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Five years ago, these would be futuristic.

Now, compared to a pure-phone solution, they're retrograde: an extra thing to carry, perhaps useful to interface with legacy, insecure magstripe-readers. "A day late and a dollar short."

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Do you honestly shop at only places w/ NFC readers? Do you not eat at restaurants? Do you not take cash out at ATMs? I mean - sure Apple Pay is slicker and maybe more secure - but I can not imagine anyone now ditching plastic to go 100% Apple Pay, Google Wallet, whatever.

I like it when internet folk comment about current technology as legacy because some tiny fraction of its market now uses something new and shiny.

With the prospect of fraud liability in the US shifting to the merchants starting next fall, many merchants will be swapping in terminals that are EMV compliant. I suspect many of these merchants will go for a terminal that also has NFC.

http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014...

I'm not paying $50-150, and futzing with some idiosyncratic offering of a small company, just to maintain magstripe-compatibility when magstripes are rapidly on the way out. Carrying a couple fallback magstripe cards for the last days of magstripes isn't a big hassle.

Carrying tons of magstripe cards when there were no other options – 5-10 years ago – is the only problem these seem to solve.

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