Comment Re:Good luck with that. (Score 1) 558
I've never seen an NFC terminal. If it's industry standard where are they?
Are you sure you've never seen one? They look just like other credit card terminals, but have a protruding bump at the top with some of the various NFC brand logos on them, like PayPass, as well as the more generic NFC logo, which looks kind of like a wi-fi logo turned on its side. At least, that's what the ones I've seen usually look like.
There are some newer ones coming out, too, that also have the hoods around the number pad, so that you have privacy when typing your PIN.
If you really haven't seen one, that could range from astonishing to perfectly reasonable, depending on just where you are. In rural Upstate NY, they're not very common, but when I go buy groceries at Wegman's in Syracuse, or visit a Panera, they've all got them in one form or another.
However, the point here is that regardless of their current ubiquity or lack thereof, the technology behind them is an industry standard: any terminal that accepts Apple Pay also accepts Google Wallet and any of the various tap-to-pay NFC-enabled credit cards (like MasterCards with the aforementioned PayPass). Apple's not doing anything fancy and proprietary to communicate the authorization to the bank and merchant, just using the industry standard procedures for tokenized NFC payment.
It's important to remember that just because something is an industry standard (like, say, USB, or Thunderbolt), it won't necessarily show up everywhere immediately. In the US, Apple's a relatively early mover on this technology, despite how common it is in the rest of the developed world (and despite some geekier and less-well-known solutions like Google Wallet using it earlier), so for now, it seems to be a technology linked to Apple, but over the next few years, you'll start to see it more and more around the US.
Dan Aris