The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission won’t let banks team up to bargain with Cupertino over Apple Pay fees.
Three of the country’s four major banks applied to negotiate with Apple together, and potentially boycott the wireless payments service if no deal was reached. Now that the banks’ request has been denied by the ACCC, they’ll be forced to work out individual agreements over Apple Pay.
Apple is planning to adopt a new tap-to-pay standard that will be integrated into future iPhones specifically for customers in Japan, according to a new report. The FeliCa standard, originally developed by Sony, will allow users to store public bus and train passes in Apple Wallet.
Samsung Pay is doing all it can to make things difficult for Apple Pay, and that could include bringing the fight to its own backyard. Samsung is said to be working on porting its mobile payment service to the iPhone — but there is a catch.
We’ve been waiting for WhatsApp to deliver video calling since December, when the feature was first spotted inside a beta release on iOS. Now it has appeared again in various places, which suggests its launch is finally getting close.
Businesses across the US are pretty much out of excuses for not accepting Apple Pay now that Square’s wireless card reader is ready for prime time.
Starting today, every Apple Store in the US is now selling the new Square card readers that bring Apple Pay support as well as the ability to accept new chip-and-pin cards for transactions.
Apple Pay will finally arrive in China next year, and it’s going to have strong competition from day one. Just hours after Apple announced the expansion of its mobile payment service, Samsung confirmed its own will be following after it struck an almost identical deal with China UnionPay.
You local coffee shop might finally start accepting Apply Pay this week, thanks to the official launch of Square’s new card readers that support NFC payments, as well as new chip-and-pin debit cards.
Samsung is already fighting Apple Pay head on in the U.S., and now the South Korean company wants to beat it to new markets. A new report claims Samsung Pay will make its way to China, Spain, and the U.K. next year — only one of which is already supported by Apple Pay.
Apple Pay today makes its debut in the United Kingdom, nine months after it launched in the U.S., and it has been greeted by plenty of support from local banks. Those with a supported device can register their credit and debit cards now through the Passbook app on iOS.
About 95 percent of the coffee shops and stores I frequent in the Phoenix area use a Square reader or terminal to process payments, and virtually none of them support Apple Pay. That could soon change, though, thanks to a new contactless payments terminal from Square that will bring Apple Pay to businesses small and large this fall.
An outcry from customers who found that Home Depot no longer accepts Apple Pay resulted from an upgrade to the hardware chain’s in-store payment systems.
Stephen Holmes, Home Depot’s director of corporate communications, told Cult of Mac the problem is not specific to Apple Pay. This means that nobody, including Google Wallet users, can make electronic payments right now because the company is working on its NFC terminals.
“We don’t have the capability to accept [Apple Pay] online, and our NFC is currently inactive as we upgrade our systems,” he said.
A job ad that made a brief appearance on Apple’s website before being taken down has confirmed that Apple Pay is on its way to Europe. The listing called for a London-based intern who would “drive the roll-out” of Apple’s new mobile payment system across Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa.
The dream of replacing all the pieces of plastic in your wallet with your smartphone got a little closer to reality today as Starwood hotels announced that its new keyless entry system – SPG Keyless – is rolling out to hotels worldwide.
Guests at Aloft, Element, and W Hotels around the globe can now use their iPhone and the SPG app to skip the hotel front desk altogether, walk straight to their room, and unlock it, no key required.
iPhone 6 owners have only started using Apple Pay to buy items at local stores, but Apple is looking to expand the technology behind its mobile payments system to eventually replace everything from building security cards, subway passes, and bus tickets.
Apple representatives have reportedly been talking to potential partners about using the iPhone 6’s NFC for other uses, reports The Information, with the aim to replace all the tickets and passes you carry in your wallet too.
Just like one of The Avengers — where bickering superheroes team up to fight a far more oppressive evil — Apple and Android fans on reddit have united forces to boycott what they see as the unethical blocking of NFC payment systems by a number of different retailers, affecting users of both Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
The reason for this blocking of the NFC service is that the retailers in question — including Gap, Old Navy, 7-Eleven, Sears, Kmart and others — are part of an organization called Merchant Customer Exchange, which uses its own payment system called CurrentC.
Two major pharmacy chains have stopped supporting Apple Pay as merchants in the U.S. take sides on which mobile wallet platform to embrace.
Reports from a couple days ago revealed that Rite Aid had started disabling its NFC terminals, thereby forbidding the use of Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Now CVS has reportedly started shutting down its NFC terminals.
Critics are fond of saying Apple doesn’t innovate any more. But Apple’s new electronic payment system, Apple Pay, is innovation of the highest order. After a relatively smooth rollout this week, I honestly believe Apple Pay is the future of payments.
Even so, Apple Pay must clear some big hurdles if it’s to become the universal standard. For now, it’s limited to Apple’s latest iPhones and a relatively small number of retail partners, but the basic system — using your fingerprint to validate a purchase on your mobile phone — is the way we will pay for goods and services in the future.
Once again, Apple has shown the world how things should be done.
Apple Pay launched yesterday with dozens of official partners supporting Apple’s mobile payments solution out of the gate, but even though participating stores are listed on Apple’s website, there are tons of other contactless payment vendors in your city that can use Apply Pay, and you don’t even know it.
Many of the 200,000 contactless NFC payment terminals across the U.S. can accept Apple Pay, whether it’s a Coca-Cola vending machine, or your local car shop. Finding those business using contactless payments is the biggest challenge, but thanks to a couple of websites and apps, you can locate your next Apple Pay destination in seconds.
Here’s how to find Apple Pay merchants near you:
Today marks the official roll-out of Apple’s long-awaited mobile payments service, Apple Pay. But while paying for items in-store using your iPhone is definitely an exciting prospect, Cupertino expects in-app purchases will make up the vast majority of early transactions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Apple’s first major iOS 8 seeded to developers this week contained clues that Apple Pay is nearly ready for launch, and according to a report from Bank Innovation, we won’t have to wait much longer to replace our wallets with the new mobile payments solution.
The finishing touches are still being made to the security features in Apple Pay, but the report claims that the official release is tentatively scheduled for the third monday of October.
Apple Pay is threatening to put mobile payments companies like Square and PayPal out of business when it launches next month, but according to Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, Apple Pay isn’t actually a threat to his company.
Dorsey revealed yesterday that Square is hoping to use Apple Pay to its advantage by building a new register for sellers that accepts Apple Pay and pretty much every other form of payment you can slide across a counter.
Apple’s insistence on secretive behavior is well known. When it came to entering mobile payments with Apple Pay, that veil of secrecy didn’t drop for a second — with Apple insisting on some pretty stringent security measures, despite dealing with some of the giants of finance.
The code-name it chose for one of its partners on the project might strike you as a bit familiar, however — since it was later re-used as the name for Apple’s latest iteration of OS X.
“Our first code-name was Yosemite,” Barry McCarthy, president of Financial Services at FirstData, told me in an interview. “Later on when we found out that was also the name Apple had selected for its new OS, we changed it to Project Acadia, after another U.S. national park. We weren’t allowed to use or even say the name of the technology company we were working with — which was of course Apple.”
Apple finally added NFC to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but if you were hoping that the company’s new NFC chip will allow you to pair speakers or integrate NFC tags into your favorite apps, you’ll have to keep waiting. Apple has put its NFC chip on lockdown, at least for now.
Sources at Apple have confirmed to Cult of Mac that the NFC chip on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will only be used for Apple Pay when it launches this week.
More and more retailers are already using NFC terminals, but there is an additional reason why those without them might want to hurry up and get onboard: because Apple Pay could lead to more impulse purchases.
That at least seems to be the rationale of Walt Disney World, according to a new report.
A partnership with Walt Disney World was announced on Tuesday, and as per About.com theme park expert Arthur Levine, Disney is convinced it’s going to prove a great way of upping the amount customers will spend.
“It is surely hoping that by giving visitors the ability to use its cash-less system anywhere across the Disney World campus, they will increase spending, especially on impulse purchases,” Levine says.
For the second consecutive year, Apple has delivered not one but two new iPhones. Unlike the iPhone 5c, however, the slightly cheaper model this time around isn’t just an old iPhone inside a new shell. The iPhone 6 has the same A8 processor, the same Touch ID fingerprint scanner, and the same improved iSight camera as the iPhone 6 Plus.
So, is size the only difference, and how do you choose which model is right for you? Our in-depth comparison below will help you compare each device — spec for spec, feature for feature — and decide which one most deserves a place in your pocket for the next 12 months.
