Patent on the NFC Mechanics of Apple Pay Details Its Inner Workings | Hacker News Reader

Patent on the NFC Mechanics of Apple Pay Details Its Inner Workings

techcrunch.com

It's worth noting that tokenization isn't an Apple thing - it's something the card networks came up with a year ago: http://about.americanexpress.com/news/pr/2013/mc-visa-amex-p...

What I don't get is how something like this could be patented. Isn't it all obvious? I think we had every single non-trivial component (single-use tokens passed over secure channels, initialize-send-retry_if_failed loops and other stuff) for years. If the "innovation" is that those are now used for payments over NFC — I don't get it. Or I've missed something novel on a quick glance.

You need to read the claims of the patent - it isn't patenting payments over NFC, it is on ways of recovering on NFC communications failures.

That still doesn't seem novel, but that is a different topic to argue than payment over NFC...

"That could be ideal for the forthcoming iPad, which is rumored to offer Touch ID and Apple Pay"

Can't wait to be in line behind the person fumbling to get our their iPad to pay for a pack of gum. Phone and watch should be smooth though.

It might not be as silly on an iPad Mini. Also you may be using Apple Pay to pay for things at home (e.g. Pizza Delivery, or to renew your Keurig 3.0 online subscription to re-activate your coffee machine).

From the way the rumor mill is churning it looks like the iPad won't have NFC, and so the Apple Pay functionality would be limited to In App purchases through Instacart, Groupon and such, rather than In Store purchases at Walgreens.

Here's a link to the patent: http://1.usa.gov/1nelibZ

Claim 1, 8, and 15, on which the other claims are based, indicates the patent applies to how the system recovers from NFC failures, not the NFC payment mechanism itself. The other claims cover ways of diddling (mostly hardware) parameters to recover.

1. A method of operating a portable electronic device, comprising: using the electronic device to conduct a mobile payment transaction at a merchant terminal; and in response to detecting that the mobile payment transaction has failed, updating at least one operating setting on the electronic device prior to performing a subsequent payment attempt at the merchant terminal.

Did Apple just try to patent updating a variable and re-trying a request?

original post: http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10/09/apple-outlines-app...

Does this mean Apple Pay won't work with existing NFC payment terminals?

Nope. It will.

Patents need have little to nothing to do with products, and any article which claims that a patent disclosure reveals something unannounced about a product can be ignored without reading.

Yay, downvote!

What for? I continue to assert that articles that claim that patents reveal things about products are unfounded.

I have a number of patents myself: companies file them all the time with little to no concern for whether they'll use them in a product. Thus, the existence of a patent is little to no evidence regarding products.

What you said about the relationship between products and patents is true and worth adding to the discussion, fwiw.

I think making it an absolute - ie, there is never anything to learn along these lines - is going too far, but there are certainly a lot of patents that never see further development.

It's a little bit of hyperbole, sure, but I don't recall ever seeing a press article that used a patent disclosure to offer any real insight about unreleased products. I'd be happy to see a counterexample.

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