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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

The card has a magnetic stripe, so they must have some solution to the magstripe number being stolen

Why does it even have a magnetic stripe in this day and age, as a completely new tech product from Apple?

Because it's not a tech product, it's a credit card, and plenty of places, in the US at least, still require the use of a magnetic strip. As for how they deal with a changing card number, I have no idea.

As others have said, still lots of mag stripe readers in the US. In fact, many Square readers still seem to be swipes.

https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/reader

The main thing that makes me pretty much "meh" on the card is that the 2% is only for Apple Pay which I use for a tiny percentage of my purchases. So it's really more like 1% back and I already get that and more with other cards.

I think that's part of the point -- to encourage customers to ask for Apple Pay and get merchants to adopt it.

I have no doubt you're right. And I'm sure GS wants to be in early on whatever change in payment mechanisms happen in the US over time as well. But it doesn't change the fact that it's not too useful for me today. Sticking a card in a chip reader may not be as high tech as NFC using a phone or watch (or even using a contactless card) but in practice it's pretty convenient.

In the US, many point of sale terminals are still not converted to use chips. I most frequently encounter stripe readers at gasoline stations. I'm fairly sure that each time my card has been cloned in the last 5 years, it has been via criminals modifying gas pump card readers to harvest card numbers.

I hate gas stations so much that I bought an EV. Ironically, my wife makes me pump gas for her, so my cards are still at risk.

It's just a co-branded credit card, not a new tech product.

Same agreement as a card offered by a charity, alumni association, airline, or baseball team. Uber has a co-branded card too, which is also not a tech product. Incidentally Uber's credit card has particularly attractive rewards.

Apple was [probably] a bit more involved with the design of the UI than your average airline, but that's it.

I don't know if this is a false memory but I seem to recall at least one time when I saw a vendor swipe a card because chip didn't work on that particular occasion for some reason. I don't know if magnet is actually more reliable, but it does seem to be that way to me.

In Europe I've never used the magnetic stripe. Across 10+ countries, for the past 10+ years.

They still exist in the UK, but I've never seen one used.

I 'used' it once when Sainsbury's first introduced their self checkouts, for some reason it asked me to do it after I tried chip+pin.

Didn't work. Ended up having to pop outside to the cashpoint to get analogue money out.

I assume it's just one of those old weird technologies that just exists because solely it's not been removed yet like fax machines

This is about the US.

True, but the point was about the reliability of the tech. My point was that the chip can be just as reliable as the magnetic strip.

The chip is nearly 100% reliable (absent any manufacturing defects). It's the network in the U.S. that is stuck in the 1970s. Even with the supposed requirement to move to chip terminals, I still come across so many merchants who either (1) don't even have a chip reader, or (2) have a little sticky note on the payment terminal that says "chip broken".

What's really surprising is when a new store opens (restaurant, typically), and they don't have a chip reader on day one. They still swipe.

I've had my card skimmed more times than I can count over the decades. That we're still dealing with this problem in 2019 is maddening.

As with any Apple product ever, this is not a "completely new tech product". This is a long established market that Apple believes they can do better than everyone else.

For an exorbant price of course, but that stage is some years into the future.

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