IPhone Users Are About to Be Screwed Over

This is almost entirely incoherent paranoia based on the idea that a) the iPhone will route payments through AT&#38;T and b) phone companies used 900-number reconnection scams in the 90s to prove to banks that they should be in charge of payment processing.<p>Even if you somehow manage to follow the logic behind (b), the idea that Apple's going to just throw away its pre-installed and -activated iTunes account on every iOS device and just give everything to AT&#38;T is completely insane.

Wait...NFC payments involve the phone company?<p>I had assumed it would work like contactless credit cards, which obviously do not have a phone connection. That is, the phone would simply be used to store your credit card information, and use NFC to transmit it to the terminal when you want to pay.<p>The stories I've seen on this say it is coming to both iPhone and iPad 2, which would seem to confirm that the phone company is not involved since iPad 2 is not a phone.

Why would someone link to anything written by John Dvorak who made a profession out of trolling Apple?

The irony is this article is completely wrong in its analysis but completely correct in its conclusion. Once tons of money is flowing through iTunes for consumer goods, eventually there will be a "Apple tax" on all consumer goods where the majority of payments are happening from iPhones (hello Starbucks!), to offset the fees Apple is going to charge for using their payments system.<p>This fee of course is going to be the fee the credit card companies charge, <i>plus</i> the Apple-related chunk, so that's why it's going to inflate prices more than the already inflated prices you see due to the luxury of being able to use a credit card.

Quite bluntly, I don't think Dvorak is really HN-worthy, and this article does not change my opinion.<p>So instead of commenting on this sort of thing and upvoting it, let's do something to improve HN.

There's nothing here that's specific to the iPhone - NFC and phone companies handling payments - yeah, there's potential downsides. But it's not iPhone specific.

Well, today you could be screwed on any device that can be used to make payments. This does not mean people will stop using a computer (or a smartphone) to pay for stuff. You can't stop technical progress by being paranoid.<p>Eventually all users will learn to protect themselves by limiting in some way the amount of money your smartphone can access per day or for a given transaction.

&#62;I consider this technology to be the most onerous ever.<p>I stopped reading here.

Serious question. Is John Dvorak a humor writer or just befuddled? I've read his column occasionally for many years, but I've never been able to decide.