Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian, makes the case that Apple’s new iPad release is much more than a speed bump release. Rather, the addition of Touch ID to the iPad line is a huge milestone marker and a critical element in Apple’s Apple Pay rollout and pursuit of acceptance/adoption in the business sector.
The TouchID addition is important for people who use iPads in businesses, especially the giant “enterprises” where thousands of devices might be deployed. When I mentioned on Twitter that TouchID looked useful on the new iPads, the responses came thick and fast from people who don’t want to have to type their long IT department-mandated passwords into a screen, but would rather unlock them with the touch of a finger.
“TouchID [is] very important in enterprise for mobile workforces, particularly in customer-service scenarios,” responded Tim Edwards of Dootrix, an enterprise software development consultancy. Long passphrases are the enemy of quick interaction with a customer, he explained: “Fumbling around with a strong passcode doesn’t cut it for a quick customer interaction, especially in travel.”
As to Apple Pay:
Having already signed up a number of banks and merchants for its announcement on 9 September, Tim Cook said on Thursday that another 500 banks have come forward to get involved in Apple Pay, as well as a number of merchants (including Starbucks, which has had its own payment system going for some time).
“We believe ApplePay is going to change things profoundly,” Tim Cook said. The advantage that Apple has is that ApplePay will have a really big merchant ready to use it straight away: all of Apple’s stores, which number more than 250 in the US. Given that Apple has surely already sold at least 2m new iPhones in the US (and perhaps more like 5m), it’s highly likely that the value and volume of NFC transactions through Apple’s Stores in the US in the next two months will exceed that across the US in the previous ten months of this year.
And:
One can argue that there aren’t many NFC-capable tills in the US, which is largely still stuck in the card-swiping dark ages; chip-and-pin, as used in the UK and the rest of Europe, isn’t yet mandatory.
But a series of terrible hacks which have given millions of credit card details to hackers because companies stored them following transactions means that the US banks have finally had enough. They are making chip-and-pin (also known as EMV) mandatory: by October 2015 any business that doesn’t have EMV implemented will have to bear the brunt of fraud, rather than being able to pass it to the banks, as they can now.
That means tills are being updated, and NFC payment capability is an inexpensive “nice to have”. Apple executives have indicated to me that they think that their timing on this is just right – and in business, it’s often timing that matter more than just technology.
Great read.
Nice to see someone at The Guardian not being cynical and/or condescending about Apple.
Does iPad not has NFC? I don’t think it can be use for Apple Pay.
“Charles Arthur’s travel and accommodation to Berlin was paid by Apple.”
Don’t they usually hold a screening of the launch events in London?
It’s a shame that the iPad mini and iPad Air were on equal footing last year and are now back to being a year apart spec-wise. Last year you truly could just choose whichever screen size you preferred because everything else between them was the same. Now you have to consider whether you need or want the A8X chip vs. the A7.
The question to answer yourself is this: would you still feel the same about having two equal products in every regard, except size, if they came at the same exact price?
Like it or not, Apple has to succumb to basic psychology: you have a smaller iPad, it has to cost less.
Of course, there are product categories where the opposite is true – the bigger chunkier product is cheaper, and the thinner smaller one is more expensive.
However make the big and the small the same price and you enter uncanny valley – people flip between the two mental models, and either they feel cheated buying the big iPad, or they feel cheater buying the small iPad, because if they have the same price, the prices seem arbitrary. “Hey, everything is $499 now, screw it all!”
And if Apple has to charge less for the iPad mini, then it becomes entirely unfair to expect it of them to have the same exact internals in there, instead of using the product to amortize the equipment they have for building A7 chips.
The A7 chip is not slow anyway, we’re entering a phase with these mobile devices where the increment become quite incremental. Say would this year’s PC be way more amazing than buying last year’s PC? Not quite, same deal. We’re not quite there with tablets, but we’re almost there.
I may be in the minority, but I would pay iPad Air prices for a fully equivalent iPad Mini. I prefer the smaller size, but I want cutting edge tech inside it.