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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile Apple Pay is not doing much better. I tried it a couple of times with my iPhone. I had trouble getting it to work and it was definitely more troublesome than getting out a credit card. It would be enormously useful if I could use it to pay online merchants, which would keep me from entering address and payment info on my iPhone. But I have seen no such merchants and do not know if such an option is even possible at this point.

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Apple Pay processes tons of transactions daily, Current C can't actually launch their product because it's so bad. The drugstore in my building supports Apple Pay so I use it all the time and I like it more than a credit card because of the anonymity (the retailer can't track my sales). I'd really like it if gas pumps would start supporting it as they are common sources for skimmers.

As for paying merchants online (opposed to in an app , that is supposedly coming:

http://www.recode.net/2016/3/23/11587214/apple-pay-coming-to...

There a gas station chain around me that accepts Apple Pay at the pump. I'll go out of my way a little to go to one of those when I can.

I use it every day but I do wish it were accepted in more places. I walk to whole foods and Peet's and typically do not have my wallet with me. It's pretty fast. You can use it online, but only through apps (amazon, fandango etc) since it uses the touch authentication. IRL I use my watch, for online purchases of course I use my phone.

While Apple Pay might not be as convenient and simple as a world that only swipes credit cards, the spread of chip readers makes Apple Pay look comparatively convenient. First you do the dance of trying to figure out if the chip reader is actually enabled. Then for a lot of readers you have to wait a really long time with your card in the reader. And it's easy to mess up and pull out the card too early. With Apple Pay you just feel a little silly smacking your phone or watch up against a wireless reader.

The chip readers are such a disaster. I can't believe they are so slow.

What's interesting is that the ISO standard for NFC is derived from ISO 7816 standard for chip cards; and, NFC has to transmit at 13.56MHz while chips have a wired connection. I'm not sure what is going on there exactly, but it doesn't make much sense (at least before diggin' deeply into the specs).

It depends a lot on the terminal. I've been using a chip card for over 6 years now, and here in New Zealand we use cards for almost every payment.

The first generation of chip terminals were horribly slow, they took far longer than a swipe. They also wore out really fast - the spring contacts would stop making proper contact with the card leading to failed transactions.

The current generation (fourth I think) is much faster and more reliable. They can read the chip faster than contactless, there's still the PIN entry though.

I'm not sure how it is in the US but here most retailers rent their terminals so get reasonably regular upgrades.

I don't know how deep this rabbit hole you want to go down, but the speed of the transaction also depends on the actual chip in the card (ASIC), and the transceiver in the terminal. These chips do have to perform a cyptographic transaction while using power from the terminal. I wonder how much filth on the card causes poor connectivity(?). The max data rate for NFC is 848kbps (IIRC); not sure about contact smartcards, but it should be faster than that.

That's what is surprising to me, the chips are new in the US so the terminals that support them are also all brand new. I'd say it's a good 7 seconds on average, but sometimes even longer. Apple Pay is 1 second or less most of the time (though sometimes you have to sign so that slows things down).

This is the exact reason why I switched from CVS to Walgreens. The chip readers CVS uses are cumbersome and slow, taking 30-45s to complete the transaction. Walgreens, on the other hand, takes less than 10s when I use Apple Pay.

Apple Pay has been a godsend for me. I carry one backup debit card and slimmed my wallet down to almost nothing.

In Canada, we've had contactless terminals everywhere for a few years, so it's very rare to find a place where I can't just tap my Apple Watch or iPhone to pay. There's no need to find a place to explicitly supports Apple Pay, it works the exact same way our credit and debit cards have for years.

I use it about 4 times almost every day. I've used it to buy food, coffee, groceries, restaurants, even tickets for a sports game. It has always worked flawlessly. Never had an issue with a terminal, never got any weird errors, never had any fraud issues. Give it another try. I personally love it. I even pay with the Watch.

PS: What's with the downvotes? No positive experiences with a product are accepted?

Do bear in mind that there is better contactless support in other countries – that's probably one of the reasons Apple Pay is less convenient to use in the US!

In the UK, at least 1% of all transport payments in London use Apple Pay – a pretty huge volume considering. It's also universally accepted wherever there is contactless support (which over here is now becoming ubiquitous).

Just to add to this, Mastercard and Visa have set a 2020 limit for all card machines in Europe to support contactless payments.

The readers they use for Oyster card, and the specifics of Oyster Card's requirements for the NFC transceiver are probably quite different from VISA/MC. The US has many transit systems that use contactless too. Off the top of my head, from years ago: Atlanta, D.C., New York, Las Vegas, and that was in '06.

You can use contactless across TfL services as of a few months ago.

Sorry, I did mean "contactless credit cards" rather than "generic contactless system" – the word "contactless" is almost exclusively associated with payment cards in the UK.

TfL's network has supported direct use of contactless payment cards for > 6 months now, so Apple Pay (and the Android equivalent) support comes for free.

Having worked in NFC payment terminal development, I think we just speak different lingo.

Yeah, I gave up on Apple Pay a few months ago. It's easy and fast when it works, but figuring out whether it's going to work is a massive hassle. Simply looking for the NFC symbol is not enough. Some places don't actually enable it, and some places enable it but still don't work. It's easier to just go for a credit card than it is to try my phone and then possibly switch to the card.

On-device payments are possible, and those work pretty nicely. I've used it with Uber before. I don't think it's possible to use them with random merchants who don't have iPhone apps, though.

"Not doing much better?" Please, this CurrentC thing was a disaster from start to finish. I mean I'm sorry you don't like Apple Pay and all but that's just silly.

My Austrian bank revived the NFC sticker (looks like this: http://help.orf.at/v2static/storyimages/site/help/20160622/e...). You just stick it on anything (for instance on your pebble or normal watch) and it pays on contact and the payment confirms by PIN if > 15EUR.

Since the sticker/card independently already hooks up with my devices anyways (sends me a confirmation push to my phone) I don't actually understand why I need NFC on the phone.

I have no problem using it every where NFC POS terminals are here in Portland. If more places that use square had NFC reader I would be using apple pay well over 80% of the time.

On a recent trip, I think it was in Copenhagen, many vendors who used square-like setups also had a bluetooth-or-something connected round dongle paired with their tablet they used for NFC and EMV payments (as many of those terminals are mag stripe only without the dongle). Quite cool.

https://squareup.com/contactless-chip-reader

WholeFoods has it setup well, but that's the only store I've come across that has it. I think it's about the same speed as digging out my credit card. I just wish more retailers would enable it for their machines.

I use it everyday. Mostly at vending machines but also anywhere else it's available. Using it with the Apple watch is even easier. Works every time for me... Wish it was accepted everywhere.

My android pay works pretty seamlessly; it's slightly easier than my chip card. Except it only works at a couple of stores, so I never even think about using it.

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