Probably trying to decide how they can lock their users into their own system

Or waiting until the systems actually work, or anyone other than a bank expresses any kind of enthusiasm for it at all. Mate of mine has an NFC credit card. One day, we were in a coffee shop and he decided to give it a go when paying, just to see how it worked. It took about four times longer to do than just paying with cash and the till operator said she'd never actually had anyone bother to use it before.

My opinion? The thing that's holding back NFC is the same thing that's holding back sales of 3D televisions. Lack of consumer demand. Which is a problem I think the iPhone 5 possibly won't suffer from.

The iPHone 5 : Also doesn't have wheels. Even square ones with rounded corners.

Jon

Just what I was thinking.

The only way an NFC system is ever going to work is if it's a standard. If I can't touch my NFC phone against any given terminal and know it's going to work, 100% of the time, its useless. Therefore Apple or anyone else attempting to do a proprietary system will always fail. Even Apple know this. which is why they are waiting. It's not a case of waiting until they have the idea of how to do it 'their way' because 'their way' won't work, just the same as anybody else's 'way' won't work. It has to be 'everybody's way', or it will be a waste of time, the same way cashpoints were a pain in the arse until they sorted it out so you could use any card in pretty much any cashpoint machine.

If it was simply a case of them wanting to handle the payments they could do it now. The vast majority of iPhone users already have a credit card registered against their Apple ID's, for buying Apps and such. Several hundred million people. If Apple just wanted to do an NFC payment 'app' they could just make the phones charge things for goods the same way they already do for apps, with the occasional re-auth for security.

The alternative you're all suggesting requires Apple to effectively set up their own credit card and payment terminal network. Which every shop from the swankiest hotel to the corner newsagent would need to have. That would be a literal waste of tens of billions of dollars, for no effective gain at all.

If it's that they just haven't figured out how to do it yet, it's the same way they just haven't figured out yet how to eat soup with a fork. They aren't making any effort to figure it out because it's an idiotic idea. As is the notion of suggesting this is why they haven't done it yet.

Jon

Mobile payment fills me with inertia.