Apple and Stripe are also set to commoditize the small business Point of Sale that is Square's bread and butter. iPhones were just announced to soon accept contactless payments directly, and probably also the next iPad will include the required NFC hardware.
The hardware is less important than the merchant account. The risk of charge backs means a small business accepting a credit card is effectively taking out a loan. Apple isn't going into that part of the value chain (so far).
Right, Apple is only providing the hardware and it requires to use a (partnered) processor, like Stripe, which was the example they used in their recent announcement. Stripe coincidentally sells chargeback protection as a service https://stripe.com/radar/chargeback-protection if that is a concern.
Exactly, afaict this feature's impact on Square is that online payment processors like Stripe have an easier path to competing for in person sales.
in what way is square being beat by clover? was square in some way doing better than cover at one point and is no longer doing so?
That's my understanding, yes. Square was first but now Clover is signing up more merchants.
Not related to said beating but I opened https://www.clover.com and umatrix icon showed the number 258. This many requests to 3rd party resources at start usually mean there is too much tracking. A good reason to just close the tab. By the way, Square had only 2.