Our Sources Say the Next iPhone Will Include NFC Mobile Payments
Platforms like Google Wallet, Isis, and Square have been around for years, while Apple has remained curiously silent on the mobile payments front. Well not anymore. — The company's next iPhone will feature its own payment platform …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple has spent years on the sidelines of mobile payments while Google Wallet, Isis, and Square built out the category — a silence this site flagged as far back as 2012, when employee perks like Pirq discounts were read as tea leaves about Apple's commerce ambitions. The rumor now says that ends: the next iPhone ships with NFC and Apple's own payment platform.
The timing frames it as a platform announcement, not a feature leak: invitations are confirmed for a September 9 event at Flint Center — the site of the original Mac unveiling, where Apple has built a confirmed hidden structure — and sources say a wearable will appear alongside the phone. The story has traveled unusually wide for a rumor, picked up by 9to5Mac, Re/code, The Verge, Engadget, AP, and others within a day.
First-order effects
- If the report holds, iPhone 6 buyers get tap-to-pay out of the box through an Apple-run platform, instantly giving Apple a retail payment footprint that Google Wallet and Isis spent years trying to build without comparable hardware distribution.
- Square — reportedly raising $200M at a $6B valuation just a day before this report — would see the largest iPhone maker become a direct competitor in consumer payments rather than an ecosystem partner.
Second-order effects
- Isis and Google Wallet, whose apps depend on carrier and bank partnerships, would face pressure to differentiate on rewards and acceptance networks rather than the tap gesture itself, which Apple would normalize for mainstream shoppers.
- Card networks and banks gain a new negotiating counterweight: an Apple-branded wallet with hundreds of millions of secured devices shifts leverage toward whoever controls the handset's secure element.
Third-order effects
- Payments would follow the pattern already visible in music and apps: the device maker converting a commodity function into a gated platform service, with Apple positioned as toll-taker between banks, merchants, and consumers.
- If NFC finally ships in volume inside the iPhone, retailers' terminal-upgrade calculus changes industry-wide, since acceptance infrastructure investment becomes rational only when the dominant phone supports the standard.
The trend: Smartphone makers are absorbing the standalone wallet companies' function, moving retail payments from app-based experiments toward hardware-gated platforms controlled by the device vendor.