country is not a simple task; we're rolling out "chipped cards" and new registers to support them (that's a lot of effort & money), but doing so will take most of a year. That's why Apple Pay is such a big deal, and why the fuss about large businesses trying to roll out their own specialized (and usually inferior) version: yes we're starting to move to chipped cards, but even those are proving slow to use in many/most areas; most of the new registers also support NFC, making Apple Pay's "double tap a button and wave your watch/phone nearby" desirable - IF the store turns on the NFC & infrastructure. Alas, Walmart is trying to avoid Apple's fees by putting support into their own app, which will be annoyingly slow.
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      > We have a VERY large network of point-of-sale registers, all built around the old swipe-to-pay (often requiring signature) credit card model. Yeah, well, I'm in Canada and we had about the same thing, yet in the last 5 or so years we've seen 2 major changes (chip and pin followed by tap to pay) and most business have kept up, I haven't used the swipe in 3 or 4 years and the tap I'm now able to use tap at most places. Is there a problem with adoption in the US for some reason that doesn't exist in other places? Perhaps Interac has some special power here or something.
      - ctdonath 11y ago
        It just seemed to stall out. Either the technology wasn't up to par, or (more probable) there wasn't the impetus to roll it out everywhere - failure to reach critical mass. For NFC, however, practically every card reader MUST be upgraded this year to support chipped cards, with NFC riding along as a given capability which Apple is leveraging with its "half the market" NFC-capable phones & watches. About this time next year I'd expect widespread availability of Apple Pay and other NFC services.
- crusso 11y ago
  Any payment method that doesn't use cryptography for payment approval is fundamentally flawed.
- a_c_s 11y ago
  Not necessarily - for some stores, such as Walgreens (a US drugstore chain), the checkout flows look something like this: Credit card: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Select "credit card" 3. Swipe card 4. Answer question about making a donation 5. Confirm credit amount 6. Sign 7. Confirm (This is from memory, but it is roughly correct - I actually fear I may have forgotten a step or two) Apple Pay: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Wake iPhone and bring near POS terminal 3. Place finger on home button until it buzzes (~1 second) The flow for Apple Pay could be a little longer if you need to select a different card, but it is still both far faster and far simpler than the regular credit card flow.

Sadly, it's much easier to just pay with Apple Pay on the iPhone.

by Bahamut 11y ago

Sadly, it's much easier to just pay with Apple Pay on the iPhone.

pbreit 11y ago

Happily, it's much easier to pay with a credit card than all of them.

Someone1234 11y ago
That will change when Chip & Pin are common. Instead of just swiping, yes, yes, done, it will be inserting the card into the reader, the reader fails to read the chip, spitting on it, then trying again, and finally entering the pin and yes, yes, done. Don't misunderstand, chip & pin is something the US has long since needed. But the chips are unreliable and entering a pin on some terminals is annoying. A phone with NFC might be easier than that, just fingerprint to unlock, and then press a single button on the phone.
- riffraff 11y ago
  As a european who has always had chip cards, it has never happened to me[0] that the reader failed to read the chip. Granted, I don't use the card very often, but I would say in the last 10 ten years I have probably used it a few hundred times. Chip & signature, is usually slower. OTOH, NFC credit cards are now also becoming more common in europe too, i.e. https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ https://www.visa.co.uk/products/visa-contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/ http://www.mastercard.com/contactless/ [0] EDIT: it might have happened and I can't remember it, which is effectively the same thing in context.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    You assume too much. I am from the UK, and the chip failing to read is a common occurrence, and some readers are well known bad (e.g. the cashier will be like "yeah it has been doing that all day" as you spit and polish the chip contacts). But I do use my card(s) a great deal. So much so that the contacts on the chip are changing from gold to brown.
    - amyjess 11y ago
      Yeah, thanks to your post, I'm not looking forward to chips becoming more popular in the US. I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Only times I've had a swipe fail has been when I mis-swiped the card, and that's entirely on my own klutziness, not any kind of mechanical failure. The future shouldn't be worse than the present, but it looks like that's the road we're going down...
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        I've never had a problem with a card reader not properly reading swipes or the magnetic strip wearing down. Although it seems less common over the last several years (perhaps because now physical cards are often replaced several times before they nominally expire?), this used to be a serious problem. The most common fix for a read failure was to put the card inside a plastic grocery bag, pull the bag tight, and then reswipe it. I have no idea how this fixed anything, but I witnessed it working many times.
    - asherkin 11y ago
      Once you've worn the contacts away you can hardly call them contacts any more (and it's unsurprising they fail regularly). Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better.
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        > Cashiers will also say that even if they've never seen another card fail to read :P it's to make you feel better. My mum is a cachier. It is a constant headache where she works. Some tills the staff avoid using until last because the reader sucks so bad. But, to you, C&P is an infallible technology that doesn't comfort to our normal rules of physics, so I'm sure nothing will convince you.
    - diegomsana 11y ago
      A gentle lady on the cashier once took card out of my hands and rubbed on her hair. It worked lol.
- pbreit 11y ago
  You might be right. Chip & sign is pretty bad. Chip & PIN is awful.
- asib 11y ago
  Swipe is very rare in the UK - Chip & Pin is the norm, at least it used to be. Contactless cards were introduced relatively recently, where you just tap and go - no verification required (as such there's a limit on the amount you can pay using contactless). These are very speedy, I think more so than Apple pay, and are becoming increasingly popular. In London (and possibly other places in the UK, I'm unsure) they have actually integrated contactless card readers into public transport, meaning you can hop on a bus/tube and pay for the journey with your card. Essentially, you can carry around a single card to commute, buy your lunch, go shopping and everything else.
  - jaddison 11y ago
    Chip & Pin and Contactless are commonplace in Canada as well at stores. Not all have it, but most get it as they upgrade their systems.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    Honestly, contactless cards, and this push to merge a few of the cards, kind of terrify me. I already carry around my driver's license. I already carry around the access card to my school. I already carry around my student ID. I already carry around 3 different library cards. I already carry around my public transport card. I already carry around my debit card. I already carry around cash. Even if you remove a few of those I still need to carry my wallet with me, so what difference does it make? I mean, other than the loss of separation of identities that comes with the territory. It's fine that my public transport card has low security, because you can't cash it out easily, and it only carries a very limited value anyway. Neither of those apply to my debit card.
    - davnicwil 11y ago
      But with a pretty low limit on daily spend with the contactless card, it effectively has limited value too - assuming you'd cancel it within 24 hours of it being lost or stolen in most cases - and is therefore difficult to 'cash out' on for a thief. So actually both do apply to your contactless debit card, really. Actually there's likely more incentive to pickpocket a wallet for its cash contents, rather than the contactless card(s), given in a lot of wallets this will be both greater and, by definition of course, easier to cash out on! So it seems like carrying contactless cards doesn't add any particular incentive for theft above what has existed forever with carrying cash. Also, any other security vulnerabilities with the debit card, unrelated to contactless, still exist exactly as they do today. So, it seems to me that merging cards, i.e. adding contactless and the ability to use it for transport, and other things, seems to just add marginal convenience with essentially no added risk of theft or fraud[1]. So yes, it's not a life-changing technology and it won't mean you no longer have to carry a wallet, but it represents a small win and certainly a step improvement for everyday convenience, so that's good right? I for one simply think the fewer cards I have to carry, the better, to be honest. [1] though I have, to be fair, heard about the issue of thieves 'skimming' contactless cards in people's pockets, I don't know if that was always just a scare story or if it's actually a real exploitable vulnerability - but this seems likely to be a pretty far-flung edge case anyway.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  In the 5 years I've had a C&P card I've had it fail approximately once.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    I've had it for 8-9 years in the UK and I've had it failed many many times. More than I can count on both hands. The chips wear out, the readers wear out, the two get dirty, etc. it is a common nuisance, just ask any cashier.
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      Sounds like your card is about to expire then, anyway.
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        I am talking about multiple cards. I had at least four in that time.
- amyjess 11y ago
  > That will change when Chip & Pin are common. Chip & PIN is not coming to the US. Chip & sign, yes, but no PINs.
- smackfu 11y ago
  The readers I've seen in the US are a bit slow. And sometimes you run into ones where you insert your card and then the clerk says "that's not turned on yet", but that will shake itself out. Haven't seen any issues with bad reads.
- patmcc 11y ago
  Canada has transitioned mostly to chip and pin (anecdotally, 95% of debit transactions I've done lately), and I've seen a really low failure rate on my cards. I can think of once in the last year I got chip errors on the reader.
  - jholman 11y ago
    I'm Canadian. I've never had a mechanical failure on chip&pin. A friend of mine seems to have failures constantly at a certain liquor store; dunno if it's the debit card she's using, or the store's reader, or both. But back when we used mag stripes, I used to see failures all the time. The anecdata in my life says chip&pin is FAR more reliable.
- ersii 11y ago
  I use my bank/credit card often, which is Chip&PIN/EMV. I have never had a problem with any of my cards in that way, ie. the reader being clunky and failing to contact the card. I have however worn out a card that has been in use for a couple of years. I would beg to differ that the chips are unreliable. Other solutions might be easier, don't know about that though.
jkelsey 11y ago
That's your take. I find paying w/ Apple Pay on my iPhone very seamless and I far prefer it over dealing with a card. I'm sure there's others out there that share that opinion.
- azinman2 11y ago
  When it works. im often having to do it multiple times and sometimes just switch to CC
  - jkelsey 11y ago
    I never have problems with it, and I use it every chance I get, but I certainly don't discount your experience. It sucks that you're having such a bad experience with it. If lots of folks are having the same experience, Apple's going to need to get those problems figured out if they want to win the war to replace cards.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      My own experience is that Apple Pay works well when it's available. The problem is playing the constant game of "Does this terminal/merchant accept Apple Pay?" It's not always easy to tell. For example, Home Depot for several months had terminals that claimed to support NFC, but got hung up authorizing and eventually timed out if you actually tried to use it.
      - spearo77 11y ago
        I live in California, but went back home to Sydney for a few weeks this year. I used my apple watch to pay in about 90% of transactions, including parking meters! Almost all merchants support "Visa PayWave" (aka NFC) so moving my wrist up to the terminal to pay was a fun talking point. Not one checkout clerk had seen the apple watch used before, because the Aussie banks haven't reached an agreement with Apple yet.
        11y ago
Haul4ss 11y ago
I've found that if you already have your phone in your hand, using Apple Pay is quicker than getting your wallet out. If you need to fish your phone out of one pocket, it's probably just as easy to fish your wallet out of another. I like the idea of Apple Pay. It's not accepted at enough places yet to make it really worthwhile, but I could see contactless payments being a big thing in the future.
heywire 11y ago
I currently pay with Apple Pay for two reasons. Security and Discover double cash back. Definitely not convenience. I always end up screwing up the double tap to pull up the cards and people give me looks because I'm holding up the line. That said, there really just aren't many places nearby that are taking it yet.
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  I had intended to use Apple Pay simply because of the Discover double cash back but hardly any retailers around me actually accept it so it's pointless for me.
- gergles 11y ago
  You don't need to double-tap. Just touch (don't press) your thumb to the Touch ID sensor and put the back of the phone on the reader. The phone will wake up and automatically pay with your default card, as long as your registered finger is on the sensor.
ultramancool 11y ago
Seriously. Does the US not have tap-to-pay credit and debit cards or something?
- ctdonath 11y ago
  Nope. We have a VERY large network of point-of-sale registers, all built around the old swipe-to-pay (often requiring signature) credit card model. Replacing practically every POS register in the country is not a simple task; we're rolling out "chipped cards" and new registers to support them (that's a lot of effort & money), but doing so will take most of a year. That's why Apple Pay is such a big deal, and why the fuss about large businesses trying to roll out their own specialized (and usually inferior) version: yes we're starting to move to chipped cards, but even those are proving slow to use in many/most areas; most of the new registers also support NFC, making Apple Pay's "double tap a button and wave your watch/phone nearby" desirable - IF the store turns on the NFC & infrastructure. Alas, Walmart is trying to avoid Apple's fees by putting support into their own app, which will be annoyingly slow.
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    > We have a VERY large network of point-of-sale registers, all built around the old swipe-to-pay (often requiring signature) credit card model. Yeah, well, I'm in Canada and we had about the same thing, yet in the last 5 or so years we've seen 2 major changes (chip and pin followed by tap to pay) and most business have kept up, I haven't used the swipe in 3 or 4 years and the tap I'm now able to use tap at most places. Is there a problem with adoption in the US for some reason that doesn't exist in other places? Perhaps Interac has some special power here or something.
    - ctdonath 11y ago
      It just seemed to stall out. Either the technology wasn't up to par, or (more probable) there wasn't the impetus to roll it out everywhere - failure to reach critical mass. For NFC, however, practically every card reader MUST be upgraded this year to support chipped cards, with NFC riding along as a given capability which Apple is leveraging with its "half the market" NFC-capable phones & watches. About this time next year I'd expect widespread availability of Apple Pay and other NFC services.
crusso 11y ago
Any payment method that doesn't use cryptography for payment approval is fundamentally flawed.
a_c_s 11y ago
Not necessarily - for some stores, such as Walgreens (a US drugstore chain), the checkout flows look something like this: Credit card: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Select "credit card" 3. Swipe card 4. Answer question about making a donation 5. Confirm credit amount 6. Sign 7. Confirm (This is from memory, but it is roughly correct - I actually fear I may have forgotten a step or two) Apple Pay: 1. Enter phone number (for loyalty card lookup) 2. Wake iPhone and bring near POS terminal 3. Place finger on home button until it buzzes (~1 second) The flow for Apple Pay could be a little longer if you need to select a different card, but it is still both far faster and far simpler than the regular credit card flow.