Apple Selling Square iPhone Credit Card Swiper – Turning Backs on NFC?
Remember Square, the mobile payments company founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey? Well there’s celebrations happening as Apple has welcomed the card payment widget with open arms.
Apple Stores have started to sell the Square hardware which connects with your iPhone/iPod Touch via the headphone socket and gives you the ability to process and manage credit card payments from your portable Apple.
The Square device sits as the only such device on the shelves of US Apple stores and costs $9.95 – actually you get $10 of credit when you sign up for an account and the apps are free, so, in real terms Square pays you a nickle to take it home 🙂
Dorsey and co must be well pleased with themselves as this is a great move for the start-up and having Apple give you the thumbs up like this will certainly raise the Square’s profile.
The thing is, with all this chat about iPhone getting NFC smarts and the push for this tech being in baked in to 1 in 5 phones by 2014 – is Apple going to launch an iPhone 5 with NFC or will it be happy for third parties like Square to make the iPhone a payment platform?
What do you reckon?
