So Apple Pay went live Monday and I've been meaning to write about it since, but honestly I wanted to actually use the thing a few times before I said anything, because a demo on a stage in Cupertino and a real transaction at a real register with a real cashier who has no idea what's happening are two very different animals.
Here's what happened. I added my Amex to Passbook Monday night (still can't believe we're calling it Passbook for a payments app, but whatever, Apple loves recycling app names) and then didn't get a chance to actually pay with it until yesterday afternoon, running into Walgreens on Western for cough drops and a bag of pretzels, total something like $6.40. I held the phone near the reader, put my thumb on the home button like the ads show you, and nothing happened for about two full seconds, which felt like an eternity while the guy behind me in line was clearly wondering what I was doing.
Then it beeped, buzzed, showed the little checkmark, and I was done. Genuinely faster than swiping a card once it actually worked. But that two-second hang, and the fact the cashier had absolutely zero clue what she'd just watched happen ("did that even go through?"), tells you this isn't quite the frictionless thing the keynote made it look like. A cashier at a chain as big as Walgreens should probably know what the little wave-your-phone symbol next to the terminal means by now, but I guess the training memo hasn't landed everywhere yet.
Couple other notes from actually living with this for two days instead of just reading about it:
Not every terminal is the terminal. Some registers have two pads sitting right next to each other, an old chip-and-swipe one and the newer contactless one, and if you tap your phone on the wrong one nothing happens and you just look like an idiot holding your phone near a card reader for no reason. I did this at a CVS Tuesday. Learn from me.
It's not actually new tech. Google Wallet has been doing NFC tap-to-pay since like 2011 and basically nobody used it. Which is sort of the whole story here, isn't it? The tech was sitting right there for three years and it took Apple slapping their name on it and getting banks to actually care before anyone treated it as a real thing. I don't love that dynamic but I also can't pretend it's surprising.
My Discover card is useless right now. Not supported at launch, so half my wallet still has to come out of my pocket the old fashioned way, which kind of undercuts the "leave your wallet at home" pitch Apple was running with. I get that Amex, Chase, Citi and Bank of America make up most of the market, but it's a little annoying to have Apple Pay work perfectly for one card and be totally invisible for another sitting right next to it.
Separately, and only tangentially related: the iPad Air 2 started actually shipping to people yesterday too, and my brother got his a day early somehow (Amazon does this weird thing sometimes where preorders show up before the official date, no idea how). He says Touch ID on an iPad feels weirder than on the phone, like his thumb keeps missing the sensor because the muscle memory is different when the device is bigger and held with two hands instead of one. Small thing, but interesting that a sensor that's basically been solved on iPhone since last year still has some adjusting to do on a bigger slab.
Anyway. Apple Pay works. It's a little rough around the edges in the way anything is rough the first week real humans start using it instead of Apple employees who've rehearsed the tap forty times backstage. I'll keep using it at the two or three stores near me that actually support it, and probably keep the physical wallet in my pocket everywhere else for a good while yet, because "everywhere" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Apple's marketing right now and the reality on the ground in my particular zip code is more like "a Walgreens and a CVS."