One small reason is that Japan's Felica standard was only supported from the iPhone 7.

In Japan it's been common practice for certain smart cards to have Android equivalents (most of them here ship with NFC), so you have a decent app ecosystem that supports it.

For example I can get a Starbucks app on my phone and use that through NFC instead of a physical card

Starbucks Japan doesn't give you points for using their card, right? It just holds value like a Suica?

I'd rather stick to using Suica on my iPhone because… you can refill it with an American credit card… and no matter what you spend it on, the refill counts as travel spending!

Can you cash out your Suica to JPY?

No, but you can buy anything in a convenience store with it. You can refund a physical Suica but I don't know if you can do it with a virtual one.

FeliCa is only supported in iPhone 7 sold in Japan AFAIK (the one with 総務省指定 marking on the back)

No idea this person's track record (nor the record of the japanese writer being cited) but this site asserts that all iPhones 7 have the same NFC chip and that a future iOS version (11?) will enable it worldwide. https://atadistance.net/2017/04/03/iphone-7s-taking-felica-w...

I don't know about my track record either

But all the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2 teardowns by Chipworks and all, in Japan and other countries, revealed the same NXP make NFC chip. Journalist Nobi was basically saying that he thinks the timing is right for Apple to go wide and enable FeliCa worldwide in the new iPhone models later this year. I think he is right. The law cited in the comment below has been amended to allow the Japanese government regulatory mark in the screen credits rather than etched on the case.

I have also heard from various sources that JR East did not have the ability to deal with Suica Apple Pay support issues from visitors abroad and asked Apple not to activate FeliCa for devices sold outside of Japan. Word is that this is not an issue any more.

Do not have access to iOS 11 until the public beta but would love to know if FeliCa works on all iPhone 7 devices or not.

Interesting. I've searched a bit and apparently this is due to Japan law requiring device that emissed over 500 µV/m within 3 meters to have a regulatory mark.[1]

[1]: http://www.sankei.com/smp/economy/news/160920/ecn1609200029-...

The existence of this limitation makes me think that there's a hardware difference that's important.

Not that I can see. The NFC chip in the iPhone 6S is the NXP 66V10, and in the iPhone 6 it's the 65V10. These appear to just be different packages of the underlying PN544 part from NXP.

It supports reading NDEF tags (as I imagine every commercially-sold NFC chipset does - they're called "NFC Forum tags" in the datasheet [1].) There was also no hardware reason to limit Suica support to the iPhone 7; this NFC controller supported FeliCa too.

1: http://www.nxp.com/documents/leaflet/75016890.pdf

It's not been uncommon for apple to limit new features to new phones, even without a hardware limitation.

No it's not. Features that are limited to new phones that don't need some dedicated hardware are typically done for performance reasons, which is still a hardware reason.

Indeed. But still bi....g improvement.