How Square Made Its Own iPad Replacement | Hacker News Reader

How Square Made Its Own iPad Replacement

wired.com

92 pointsuptown48 comments

If this was so carefully designed why isn’t there an LED ring around the card slot? The first time I used one, the clerk had to explain several times that there was a nearly invisible card slot in front of me.

I've never seen any LED lights around a card slot on any self-service terminal before. They all have a card slot at the bottom section of whatever screen/keypad device is part of the UI and customers never seem to have an issue finding it.

Safeway and Whole Foods (I believe Verifone terminals) have a blue light over the card entry slot. It's also immediately visible because it's black on grey. The Square terminal is a black void on a black field.

In Australia at least, almost every self-serve POS in Coles, Woolworths, Bunnings, [any other large retailer] etc has an illuminated card slot. Most ATM's do too, as well as the particular brand of POS eftpos machines that the Commonwealth Bank supplied to vendors.

I think I’ve seen the feature you describe on one chip reader... ever.

These things are pretty but terrible to use as a customer. It's not obvious where the sensor for Apple Pay is and it's impossible to use with an Apple Watch. Philz Coffee and Blue Bottle have them in San Francisco and I much prefer the old card reader/Pay point.

These Wired articles that are clearly co-ordinated with product and redesign launches are starting to wear on me.

Wired had been going down hill for ages, but these pieces are a new low when for Wired standards.

We use Square, using a 6 year old iPad and the first "stand" they made. It works great. We also use it to pull up the website, control music and Chrome-cast videos. We do this maybe 1-2x a year. But it still is multi-purpose.

I looked into this new stand but the customer signature screen sucks and you can't install anything else on it.

Maybe ... just maybe, not being able to "install anything" is the point?

I read so many stories about skimmers on ATMs and other POS machines - that maybe this is a good thing?

Wonder if they're planning to offer other services integrated through their hardware? Music with blue-tooth speakers, lighting (or anything that uses hardware power switches), security cameras/backup/AI recognition, temp/HVAC with industry partnerships (or equipment instrumentation monitoring.)

They've decided to compete in the dedicated POS space, yet they continue to compare themselves to tablet based solutions. To that end, I don't think they're actually delivering much novelty here, they've only eliminated the flexibility and low cost benefits that their other products provide.

>They've decided to compete in the dedicated POS space, yet they continue to compare themselves to tablet based solutions.

How did you get that as a takeaway?

"Square’s tablet has 16 gigabytes of flash memory but hardly any internal storage"

I am very confused by that sentence.

Flash memory == RAM

I think...

That's a whole lot of RAM for a POS device. Maybe this is the device that finally runs Crysis?

16 GB of RAM for an Android tablet that is only running the square software is probably way too much. I suspect the writer meant that it has 16 GB of storage.

In this case I believe it means in the traditional sense, not ephemeral storage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

Flash memory is non-volatile memory. Typically used to hold the executable and some data for localisation.

Not 100% sure what is meant here for internal storage. Sometimes, it may be possible to use the Flash memory for general data as well. The SSD in your laptop is made from similar Flash memory technology.

TLDR - Square made a PoS machine. It is an Android tablet(s).

Yeah, as much as I like long-form pieces on how a technology was developed, pretty much any company with capital can make an Android tablet nowadays. But "Company develops internal tech solution to reduce BOM costs & reliance on third parties" isn't as sexy a title.

I often notice that most things now are basically "Android tablets".

Those little machines popping up in restaurants where you can order/pay? Android tablets.

Have a relatively recent car? Got CarPlay? Your stereo is probably an Android tablet.

So this isn't too surprising. Instead of spending whatever amount of time trying to design and build an embedded system, along with basic OS, library, etc, you can just find an Android tablet that fits what you need and build off of that.

Yes, the magic of being open to other hw/sw manufacturers. all over again...

It drives me up a fucking wall when clients want iPads for their retail spaces. You are locked into their limited form factors and premium pricing for a device that will likely be locked down to extremely limited functionality. Android tablets come in any size and shape for half the price and are easier to manage from MDM software. You can also just buy large touchscreens with USB ports that can plug into whatever. They all look the same when they're anchored to a case or kiosk.

What you need is a rack which fits an android tablet inside an iPad case. Branding and low cost, all in one.

That doesn't surprise me. The stereo(with CarPlay) in my Subaru is so sad, it crashes often and is definitely single-threaded. Honestly I'd rather just tape an iPad up in it's place. It would probably perform better.

  > Square has designed its own secure enclave,
  > a co-processor for processing encrypted
  > payment information. About a dozen
  > employees at Square work on the silicon
  > team.

I do not believe this. $50 says it is just an STM32 with square-written firmware

Square has designed custom ASICs before. One of the older Square readers did crypto just based on power from the phone's 3.5mm headphone jack, so they had to get creative. Then in 2015 they bought Kili, a Canadian company whose entire business was a custom payments ASIC [1]. I didn't work on hardware when I was at Square, but I expect many members of the Kili team contributed to this effort.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/square-buys-kili-technolog...

As a retail customer, I love this device. Ritual Coffee uses one in their Valencia St store. It’s fast for both NFC and chip card purchases. The card slot for the chip reader is a little too low key. The NFC reader is very forgiving as to location.

I’m surprised this doesn’t have a built in receipt printer. Many legislations require a receipt of sale to be provided (at least if requested).

> OK, not really; streaming Netflix on something designed to be a point-of-sale-system is a terrible idea, worse than watching movies on a Linux-based in-flight entertainment system.

Is there a term equivalent to "suspension of disbelief", but for non-fictional writing? This broke mine. I don't know what Linux has to do with anything here.

"Exceeding one's license to hyperbole for the sake of maintaining viewership and having at least one inflammatory statement to trigger 'engagement'."

Kind of rolls off the tongue very much like how an uncoated tablet doesn't.

It gives the reader some context. Many of the readers of this will have had the unfortunate experience of trying to watch an in flight movie on a Linux in seat entertainment system. Fewer will have used the Square POS system, particularly the new one.

How would anyone know what OS their in-seat entertainment system uses? I've watched the inflight movie on a wide variety of systems on varying airlines and I don't recall the experience ever being branded in that way.

if you're watching when they reboot (which is not uncommon when you're on the ground), you'll usually spot a tux or two up in the top left corner of the screen, followed by high-speed kernel messages before their app takes over.

fun fact: the virgin america systems had little keyboards on the remotes and you could kill/restart the X server with ctrl-alt-backspace

you could also switch to a console with ctrl-alt-f*. was never able to login though...

It's a weird comment either way, because having a bad experience on the inflight entertainment system has nothing to do with the underlying OS.

Not to mention, but most in flight entertainment systems DO run Linux.

It's just the typical hipster journalist looking for any excuse possible to justify Apple status signalling. You have to create something to sneer at before you can feel smug and superior about what OS a proper POS terminal should run before allowing it to process your black card.

Yeah, like aren't in-flight entertainment systems.... literally linux based these days? They're android tablets!

As far as I know, they've been based on Linux since the individual screen on the seat in front of you exist.

Before that, it was just a big shared screen and everyone had to watch the same movie at the same time.

A lot of companies have their own. PayAnywhere was using iPad and moved to custom replacement device around 5 yrs ago. It's funny to see this as news when many other company in this space have been doing the same for quite a long time.

Soooo they used Android? Unsurprisingly, it's cheaper when you don't have Apple's classic markup.

I think it was more a matter of total control, over the OS, the hardware specs, etc. They needed to provide a better turn-key experience for their users, including taking into account what long-term maintenance is like.

Square on iPads has inadvertently given Apple a beachhead in retail stores. I imagine Square wants these new devices to block Apple from converting these retail iPad users to a competing Apple services.

Apple isn't interested in getting into a shrinking industry like retail. The hand holding and R&D required are extensive, and don't generate enough profit to meet Apple's margin goals.

I see what you mean. With Apple Pay, Apple can slide into retail payment processing but they only have to deal with OEMs and banks, not every mom 'n' pop retail store.

I don't think that's the point. The article says the "Square Register" device is $999. Obviously, you can get an iPad for much less than that.

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