Living in Canada, there's basically no instance where we'd swipe our credit cards, but they've still got mag stripes; and when I visit the US, I sometimes have to swipe my card, and it does work to do so.
I don't know about other countries, but a few days ago I got a new Visa card in France. It still has the magnetic stripe. I'm not sure if I've ever seen it used here, but a few years ago I think they were still in use in German gas stations (at least).
Some banks have a nice feature where they allow you to disable the magnetic strip of the card. I presume the information is still physically on the card, but they can somehow know that the payment was done that way and decline it.
That seems like a distinction worth mentioning, especially with the first comment on the article.
While it seems reasonable that Apple's wallet might have the same problem, you dont actually know.
People never complain that tiny devices are too small for their big hands — they correctly conclude that they're made for children or for adults with small hands. But for some reason people expect to be able to use huge phones and phablets with regular-sized hands, rather than accepting that they're intended to be comfortably held by people with huge hands, who find regular-sized phones too small.
From [0]:
According to Apple's site, "the leather wallet is shielded so it’s safe for credit cards." That shield protects both Low Coercivity (LoCo) and High Coercivity (HiCo) cards — which is a fancy way of saying how resistant something is from being demagnetized. So, LoCo cards are considered things like hotel keys and gift cards while credit cards fall under HiCo.
[0] https://mashable.com/article/apple-magsafe-iphone-wallet-dem...
Let a thousand blossoms bloom, I guess.
> I should say I’m actually not using the official Apple magnetic case but the Popwallet brand
I don't understand why you would start this comment thread with a false statement though.
One, it is a light hearted comment. I’m mostly just having some fun. Two, I suspect that the official wallet would have the same problem. The point is that apple designed a system where the wallet has to have magnets in it. The official apple product documentation states that there are in fact magnets in their wallet. And yes, just like my Popwallet brand, the inside of Apple’s wallet is magnetically shielded. The issue comes when you are handling the small removable wallet and your cards together. If you place your card next to the side of the wallet with magnets, you’re exposing it to the magnet without any shielding to protect your card.
I don’t have an official Apple wallet to test, but Apple repeatedly makes the same claim as the Popwallet - that the inside of the wallet is shielded. I think the problem is that apple designed a system where cards and magnets are close together, and during handling it is easy to expose the card to the unshielded side. This is why I think it is appropriate to jab at apple.
But… it doesn’t.
Thanks, I needed this laugh.
Not sure why iPhone engineering didn’t anticipate this happening, but the flatulence kept my boss away so everything worked out.
Is it? Numerous people up and down this thread who do use the official one have told you they've not experienced it, so I'm not sure your assumption holds.
As far as I'm concerned, chip cards can get stuffed. They're utter shit in my experience.
I don't think I am. All I do is take it out of my wallet, put in the reader, take it out, put it back in my wallet, lather, rinse, repeat.
or your local merchants use "special" terminals
That would make sense if we were talking about one merchant, or even just two. But I can go to Barnes & Noble, Lowes, Food Lion, the local corner gas station, Ace Hardware, it doesn't matter, I routinely find the chip readers less reliable than the magstripe reader. I can't explain it, but chips are tainted in my worldview at this point.
Here in the UK, many (most?) new payment terminals don't have mag-stripe readers at all. And I expect banks will start issuing new cards without a magnetic strip in the near future, if they haven't done so already.
I agree that chip & pin isn't ideal, not just because of reliability issues but also because of the security risk of PIN disclosure. But thankfully contactless (incl. Apple Pay/Android Pay) has already replaced it for 99% of daily transactions.
But if your card's chip is broken, can't you just get your bank to send out a new one?
Of course I can. But that means I have to stop and take time out of my day to call my bank and dick around with them. And then if the new card comes with a new number (I don't know if it will or not), and/or expiration date (that almost certainly will change), then I have to login to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the places online where I use that card for some kind of automatic payment and change the payment details. I'm extremely loathe to do that, because it's incredibly tedious and painful, and I always miss one anyway and wind up getting scary emails about how my account is about to be closed.
Sure, my hand will probably be forced on this sooner or later. But as it stands, I just haven't cared enough to deal with all of that.
Your new card will have a new number and expiry date, but the old one will remain valid.
In any case, these days my web browser remembers card numbers and fills them in automatically, so it’s really not such a big deal to update card numbers online.
That's a good point. I guess I should call them and see if that's an option. If so, that sounds like the best of both worlds.
I could also buy a phone that has NFC / tap to pay support, and link my card to Google Wallet and use that. An awful lot of the place I shop support that these days...
Here's an example image from a NY Times story about chips wearing down:
https://i.imgur.com/XlKEBsc.jpg
The last card I replaced due to chip wear, the chip looked even worse than that.
Not that they're even used that often these days either: everything is just tap-and-go NFC payment now.
And I do mean everything!
I've had the chip struggle like once in my life. That was on a card very near it's expiration date. Most people I see in the store have no problems with their payment method, and when I was a cashier in 2012, people seemed to have significantly more problems getting their magstripes to scan.
All of this is SUPER dependent on which flavor/brand of POS is popular around you, the effort your bank put into making a good implementation, and whether your local merchants actually put effort into running their business and keeping equipment maintained. Pretty much nothing in this discussion is generalizeable to all of the US other than "We were late to the party of chip cards"
I’ve had no problems with their readers since I started doing that.
This explains a lot.
Don't people have wireless terminals in the US like the rest of the world?
Sorry you can’t buy lunch, but the hold will get released in a few days, so it’s ok!
There’s got to be a better way…
I've bought gas in France with a Monzo card and the pump was able to hold and release money immediately - ~150EUR hold initially, as soon as I put the pump down it adjusted to the real amount.
Seems like the tech to make this happen does exist, it's just a matter of not using a shitty bank.
I understand why Germany, a poorer country which was late to electronic payments, wouldn't do this; I don't understand the hostility to it. But then, I'm American, we've been doing this longer than you've been alive.
You mean payments between banks that take two to three days within the country instead of a regulated maximum of 15 seconds across borders?
It's a shame you're so salty that the rest of the world has far overtaken the US. You may have been doing it "longer", but you've absolutely failed to iterate and are still stuck with obsolete technology that's rife with fraud, for which a more appropriate feeling than saltiness is shame.
But having a clunky thing at home you stick your debit card in is okay too! I guess.
What a security nightmare.
I really haven't heard of much trouble caused by these systems - of course, they require magnetic stripes in general, which are a massive attack vector, but the bar use case specifically doesn't seem to cause additional issues that I'm aware of. There are so many lower-tech and easy ways to steal magnetic track data, like skimmers, that I don't think compromising bar-back point of sale systems is a particularly high priority for most criminals.
Anyway, this is probably just a small snapshot in time regardless, since once swiped-card transactions finally go away US bars will have to switch to the mobile terminal pay-as-you-go method anyway.
Now you get it.
LOL. It's convenient for bar owners. Patrons doesn't give a shit about that.
Some establishments take your card as collateral, some actually swipe it into their system to keep track, but that's not that common.
???
Yes you can. At least the bars around me have no problem with holding a tab with chip and/or tap. Maybe they just use newer terminals.
I don't remember when I last saw a person not taping with phone or watch.
But they also maintain an internal blacklist of declined cards, so the most you'll get away with is one day's travel around London. Per card.