I'd had the iPhone 6 since October and hadn't actually used Apple Pay for anything besides showing my mom at Thanksgiving how the little watermark-y card graphic pops up on the lock screen. Cyber Monday seemed like as good a day as any to actually try buying something with it, mostly because I was already out running errands and figured I'd rack up a few data points instead of just one.
First stop was the Walgreens by my apartment, picking up a couple things I definitely didn't need (a phone charger cable, because I own eleven and somehow always lose the twelfth). Held the phone near the reader, thumb on Touch ID, and it just worked. No tap-and-wait-and-tap-again nonsense like the old plastic-loyalty-card scanners always give you. Total was $11.43, receipt printed, done. Genuinely faster than digging out a card, and I say that as someone who is annoyingly skeptical of anything Apple markets as "magical."
Then I went to CVS a few blocks over to grab batteries, held my phone up to the reader like a doofus, and got nothing. No beep, no prompt, nothing. Turns out CVS and Rite Aid both switched off their NFC terminals a few weeks back, on purpose, because they're part of this retailer consortium (MCX, the group behind the CurrentC app that's apparently still in some closed pilot in Ohio) and they don't want to hand transaction data to Apple or the banks if they can build their own barcode-based thing instead. So the terminals are still physically there, they're just dead. I paid with a debit card like a caveman and left mildly annoyed, not because $6 and change is a big deal but because the whole point of trying this stuff out is consistency, and half the fun died right there in the battery aisle.
That's the part nobody selling you on "the future of payments" mentions: it's not a technology problem anymore, it's a turf war between banks, Apple, and retailers who all want to own the moment you tap your card, and normal people are the ones standing at the register looking confused while the systems argue with each other.
A couple practical notes if you're setting this up yourself:
- You need an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. Older phones don't have the NFC chip enabled for payments, full stop, no software update fixes that.
- Add the card through the Passbook app, not some separate Apple Pay app, because there isn't one. It's just a payment method living inside Passbook.
- It asks for a verification step with your bank, usually a text or a call, before the card actually goes live. Mine took about four minutes with Chase.
- Look for the little contactless-payment logo (looks like a sideways wifi symbol) on the terminal itself before you even try, it'll save you the CVS experience.
Since I was already out, I did the online half of Cyber Monday too, on my laptop like it's still 2011, because Apple Pay for in-browser purchases wasn't really a thing I could use yet outside a handful of apps. The day itself apparently did over $2 billion in online sales according to the early Adobe numbers going around, which is a pretty wild figure when you think about how much of that traffic is now coming from phones instead of desktops. I'm not shocked, my own Amazon order (a monitor stand, on sale for $19, that I've been putting off buying since September) came from my phone while I was standing in the Walgreens line, which feels like it should've been more exciting than it was.
None of this feels revolutionary yet, and I don't think it will for a while, not while half the terminals in any given shopping trip are switched off on purpose. But the parts that did work, worked well enough that I stopped thinking about the phone in my hand and just thought about buying batteries. That's probably the actual bar this stuff has to clear, not "amazing" but "invisible," and it cleared it exactly once out of two tries today.