What specific changes have made it possible for NFC to work in this way? All those things you listed seem possible in 2012.
Apple Pay didn't come out of the blue. The impending POS infrastructure change created the opportunity to launch a better payments user experience in the 2014-2015 timeframe. Apple knew this, and developed/acquired/refined a better security method (touchID + tokenization) and corresponding user experience to negotiate on favorable terms with banks and merchants, which sealed the deal for many and created momentum toward getting stragglers onboard and reaching broad market penetration.
Just adding an NFC chip and calling it a day changes nothing. Few markets are penetrated by hardware - or even hardware and software - alone.
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/02/06/octob...
When it comes to market adoption of hardware, typically the market leader gets picked up for adoption. By forcing their own version of mobile payments (passbook) and not allowing NFC, the market was split and NFC adoption stymied.
Apple Pay does not require Apple-specific contactless payment terminals and will work with Visa's PayWave, MasterCard's PayPass, and American Express's ExpressPay terminals.
So merchants are not "locked in" to passbook.
The reason for Apple Pay success is that they worked with the companies in question so that the infrastructure was already in place when the phone was launched. I was in the UK the week of the Apple Pay launch there and the same terminals that 3 months prior were accepting my contactless card were now accepting my iPhone.
In other words it just worked.
The only reason Apple has support for those now in 2015 is because merchants weren't falling for the walled-garden ploy. Apple has finally caught up with other forms of payment, which is why Apple was a major staller for NFC technology adoption.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5944863/apple-reveals-full-line-up-of-pas...
From related link [1]:
> There's no NFC in the new iPhone, but you'll be able to use your screen as a scannable gift card/plane ticket/voucher/etc. with Passbook, which creates a virtual bundle of all those annoying cards you cram into your wallet. Here's an ideal little scenario for you: a free cup of coffee at Starbucks, because you've got a $25 credit built right into your phone. Hand it to the cashier, beep, coffee, slurp, bye.
If you think this somehow stymied NFC... thats an incredible stretch. Before Apple was it the gift card mafia stopping NFC? Were merchants going to just throw away their perfectly usable POS machines... because technology?
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5944514/all-the-best-new-features-of-ios-...
The entire context of this discussion was how Apple killed NFC adoption in 2012 by not supporting NFC and splitting the market with their own walled-garden solution. Even your quote shows the surprise on Gizmodo's part that they released some gift card substitute...
Lets say Apple had stuck NFC in an iPhone 4S. What then? Mobile payments is not a faucet you just turn on. They'd have to convince the entire market - retailers, banks, and credit card companies alike - that they needed to incur tens of million dollars of infrastructure changes and possibly more with fraud in order to... well, what exactly do they get? They'd move from something that people were used to (credit/debit cards) that had clear risk profiles to something unknown with little evidence of consumers willingness to adopt and no added benefit to retailers or banks.
You might respond - its a better user experience! Banks don't give a shit about user experience, thats why they close at 4pm. Retailers don't either, thats why they'd buy POS machines with crap UIs and never replace them even when the digitizer could barely create a signature.
Banks and credit card companies care about risk, and retailers care about keeping costs down and seeing clear benefit in the form of evidence of consumer interest before adopting. Banks and credit card companies are also powerful, quite conservative, and are middle-men that do not necessarily have users interests at heart. Nobody in this industry turns on a dime (heh). Knowing this, Apple chose to wait for the steady trickle of POS machine replacements in the coming POS transition that would follow from Visa's EMV migration announced in 2011 [1], focus on risk-reduction and gaining leverage with credit card companies and banks through TouchID, and launch Passbook as a proof of concept both to train users and show retailers that people want to use their phones. Passbook wasn't an mobile payments competitor, it was a progenitor. It sidestepped major gaps in infrastructure, and it was placed in the second or third tier of iOS features due to its limited usefulness.
Passbook seems to be what you're hung up on. Here's a question - if Apple is so amazeballs that it could have moved the market in 2012, why then are there still retailers and banks that are slow on the Apple Pay uptake? Is it because Google and the coalition of second tier nobodys is missing? No, its because banks and retailers generally don't give a shit about user experience, manage their infrastructure at their own pace, and have all sorts of issues and internal politics that affect their decision making about _anything_.
You keep saying the same thing and haven't provided nearly enough evidence to support the leaps you're making that Apple somehow killed the beautiful 'open' fairyland that would have been NFC in 2012. There was no NFC market in 2012 to split, just bumbling attempts that misread how to make headway in the market, and a handful of Android phones with the hardware just so they could say 'first!' I'd love to see evidence to the contrary.
[1] http://www.emv-connection.com/emv-migration-driven-by-paymen...
I had said that Apple stalled NFC development by not releasing it in 2014. Are you saying that NFC market adoption would have been the same, if Apple had released NFC in 2012?
NFC was a complete basket case, and still remains that way except for Apple.
The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful.
June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.
Putting everything together is several order of magnitude harder than adding a part number to a BOM years before the ecosystem is ready to use it appropriately. They had to get there feature by feature, one at a time. Touch ID was a stepping stone for instance, and that's a whole engineering and design task by itself. It's a multi-year evolution to get to the point of adding a service that incidentally happens to use NFC as one of the many involved technologies. So, no, they did not "add NFC" without Apple Pay.