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Comment by headShrinker | Hacker News Reader

NFC is nearly useless at this point and there is a possibility it will never become ubiquitous. I don't see NFC being a huge selling point outside of the techies fpr quite some time.

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Nearly useless except at McDonald's, 7-11, CVS, Foot Locker, American Eagle, Jamba Juice, some Starbucks......

Not everybody lives in the US, you know. In Europe we have NFC in our credit cards. You put your wallet close to the register, write your PIN, and pay. Few small stores support NFC, though.

I'm not saying that's the reason why Apple ditched NFC, but maybe we would need an independent study on actual stores which support NFC and consider if whether it's a useless standard. You're gonna carry your wallet anyway to pay in cash, why not put the NFC in the credit card?

In Australia credit cards and debit cards come with a wireless contact chip inside of the card as standard. I hardly see how NFC is useless, maybe in the US it is, but in Australia and New Zealand as well it certainly has a commercial use.

Well, if only NFC had a big backer and became much more popular.. then maybe merchants would use it. A backer like, you know Apple?

Using that same argument, maybe Apple will create some sort of Bluetooth-based payment system.

So, you are saying that Samsung and Nokia aren't popular enough?

Samsung and Nokia are popular enough and have the resources to back NFC but as of now they haven't done anything besides launching phones with the technology.

NFC today is just a dummy selling point and they know it, because they haven't done anything to make it popular.

This is basically where Bluetooth was in, say 2003. People are disappointed because Apple is generally forward-looking when it comes to standards and tech, but has shied away from NFC (which shouldn't be surprising given their stance on USB3.0 and Blu-Ray).

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