iPhone 5 rumors

The Cupertino tech giant has long been rumored to be planning to introduce NFC technology in its products.

iPhone 5 design by Patrick Eckert

The iPhone 5 has reportedly been tested with such chips and the company has been working on turning devices into digital wallets. However, market watchers believe this won’t happen any time soon.
The Wall Street Journal have analyzed Apple’s strategy and talked with sources inside the company. The publication concluded that Cupertino won’t introduce NFC in the near future as the market isn’t ready for it yet.
Phil Schiller, the senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said in an interview that at present providers of mobile payment solutions are struggling for supremacy in the market and Apple doesn’t want to join that fight, explaining that they are “all fighting over their piece of the pie, and we aren’t doing that.”
For now, Apple has decided to give users Passbook, an application that allows them to go to stores and only use coupons to pay for something.
Although the development of a national payment system, using Apple iTunes or turning Apple into a bank, has been discussed, the company decided that now is not the time to implement such a system in its products.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Apple’s reservations regarding such changes may be explained by the fact that the company waits for its competitors to test an innovation before coming with its own version of the tech.
“Apple is always a comfortable number two,” says Munster. “They let their competitors do their market research for them.”