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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

I love Apple Pay. Being able to simply tap my watch to get through just about any MTA (New York City transit) turnstile makes every other public transit experience practically unbearable by comparison. The execution is flawless.

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> every other

This has been a common scenario for many countries and cities around the world, for a long time, before the MTA introduced it, with similar flawless execution. Just off the top of my head, London, Singapore, Sydney, Japan and South Korea.

I remember when Americans were initially hostile to NFC payments almost a decade ago, but I guess times change?

> This has been a common scenario for many countries and cities around the world

By using a watch or a card? A watch is 10x better than a card because it's always available, even when your hands are full.

What happens if the Watch runs out of battery?

That never happens and I wear my Apple Watch all day and all night (for sleep tracking) except for when I shower -- I plop it on my charger once a day when I shower and it charges to full during my shower (it doesn't take that long for the Watch to charge to full)

iOS devices also have Power Reserve, which lets you use wallet and express transit for up to 5 hours even after your battery is out of juice.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2022/01/13/apple-power-reserve...

Never runs out of charge… needs recharging daily?

How do these 2 not conflict?

Just that there's a routine in place which ensures it always gets the required charge without it needing to be especially planned for.

I'm sure it works great when you're travelling /s

Traveled to Japan recently (time zone change, long transpacific flight). No problem. I charged the Watch when I got to the hotel and it still had quite a bit of charge left. Then I just charged it whenever I showered and that worked for me.

The Watch isn’t like a phone. It doesn’t have a lot of background apps running and the battery life between charge intervals is more than enough.

Simple. To "run out" means to drop to a 0% battery level. That has never happened to my Watch since I've unboxed it.

Good for you, but with a battery life measured in hours, not days, unless you've got a life that's on such a routine that you charge it every day, it's going to run out of battery. I have a Series 4 watch and that thing spends most of its time at 0% battery level. It's not so useful when I'm just sitting at home, so I don't bother to charge it unless I'm planning on going out.

Most Apple Watch owners charge their watch while they’re asleep at night.

Battery life is actually 1.5 days for Series 7, and whatever routine one has with smartphone charging, one can implement the same with Watch. I tend to shower daily but I know a lot of Northern Europeans have different ideas about that so charging at bed time works too.

Take out your phone?

What happens if your phone runs out of battery? Take out your tablet.

Fumble in wallet for suica / oyster card?

It still works in power reserve. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212171

Isn't it the same thing, just NFC? The only difference I know is that your watch/phone will not limit you to a certain amount like your card will, since you're authenticating when paying.

NFC is NFC. Tap to pay with the physical cards is what convinced me to finally start using the same thing on my phone. If I had a watch... I'd probably still use the phone? I'm not entirely clear on why or how Dick Tracy inverted, yet again.

Note that I have no problem with others liking the watch. I just don't see what makes it so much more convenient than a phone. Curious what will pull me over.

Doesn’t the phone have to be unlocked? The watch authenticates one time when you put it on (and unauthenticates when you take it off), so you can securely pay for things via a double click of a button then tap, vs having to unlock the phone with your face first or enter a pin or whatever. If someone steals your watch, they can’t steal your money unless they some how can cut off your wrist without triggering an unauthentication.

My paranoia is such that I'm sure I would require my watch also have some form of "be unlocked." And since this is largely, "be unfolded and have seen my fingerprint recently," feels like a non issue?

Phones aren’t secure enough, even if it’s seen your face or fingerprint recently. Actually, Apple offered a way to use your watch to make your phone easier to unlock, as long as your watch is nearby and has been authenticated itself. The whole “on your wrist” authentication experience can be used for the phone also, I guess.

Doesn’t need to be unlocked for public transport transactions, just tap the locked phone (watch also works without further interaction). https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212171

Ya, the same for Apple Key (I can unlock my car with my phone, but needs to be unlocked before I start my car with it).

For general payments, yes, but Apple allow-list known public transport networks to charge cards without auth. I would guess this involves auditing the crypto, being fairly sure they aren't going to mess it up, having a very limited payment amount (Transport for London for example "charges" £0.10 when you tap in/out, and then bills you the correct balance at the end of the day).

Pulling out my phone while in motion greatly increases the likelihood I will drop it, or that it will be stolen out of my hand (especially by a thief going the other way).

Suica (used for transit in Japan) has been supported on Apple Watch in Japan since the Apple Watch Series 2 way back in 2016

On the London Underground since 2014 you can use any regular EMV NFC debit/credit card to tap in and out of turnstiles. Since Apple Pay just implements the EMV standard, it works just fine as well with any credit card you have added in there.

Suica was amazing the last time I visited Japan. Just bop your watch and go. It even supported reloading cash from my US credit card with the native iOS/watchOS provided card management UI, no need to fidget around with a questionably engineered third party app.

Best for who wearing watch on right wrist

Using any NFC device

You can buy NFC rings these days

Chip payments remain awful. Mag stripe worked much, much better. Much cheaper "terminals". Could use in many more places.

The awfulness of chip payments makes Apple Pay possible.

Australia went basically overnight from magstripe to chip and pin without issue. There was something uniquely awful about how the U.S. did it.

Canada also adopted it pretty quickly, years before the US. There was an extended period in there from around 2007 to 2020 where it felt like traveling back in time when I went to the US and it was magstripe and signatures again.

Don't forget about using cheques and having to use third-party applications for money transfer between people (Venmo, CashApp).

Americans always seem to come up with an excuse for why they are slower, like a comment higher in this thread, despite the rest of the world moving on with more convenient and accessible technologies. Is it an overly defensive culture?

Maybe it’s cognitive dissonance caused by nearly 80 years of ‘America is #1’ propaganda.

Massive installed base of older technology plus no financial incentives to update.

Do you really just use your bank's app to transfer money to anyone, though? Sure, here in Norway if I know their account number I can do that, but if I want to transfer money to a friend, I'm probably going to use Vipps because I only need to know their phone number. I consider Vipps to be a 3rd party app even though it's jointly owned by the major banks here.

Every country is unique, but the financial system in the US is, as far as I can tell, quite unique, in large part due to how large the country is both in physical size and population, combined with a governing system that decentralizes a lot of power (which means some changes are much harder to mandate vs what China can decide to do, for example). You have to understand some of these foundational differences, after which it makes much more sense why some things move much more slowly in the US.

In Canada, yes. But Canada does have a massive advantage that there are only five major banks who already cooperate over a shared debit infrastructure called Interac, so when email transfers (initially “certapay”) were introduced, there was already a logical body to do the coordinating.

Smaller banks and credit unions have zero incentive not to participate in anything the big banks do since it will immediately put them behind 99% of Canadians.

>Do you really just use your bank's app to transfer money to anyone, though?

yes, in canada the process to transfer money to somebody is to go to the "e-transfer" section in your bank's app or website, enter the email address to send to and an amount, and hit send. you don't need to know account numbers or anything like that.

in most of the world, the credit card companies told vendors that they'd have to be liable for any fraud committed through payment terminals that hadn't been upgraded to chip and pin. so every vendor upgraded their terminals.

in the US, credit card companies continued to accept liability for magstripe transactions up until a couple years ago. i think it was an attempt to hold onto their absurdly high market share in the US - most other countries have higher debit card usage.

The chip and pin terminals are now cheaper than the magstripe ones ever were (about $60) and are accessible to many more businesses, even those that don’t have multi year trading history with their bank. It’s absurd to say they could be used in many more places… I literally do not carry cash for the last 6 years or so. Prior to chip&pin many small restaurants and cafes could not get a magstripe terminal from their bank.

I’m curious what you mean by “worked better”? I haven’t used magstripe for a decade at least but can’t say I’m nostalgic for the experience.

Mag stripe readers are $1.

There was a first wave of contactless in the US, which then died very quickly because major retailers sued Visa/MC about preferential terms for contactless cards, and won.

The new wave seems mostly driven by Stripe and Square being adopted by small businesses everywhere and supporting it out of the box, forcing the major retailers to finally catch up.

> with similar flawless execution

> Just off the top of my head, London

Transport of London used (and still does) Oyster Cards (contactless smart cards). when they switched the system to also support contactless credit cards all they had to do was flip a switch, the support was already baked in.

contactless credit card support on TfL started in 2012 and the full rollout was in 2014.

This was doubly amazing in a recent vacation to Japan. We were able to provision a local transit card (Pasmo) from within the Wallet app and load funds with a credit card we already had in Wallet.

In Vancouver you can just pay directly with your credit card or debit card (or google wallet, apple pay, whatever). No loading of a separate account. It's really handy if you're just visiting.

Long-time Japan resident here. I haven’t travelled outside Japan for quite a while so I don’t have a good sense of how payments work in daily life elsewhere. Here, the big convenience store chains now accept a couple of dozen different types of contactless, swipe, or QR code payments [1, 2, 3 (in Japanese)]. However, cash is also widely used, and many smaller businesses still accept only cash [4, 5 (ditto)].

[1] https://www.sej.co.jp/services/cash.html

[2] https://www.family.co.jp/services/payment.html

[3] https://www.lawson.co.jp/service/payment/settlement/index.ht...

[4] https://www.caa.go.jp/policies/policy/consumer_policy/meetin...

[5] https://dentsu-ho.com/articles/8187

I don't know. I live in a city in Europe.

I get my wallet out, put it close to the ticket reader in any metro station, bus, tramway or trolley in the city, and it works just as flawlessly.

The only difference is between a wallet and a watch, which is a very tiny difference, IMO.

I'd say one of the main differences is that some NFC cards don't have anti-collision features and won't work next to other NFC cards. Thus, when you have your travel pass + credit card + ID card (mine is NFC), it doesn't work and you have to take it out.

Hopefully, in Switzerland you don't need to tap/read a ticket before boarding any public transport, so it makes it a bit easier

Given how cold it gets in the winter (around or below freezing) in various parts of Europe, getting a wallet with anti-RFID lining and a compartment outside of that, a purse or bag with a pocket on the bottom or side, or gloves with a pocket on the back of it, or this watch thing, or really anything that lets you run your travel card without having to take off your gloves is well worth the cost.

Maybe it's because I'm really lazy, but the wallet vs watch thing makes a huge difference for me. I hate having to pick up my phone or wallet from my pockets, being able to pay from my Apple Watch is such a game changer that it became the only reason I even have one.

Anyone who uses Apple Pay knows it is the way payments get made in the future. The narrative that it is some sort of failure is completely wrong.

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