Last year there were many rumors indicating the possible launch of a new iPhone equipped with an NFC chip, but in the end nothing of what was predicted happened. This year the rumors are back in the news thanks to a intervened given by a member of Mastercard's management team who suggests that Apple is working on implementing NFC technology in its own terminals. He does not specify this clearly, but he makes it clear that to be popular NFC technology must be implemented in an iDevice and Mastercard would have already concluded a partnership with Apple to bring this technology to the market.
"The timeline is always as fast as it makes sense for consumers," he says. "That's a combination of having a critical mass of the merchants, which is what you're seeing right now, and getting devices into the hands of consumers. I don't know of a handset manufacturer that isn't in the process of making sure their stuff is PayPass ready."
So that would include Apple then?
"Um, there are...like I say, [I don't know of] any handset maker out there," McLaughlin says. "Now, when we have discussions with our partners, and they ask us not to disclose them, we don't."
The current information is corroborated with others from last year provided by the New York Times and which announced the launch of an iPhone equipped with NFC technology, although at that time it was not specified which iPhone model it would be. Steve Jobs declared a few years ago that NFC technology is not yet mature enough to be used in mobile terminals and he was right, but this year Apple could make it popular through the iPhone. The problem with this kind of technology lies in the fact that there must be locations where it can be used and for now only in the US there are enough locations that would allow users to make payments via NFC.
According to two people with knowledge of the inner workings of a coming iteration of the Apple iPhone – although not necessarily the next one – a chip made by Qualcomm for the phone's processor will also include near-field communication technology, known as NFC This technology enables short-range wireless communications between the phone and an NFC reader, and can be used to make mobile payments. It is unclear which version of an iPhone this technology would be built into.
