Who cares about inserting chips into the machine? We're already well past that, to contactless payment — tapping the chipped card against the terminal like an N

Who cares about inserting chips into the machine? We're already well past that, to contactless payment — tapping the chipped card against the terminal like an NFC door tag. It still uses the chip, and can still require your PIN (depending on your bank); you just don't stick the card in the machine to do it. MTBF = approximately forever. Inserting the chip is a fallback, or for high-value transactions. Both use-cases are low-volume enough that a POS terminal's chip-slot reader should see relatively little use/wear.