Hacker News Reader

Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

My only beef is the lack of NFC. Yes the local Starbucks doesn't support it but if iPhone had it, they soon would've. Read that the aluminum back is not compatible with the rather large antenna needed for the NFC chip. Or maybe Apple didn't figure out a way to take their cut of mobile payments yet. But it sure is disappointing to see the tech being held back by the lack of adoption.

View on HN

I heard from a source that it's has to do with the extreme space and weight constraints of the iPhone 5, but that Apple wants to put it in eventually. But I am more concerned with the ecosystem - it's not just enough to put it in the phone, Apple needs to make super-easy to sign up for, both as provider and user.

I learned something interesting about NFC recently that I hadn't considered before: for all the wallet kind of applications, where the phone acts like a VISA/Msatercard/etc credit card there has to be a trusted module that takes care of the authentication - e.g. the SIM of the phone. This module is very restricted in who can write things to it, and there's all sorts of power struggles between carriers, manufacturers and service providers about who should be in control of letting apps add things to the trusted storage.

Before that is sorted out, I think that mass adoption of NFC is unlikely, and it's very likely that we'll end up with either the carriers or VISA et al in control - not a very promising prospect, IMHO.

Android is outselling iPhones, and many Android phones include NFC. If NFC is ready to take off now, iPhone availability is not the limiting factor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com