AppleInsider Staff
At The Wall Street Journal's inaugural WSJD Live conference on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed Apple Pay is off to a booming start, with more than one million card activations in its first 72 hours of service.
According to Cook, the massive uptake makes Apple Pay the largest contactless payment system in the U.S., more than the combined total of cards registered with competitors.
"The early ramp [of Apple Pay] looks fantastic," Cook said in an interview with WSJ managing editor Gerry Baker.
Cook referred to recent revelations that Merchant Customer Exchange retailers like Rite Aid and CVS are now blocking Apple Pay, characterizing the situation as a "skirmish" that will ultimately be decided by consumers "over the long arc of time."
Apple Pay debuted last week as part of iOS 8.1, enabling the NFC module in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to handle touch-less mobile payments. The payments solution integrates with Touch ID fingerprint recognition, performs tokenized transactions and includes hardware-level data security.
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
33 Comments
Whatever. 1 million activations is what Android does in, what? every 0.05 seconds? /s
thats great i just wish my rei (us bank) credit card and Etrade debit cards were one of those
Put seriously, Apple Pay is pretty sweet.
Wish I could. My bank doesn’t support it yet.
I still prefer cloth to anything else, anyway. Then again, what does it matter when currency is backed by faith?
In before any posts calling out “hypocrisy”.
OK I was following The Verge live blog. Can someone tell me why Cook accepts invitations to these events? He doesn't say anything interesting. All the same answers we've heard a million times before. TV is an area of interest for Apple. TV interfaces are stuck In the 70s blah blah blah. Cook said the exact same thing in 2012 and 2013. Seriously these questions were bad (and predictable) and so were Cooks answers. http://live.theverge.com/tim-cook-wsjd-live-blog/ Jony Ive is receiving an award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Thursday evening. He's supposed to be doing a sit down interview. God I hope someone asks him some interesting questions and we don't get the same answers we've heard a million times before.