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Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, my Nexus 5 is the first device that is good (to me) right out of the box.

I've installed Cyanogenmod on every Android device before and Cydia on my first iOS device (my first smartphone was an iPhone 3GS).

The clerk you are talking about, will still not know what NFC is for payments in a year from now. It doesn't change anything that Apple now joined the same game with Apple Pay... It's more infrastructure related and demand related.

Just like the Apple Watch, there is no actual demand for NFC Payments from regular users.

There was demand for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Also Maps applications are used a lot (Navigation).

We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash.

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"We don't use watches anymore (check your smartphone), we still pay with our wallet and with cash."

When I was living in the UK about 70% of my purchases were done with a chip and pin card, even a couple of beers at a pub.

This because in the end it was quicker and easier than using cash.

If NFC makes paying quicker and easier than using cash or cards, the demand will be there: by the end of the month there will be millions of iPhone6 customers waiting to test these new features.

If I were a shop/chain owner, I would be scrambling to try to please them, before the competition does.

Here in Canada, we have "contactless" payments on the major credit and debit cards. When it's time to pay, you just tap your card on the reader and it's done().
NFC payments using a phone would add a few more steps, so I think that the wallet and card is going to win out for me. It would be very hard to get it much simpler than it is right now.

() There are limits. My MasterCard, for example, will let me make contactless payments up to a total of $50. At that point it will require me to make a Chip&Pin transaction in order to reset the $50. When this happens the reader will just say "Insert Chip" or something.

Contactless is supported in the UK as well (usually up to a £20 minimum), but isn't nearly as widely supported as chip +pin, and I certainly don't know anyone who uses it regularly.

Once more supermarkets roll it out (I'm looking at you, Sainsburys), it'll start to get proper traction and kick on to being regular thing.

Also, it's often difficult to see whether a retailer has contactless even when you're standing Right There and then you do the normal chip+pin out of shame because you feel like a right fool with your card out.

I'm going out with some friends, everyone brings in 10 € into the shared "wallet".. (1 guy has an old Nokia, the rest is shared between Android, iPhone and Windows Phone). One guy has no wallet and only has Apple pay .

Next time he goes out with them, he will have his wallet. To give back the money he borrowed from his friends.

When the above situation can be handled.. There is an option for a walletless life. Where i live (Belgium), this won't happen within the next 2 years

>he will have his wallet.

The vast majority of men in the US will have their wallets with them regardless. The iPhone 6 will not, and is not designed to replace driver's license, etc.

I think that should be the whole point, seeming that without use of the wallet, there is no use for cash anymore.

For the ones that think a wallet isn't required anymore because of Apple Pay. How are you going to transfer money to your friend (with any other device or without a smartphone), with a transfer rate of 0% without cash?

If that problem is solved, there can be a future for a walletless life.

Venmo.

In fact, in young circles (in the US), this seems to have become the defacto way of transferring money socially between individuals. I don't think I have paid someone I know with physical cash in years.

It costs you guys money to make bank transfers? Wow. For the record, I can send and receive money (for free) from my phone only needing the other person's phone number at this point. (Australian. Also, I've never used the pay-to-phone stuff because I just prefer to use their account number. I can do that for free from my phone too.)

It strikes me that our NFC infrastructure is way better than yours too. Somewhat a reverse of most patterns in tech-infrastructure. It's just a pity Google won't support the Nexus' NFC capabilities in Australia - I bet Apple will.

The banking system in the US is terrible and stuck in the stone age.

Squarecash, free and works over email so anything that can do email can do it.

Any number of services support ths - I believe Wallet, Venmo, Paypal and Square all offer some form of fee-less peer-to-peer transfer, because it has such a high value for organic growth as people send money to friends.

And/or because it's a nice chunk of data to add to the social graph.

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