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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

Slightly offtopic: how's your experience with Apple Pay so far?

Not the OP, but as someone with an Apple Watch, my experience with Apple Pay can be summed up easily: I still pay with my credit card. It's just easier. Each time I've tried to pay with Apple Pay, I feel the fool. It's much easier just to hand the person a piece of plastic and then get it back. With Apple Pay, it's stupid, sitting there with my hand waiting to pass it over the device. Oh wait, no, too soon. Gotta pay attention. With a card, I can pay and not thing about what I have to do. Just hand it over.

Apple did the impossible: made payments more difficult than even cash.

Wow, I've had the complete opposite experience. In most/all stores I deal with regularly, you can swipe your card at any time while they're scanning your stuff. You can do the same thing with the watch. I've been able to get away with using it in countries where it wasn't officially supported yet, as well, since it's just NFC and no one has explicitly blocked Apple Pay there (sadly not the same in the US). Results may vary.

My experience mirrors your own. It's really convenient in stores where you have to swipe your own card rather than hand your card to the cashier. Apple Pay on the watch is better than the phone too.

And I've picked Walgreens over CVS several times because of Apple Pay.

Thirded. The hard part of Apple Pay is figuring out whether you can use it. The NFC icon isn't always obvious. When in doubt, I don't try. But when I do try, it's fast and easy. I just wait until the terminal shows my total, then I hold my phone up and it goes through. It's not a game-changer or anything, but it's a nice convenience.

(One exception to the above: Home Depot had terminals that claimed to do NFC but would hang for a while and eventually time out and error if I tried Apple Pay. That was annoying.)

In the US a lot of terminals that technically could support Apple Pay because they use NFC (and have the logo you mention) have explicitly disabled Apple Pay support. So the scanner 'sees' the watch and kinda starts the transaction, then fails later because it's "not supported yet". Because they have a vested interest in a competing product.

In Canada (where the chip & pin is much more prevalent) I find paying via NFC to be a lot easier.

In many stores the credit card terminal is right in front of you. After indicating you'd like to pay via credit, the terminal is "activated" and shows your total owed. At this point you can insert your chip &pin card, or simply tap the card (or your phone) if there is an obvious NFC reader.

From the sounds of your comment, the whole timing of this workflow just isn't very smooth for you since many people are still paying with regular swipe credit cards.

Edit: Speeling!

I haven't noticed if Walmart's new readers are NFC enabled, but using a chip and pin card with them is all about timing. Too early and the transaction hangs during authorisation. If you don't go through the prompt and explicitly declare the transaction as a credit, the transaction won't go through either. If they're NFC enabled I'm sure the same restrictions apply.

I love it and use it whenever the credit card machine has an NFC reader. I usually pay with my watch and it hasn't failed yet.

I still carry my bank's debit card for incompatible readers, but after having my card blocked three times in the last three years for fraudulent activity, I love not having to give out my real account number whenever I can avoid it.

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