Apple Pay Could Be Revolutionary

There's a lot to like about the new iPhone 6—size, speed, software—but the most important feature is Apple Pay, Apple's new payment system, writes Rich Jaroslovsky at Quartz. Mobile-payment systems exist already from companies like Google and PayPal, but they haven't managed to pull in users. "Essentially, the mobile-payment movement has just been standing around waiting for Apple to decide what it wants to do," Jaroslovsky writes. Now it has:

• The company already has "hundreds of millions of credit cards on file," thanks to iTunes and the App Store. And those worried about security may be comforted by the fact that Target, "which has to be paranoid about such things" following its own data breach, is "comfortable with Apple's approach."

• The system does appear easy to use: A phone owner simply touches her phone to a sensor while touching the phone's fingerprint detector, notes Laura Shin at Forbes. The company also offers what she calls "a new level of privacy," using changing codes rather than a single credit-card number for transactions.
• And finally, Apple, unlike other mobile-pay wannabes, isn't "trying to make money off the payment system. [It's] trying to increase the preference for their device," an analyst tells Forbes.
• Still, one hiccup could be the lack of stores ready to use the service. While some 220,000 are prepared to do so, "97.6% of business(es) do not have point-of-sale systems that work with near-field communication, the technology Apple Pay relies on," writes Jacob Davidson in Money.

(More iPhone 6 stories.)