It isn't "much slower" when you actually account for the time spent waiting for the server to come around, getting their attention to ask for the check, waiting for them to come back with it, waiting for them to do their lap and come back to collect the card, waiting for them to go run it, and finally waiting for the card to come back.

No need for the waiter to walk away with my card if they have a mobile POS, as I mentioned above. Tapping my card and selecting a tipping option takes less time than even opening my camera app.

Ironically, many of the QR payment places I‘ve been to actually have these as well.

I get that jumping from a central POS to a device per waiter is an investment – but why switch to QR codes if all your staff is already equipped with a strictly superior solution?

> if they have a mobile POS

That’s a big if in the US.

This is pretty standard in many parts of the world. I just can't understand why wireless credit card payment and mobile pos ain't available in US.

They have started appearing very quickly. There is definitely a long tail, but these days I would say I see one at least ever other time I go to a restaurant or bar.

In my experience, US restaurants either have something very new (i.e. combined POS/ordering handhelds), or very old (i.e. centralized/non-mobile, sometimes even magstripe only POS, no PIN or contactless capability).

The ones I‘ve seen that have switched to QR payments had mobile POSes before.

This weird system is one thing I don't enjoy about visiting North America. Where I live, you never deal with the servers for payment. When you're ready to leave, you just leave. Every restaurant has a payment desk near the door where they show you your bill, you tap your card and you're on your way.

> The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay

Can you provide any evidence of this?

You can pick what information you want to collect as an Apple Pay web merchant:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

Customers can ultimately set whatever they want as an email address there, and it's not verified in any way by Apple before completing the payment, but defaults matter: The default on my phone was my real email address from my contact card, and I did not even notice that it was preselected in the payment sheet until I got a confirmation email by the checkout system.

In an online payment context, this makes total sense to me: The merchant needs some way to identify the buyer even just for digital goods, after all. But it came very unexpected for me in a restaurant context, where I know that Apple Pay (via tap and pay) normally does not even reveal my name.

I really hope that Apple realizes the pretty big privacy gap here and starts integrating their email relay service into Apple Pay sooner rather than later, as well as making it possible to override required fields in some way.