My parents only gave in when, in high school, after-school marching band rehearsals had varied and unpredictable end times. If ever I went to a friend's place, they knew that I could call them on a house phone to check in, so they resisted the cellphone "fad" for a long time. I was always trusted to get to and from school on the bus without incident. Personally, I didn't own a cellphone until age 13. Their two-year-old starts to wail at the table, so mommy hands him an iPad like some sort of digital pacifier.
Look across the restaurant and see another two parents their babysitter quit on them before their weekly night out to dinner. The children - a daughter, looks to be about nine, a son, seven - both clutching cellphones. It just makes you shake your head in disappointment. Perhaps they just need the right shepherd to show them the way. Americans have just proven to be slow adopters. Whether for security's sake or efficiency's, mobile credit is the way of the future. In the same way that you might text CROSS to 55555 to donate to the Red Cross, cell phone users can text to their creditors mobile banking number to pay their bills or to purchase a product. In Africa, where carrying cold, hard cash can be a dangerous practice, SMS transfers are the preferred method of payment. Instead of using an Apple ID, in Europe, near-field communication is the norm - simply swipe your smartphone over a sensor at the register and your credit card information is gobbled up. Outside of the states, mobile and digital payments are the norm. It would be a natural step on the path towards the digitization of currency. If Apple were to implement a large-scale wireless transfer service using those same devices and the Apple IDs that users have already grown accustomed to, we can expect the same flawless cross-platform functionality. The existing Apple ID set-up and iTunes purchase methods are intuitive and functional. Their cloud service functions seamlessly across its varied products. One of Apple's strengths is product and service integration. No customer acquisition required - just a brief stint of user education to encourage people to start implementing their new Apple iPay (I just came up with that name, but it's pretty good).Īpple's second strength is the fact that, well, that it is Apple. This means that, were Apple to offer a secure wireless payment service using Apple ID confirmation online and quick fingerprint scan authorization on the iPhone, they would already have a huge audience for that service. WIRED writer Marcus Wohlsen reveals that existing services and other eCommerce sites - PayPal, Google Wallet,, Bitcoin - don't have even half of Apple's 800 million users. Wireless payment methods already exist, but even established services like PayPal don't have the kinds of numbers that iTunes commands. That position is unique for two reasons: first, the number, and second, the trusted Apple brand. Over the course of a decade, they have inadvertently created a huge market for a valuable digital service.
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