Samsung is worried that the kind of customer that buys a product because 'this one is bigger than that one' is no longer going to buy Samsung over Apple. Apple's products are higher quality (a factor of not being rushed to market like Samsungs), so the only thing Samsung can do is drop their price which will eat into their profits. No wonder they don't like it.
I'm unconvinced that this is a significant chunk of the market. People buy the humongous Samsung phones because they want a top-of-the-line phone, and that's the size Samsung's top-of-the-line phones are. I think that's absolutely all there is to it.
Why are they buying Samsung instead of Apple? As unbelievable as it may seem to us tech nerds, I believe that 80-90% of consumers literally don't know that iOS and Android are two different things. They buy Samsung largely because most store employees steer them into it and because of up-front price. I don't think either of those things are going to change, so I don't think iPhone sales are going to increase significantly.
I suppose there are a certain number of people who really want an iPhone and really want a huge screen, but I think after the introductory surge is over, they will all have bought one, and sales of the 6+ will sag down to almost nothing.
I can't wait for the statement ad, á la "Here's to the crazy ones" and "This is it", that starts with "You are our customer, not our product". If they did a full-on prime-time push, I think it would be devastating for Android.
Samsung's mobile sales (especially phablet sales) will drop suddenly and permanently starting this quarter.
Will be fun to look back on what happened. In about a year or so.
We'll see what kind of ads Samsung can afford to run in fall 2015.
Sony just wrote off a substantial fraction of their mobile business from their balance sheet. This is where Samsung is headed. The Chinese smartphone manufacturers will not, cannot be denied.
So now the small companies are worried. What's going to happen to Fitbit, Meta, Pebble, Square, etc.? Will the sale signs soon come up?
When Niké put the kibosh on their fitness monitor hardware, Fitbit et al should have stopped to thoroughly think things through. My own anecdotal, statistically insignificant experience was to drop my Fitbit hardware and install the Fitbit app when I finally got a smartphone (5s).
I can't wait for the statement ad, á la "Here's to the crazy ones" and "This is it", that starts with "You are our customer, not our product". If they did a full-on prime-time push, I think it would be devastating for Android.
I think the ads would have to be more attention-grabbing that what they're running now to have any effect. I admittedly don't watch a lot of TV anymore, but I can't remember the last time I noticed an Apple ad. I know they exist, because a discussion about them here led me to go looking for them, but they're so beige and boring I never even noticed them prior to actively searching them out.
When I found and sat down to actively watch an Apple ad, the message I got from it was "Apple something something... whatever." Even though I was watching it on purpose, it couldn't hold my attention for even just 30 seconds. Of course, that MIGHT say as much about my attention span as it does about hey look there's a Steller's Jay in the lilac bush.
So the crown is redundant, as you wouldn't use it.
I wouldn't use the crown to zoom in on maps for no reason when I have my phone with me when there is a better use case for having maps on my wrist. You're so convinced this watch will fail but you're trying to pit one form factor vs another. They should be used differently for different things. Maybe it will forever seem useless to you, but I bet you felt that way about the iPad, too.
Not so. I thought the iPad would be huge as soon as Jobs introduced it. I received the original one a day before it arrived in the shops.
That said, I was more sceptical about the iPhone, despite the thrilling keynote. Not so sceptical now.
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">Edit: of course, if he and I had ?Watches, he could send me his heartbeat with his location and I could verify that his heart is in the right place.</span>
So far I have not heard of Apple Pay being integrated with online shopping which is PayPal's major market.
That's an area that needs to be overhauled and really would affect Paypal's business. Taking online payments needs a payment processor and a merchant account. Some payment processors are the following:
Paypal is one that acts as both a merchant and processor and this is good for small businesses. I don't know if Apple would take the merchant responsibility on because the risk there is in the business to customer relationship. If a business sells defective products and the customer wants a refund then the law will back the customer and refunds come out of the merchant account.
Paypal manages this risk by keeping reserves in the merchant account from a company's revenue for a certain time period, which leads to things like this:
They often take a percentage of the revenue but for people who run a business with low operating margins the percentage they take makes the business unsustainable. Apple has a fairly large piggy bank, which could be used as a reserve but so does eBay/Paypal and given how Apple invests their cash, they probably wouldn't want that risk. If they don't, this gives Paypal a secure enough place in the payments market.
However, if the companies offering merchant accounts that would use Apple's payment processor were willing to relax their risk reserves due to the added security of Apple Pay, that would affect Paypal in this market and also be better for small businesses as it opens up the options. Paypal could even be a merchant account provider for Apple Pay.
I wonder how they'll handle stolen credit cards. I take it there will have to be a security step when adding a card to Apple Pay such as the bank calling the card owner to verify security details as this would prevent someone ever being able to use a stolen card through Apple Pay.
I want to skip to Jan and see what the 6 did to Sammy's numbers in the Dec qtr.
Not sure if I'll use Apple Pay but Paypal is foolish to brag about its security.
Unfortunately, since no one really knows outside of Sammy how many they "really" sell, we'll probably never know the real impact. Might see the drop in profit and sales, but we won't know how many switched over.
How is Apple going to secure the watches? Will there be a jewelry store counter now forcing customers to look with their eyes, not with their hands, without assistance? I can't imagine any other way to show such a personal device a customer must strap onto their wrist. But who knows, Apple may come up with a revolutionary way to demo jewelry. And let's face it, once Apple goes down this path, can digital rings, broaches and necklaces be far behind? Anybody think Apple will get into HUD items like Google Glass? If I were Google I would be worried. Apple just showed them how to do a "phablet" after years of saying they wouldn't enter that market. Eyeglasses are not a bad idea, and with all those fashion executives on staff now I'm sure Apple could greatly improve the style offerings. Can implants be far behind?
^^^ Perhaps a new jewelry counter by the Genius Bar to prevent "smash and grab" thefts? Introducing a high-end gold model Watch will surely increase interest from criminals.
So far I have not heard of Apple Pay being integrated with online shopping which is PayPal's major market. I agree they must be disappointed that Apple entered the brick and mortar payment realm because that was a market they had hoped to gain some traction in. I have seen a few stores where you could pay with PayPal but not many, so I don't think PayPal will lose much money in the near term because of Apple Pay, it is more a matter of the impact on their projected growth in the retail payment business.
One thing PayPal has going for it is the private person to person payment capability and their worldwide presence.
I dont think paypal is worried about brick and mortar, but think about this, I keep a paypal account for 1 and only 1 thing :
- speciality websites that allow paypal as a card processor (common among small sellers), so that I dont have to give my card number to yet another place. There is quite a number of bad stories about them, but Paypal is etablished and my EMV card account it setup with "verified by visa" mandatory (auth code sent to my phone for each purchase, to be entered at (paypal) website) so there is little risk. I dont pay from paypal account (balance never left a big 0) but directly from the card.
Now Applepay enter, and it is pretty easy for Apple to do exactly this scheme but with TouchID and SMS. Even simpler, secure and convenient. They may even be able to send a reverse SMS so you dont have to enter the code on website.
does nothing for private to private, but that is probably a small part, if you exclude sexy webcams and scams.
Paypal is right to be shitless (remember, soiled pants) terrified.
So far I have not heard of Apple Pay being integrated with online shopping which is PayPal's major market. I agree they must be disappointed that Apple entered the brick and mortar payment realm because that was a market they had hoped to gain some traction in. I have seen a few stores where you could pay with PayPal but not many, so I don't think PayPal will lose much money in the near term because of Apple Pay, it is more a matter of the impact on their projected growth in the retail payment business.
One thing PayPal has going for it is the private person to person payment capability and their worldwide presence.
Apple pay is available for 3rd party developers to integrate into shopping apps. For example, you can pay with Apple Pay from the Target app when they update their app to support it. I should have been more specific when I said online. I haven't heard of any plans for Apple Pay to work through a web browser as that would defeat the whole point of their payment model where your payment info is stored in the "secure element," not online in an account like Pay Pal. Perhaps they could have a way for you to get a one-time payment number from the phone that you manually enter into the website but that would not get widespread adoption because it would be too inconvenient.
PayPal isn't going anywhere and it's differentiated enough to coexist with Apple Pay. But it does take money away from Pay Pal and that's why they're running a disinformation campaign. There's doesn't seem to be any other good exploitation as to why they'd be doing it otherwise except to perhaps leverage Apple IPhone buzz and awareness to get themselves noticed (marketing riding the coat tails of Apple.) Even if that's the case, why else trash Apple?
There are quite a few millionaires in China. As in millions of US dollars, and I'm sure they'd rather be seen with Apple products. And although quite a few of them are fleeing China, I'd bet that enough will remain to keep Apple quite happy and profitable in China. Then, gradually, as the iPhone 6 and 6+ become 1-year old and 2-year old phones, their price will drop a little and be more accessible to the rapidly growing Chinese middle class.
Just search for "chinese millionaires" and you'll see quite a few stories about rich Chinese moving out of the country. Makes no difference to Apple. They'll buy iPhone 6 Plus-es wherever they move to.
Agreed. Apple has a market to capture. It really depends on culture and which one is the one to be seen with. If Apple is the premium luxury brand in China, the millionaires will be getting iPhones if even as just a status symbol.
I'm unconvinced that this is a significant chunk of the market. People buy the humongous Samsung phones because they want a top-of-the-line phone, and that's the size Samsung's top-of-the-line phones are. I think that's absolutely all there is to it.
...
I suppose there are a certain number of people who really want an iPhone and really want a huge screen, but I think after the introductory surge is over, they will all have bought one, and sales of the 6+ will sag down to almost nothing.
If you look at phones in a carrier store, Apple's iPhone 5's look less attractive compared to large screens. A large percentage of the population is driven toward larger, brighter screens. Over the past year or two, "phablets" started quickly attracting older people and many women who carry their phone in a clutch case or inside a purse. Those people were driving all the high end sales of Samsung devices.
By offering a moderately larger 6 and a very large 6 Plus, Apple is going to take all the wind out of the sails of companies who were banking on picking up the biggy size buyers.
It's hard to say if mainstream users stick with 4" 5c/5s (assisted by cost sensitivity) or grow towards the 4.7" 6. But Apple is going to find out right away, and will have the best data to use in going forward. Regardless of 6+ sales' size or popularity proportion among iPhones, they are going to devastate the market for Samsung and Lumia just the same way that 4G LTE iPhone 5 instantly stole the majority of the LTE market from Android.
The "Samsung is winning" meme of 2013 died before Apple even released iPhone 6/6 Plus. This release is going to do severe damage.
I still use PayPal now, but a transaction with them years ago left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
In the early days, I sold a MacBook on eBay that was paid for by PayPal. It was in the early days of verified shipping addresses, but PayPal sent me the money when the package was accepted by the customer. A few days later, I was contacted by a guy who said that he was a professor at a university who had had his Amex card stolen by a student. I told him that the deal had completed, I had shipped the product, and that it was not my problem that the goods had been paid for with a stolen credit card. He agreed and said that he would make a claim with Amex to have the charge nullified. I didn't hear back from him, but PayPal tried to charge me back for illegal transaction even though I had shipped the MacBook. They expected me to take the loss even though it was a private sale and they had approved it up front. Long story short, they chased me for a while and then shut down my account when they couldn't get the money back from me. As it turns out, I went ahead and opened another PayPal account on another email address and have used this new account since.
This happened probably about 15 years ago when PayPal initially started. No doubt they have improved security substantially since those days, but I really don't think they have become much more customer friendly over time. Worst part is that after PayPal quit chasing me, they sold the debt off to a debt consolidator who continues to harass me to this day to try to recover the money ... even though it was undoubtedly written off years ago.
iPhone 6 and Plus, Apple Pay, Apple Watch. It's like a chess match. Each technology or product Apple comes out with, builds on what Apple has earlier introduced. Notice too the misdirection. Everybody thought the new watch will just be an iPod Nano type of product. All the while, back in the lab, they were hatching something totally different. iBeacon was going to support a type of payment technology. Apple let the wags alone with their ideas. Then let the NFC cat out the bag with a big splash. The terminals were already there, so why not crash the party and bring the big cake by offering the best security for it. So now the small companies are worried. What's going to happen to Fitbit, Meta, Pebble, Square, etc.? Will the sale signs soon come up? What's going to happen to the bigger companies - Moto, Garmin, Shamsung, Paypal? Well, they have the template. Time to do some serious copying again....
The pile of soiled diapers is growing quickly across the community of product vendors who don't control their own integrated hardware, software, platform, and ecosystem solution and thus, their own destiny. Being good at only one thing no longer cuts it. Integration is king on the product side just as teamwork is key on the people side. All the world admired Steve Jobs' vision, passion, and design sensibilities but I think they've overlooked the killer instinct, persistence, and unrelenting focus on operational excellence that Tim Cook brings to the table. Now they will pay the price. Steve's last great act as visionary was leaving Jony and his team to carry on and extend the product vision in spectacular fashion and Tim and his crew to pummel the competition with operational excellence on a global scale like no company has ever done before. Multiply this times the thousands of world class Apple employees and here we are.
Welcome to the New Apple.
One of Steve Jobs' great qualities that many overlook was his ability to assemble, drive and motivate amazing teams. He had natural concern about his legacy, espcially when he knew he was becoming increasingly sick. He was not about to install a bunch of monkeys in there.
It's too early to tell, but maybe, ultimately, Steve's greatest innovation will be seen as what he implemented as far as teams, systems and vision at Apple before he died. By many measures, Cook has already surpassed Jobs but remember, Jobs decided that Cook would be the CEO! And that Jony Ive would be VP design and so on. He knew what he was doing.
As to the OP, PayPal's ad seems desperate. The fees are rather high with PayPal, but I have used it a lot and like the interface. But NFC will be a leapfrog technology and if integrated into my phone it's one less step I need to take to pay for something. Lines move faster and everyone is happy.
Comments
I'm unconvinced that this is a significant chunk of the market. People buy the humongous Samsung phones because they want a top-of-the-line phone, and that's the size Samsung's top-of-the-line phones are. I think that's absolutely all there is to it.
Why are they buying Samsung instead of Apple? As unbelievable as it may seem to us tech nerds, I believe that 80-90% of consumers literally don't know that iOS and Android are two different things. They buy Samsung largely because most store employees steer them into it and because of up-front price. I don't think either of those things are going to change, so I don't think iPhone sales are going to increase significantly.
I suppose there are a certain number of people who really want an iPhone and really want a huge screen, but I think after the introductory surge is over, they will all have bought one, and sales of the 6+ will sag down to almost nothing.
Apple: "We are not in the business of collecting your data." - Eddie Cue, 9/9/2014
Google: [nervous fidgeting, crickets chirping ...]
I can't wait for the statement ad, á la "Here's to the crazy ones" and "This is it", that starts with "You are our customer, not our product". If they did a full-on prime-time push, I think it would be devastating for Android.
Samsung's mobile sales (especially phablet sales) will drop suddenly and permanently starting this quarter.
Will be fun to look back on what happened. In about a year or so.
We'll see what kind of ads Samsung can afford to run in fall 2015.
Sony just wrote off a substantial fraction of their mobile business from their balance sheet. This is where Samsung is headed. The Chinese smartphone manufacturers will not, cannot be denied.
So now the small companies are worried. What's going to happen to Fitbit, Meta, Pebble, Square, etc.? Will the sale signs soon come up?
When Niké put the kibosh on their fitness monitor hardware, Fitbit et al should have stopped to thoroughly think things through. My own anecdotal, statistically insignificant experience was to drop my Fitbit hardware and install the Fitbit app when I finally got a smartphone (5s).
Edit: of course, if he and I had ?Watches, he could send me his heartbeat with his location and I could verify that his heart is in the right place.
Oh, get a room! :-)
I can't wait for the statement ad, á la "Here's to the crazy ones" and "This is it", that starts with "You are our customer, not our product". If they did a full-on prime-time push, I think it would be devastating for Android.
I think the ads would have to be more attention-grabbing that what they're running now to have any effect. I admittedly don't watch a lot of TV anymore, but I can't remember the last time I noticed an Apple ad. I know they exist, because a discussion about them here led me to go looking for them, but they're so beige and boring I never even noticed them prior to actively searching them out.
When I found and sat down to actively watch an Apple ad, the message I got from it was "Apple something something... whatever." Even though I was watching it on purpose, it couldn't hold my attention for even just 30 seconds. Of course, that MIGHT say as much about my attention span as it does about hey look there's a Steller's Jay in the lilac bush.
Not so. I thought the iPad would be huge as soon as Jobs introduced it. I received the original one a day before it arrived in the shops.
That said, I was more sceptical about the iPhone, despite the thrilling keynote. Not so sceptical now.
Ugh.
That's an area that needs to be overhauled and really would affect Paypal's business. Taking online payments needs a payment processor and a merchant account. Some payment processors are the following:
• 2Checkout
• Authorize.net
• Beanstream
• Braintree
• Chase Paymentech (Orbital)
• CyberSource
• Dwolla
• Elavon MyVirtualMerchant
• First Data GGE4
• FirstData US
• IATS Payments
• Ignite Payments
• Litle Online
• Merchant e-Solutions
• MerchantWARE by Merchant Warehouse
• Optimal Payments
• PayJunction
• Payment Express PxPay
• PaymentExpress
• PayPal Express Checkout
• PayPal Payflow Link
• PayPal Payflow Pro
• PayPal Payments Advanced
• PayPal Payments Pro (US)
• Plug'n Pay
• Psigate
• QuickBooks Merchant Services (Intuit)
• Sage Payment Solutions
• Samurai
• SecurePay
• Shopify Payments
• Skip Jack
• Stripe
• TransFirst
• Trust Commerce
• USA ePay
• Verifi
• WorldPay (Direct)
• WorldPay (Offsite)
Paypal is one that acts as both a merchant and processor and this is good for small businesses. I don't know if Apple would take the merchant responsibility on because the risk there is in the business to customer relationship. If a business sells defective products and the customer wants a refund then the law will back the customer and refunds come out of the merchant account.
Paypal manages this risk by keeping reserves in the merchant account from a company's revenue for a certain time period, which leads to things like this:
http://www.aboutpaypal.org/paypal-destroyed-business-8-years-day/
They often take a percentage of the revenue but for people who run a business with low operating margins the percentage they take makes the business unsustainable. Apple has a fairly large piggy bank, which could be used as a reserve but so does eBay/Paypal and given how Apple invests their cash, they probably wouldn't want that risk. If they don't, this gives Paypal a secure enough place in the payments market.
However, if the companies offering merchant accounts that would use Apple's payment processor were willing to relax their risk reserves due to the added security of Apple Pay, that would affect Paypal in this market and also be better for small businesses as it opens up the options. Paypal could even be a merchant account provider for Apple Pay.
I wonder how they'll handle stolen credit cards. I take it there will have to be a security step when adding a card to Apple Pay such as the bank calling the card owner to verify security details as this would prevent someone ever being able to use a stolen card through Apple Pay.
I want to skip to Jan and see what the 6 did to Sammy's numbers in the Dec qtr.
Not sure if I'll use Apple Pay but Paypal is foolish to brag about its security.
Unfortunately, since no one really knows outside of Sammy how many they "really" sell, we'll probably never know the real impact. Might see the drop in profit and sales, but we won't know how many switched over.
So far I have not heard of Apple Pay being integrated with online shopping which is PayPal's major market. I agree they must be disappointed that Apple entered the brick and mortar payment realm because that was a market they had hoped to gain some traction in. I have seen a few stores where you could pay with PayPal but not many, so I don't think PayPal will lose much money in the near term because of Apple Pay, it is more a matter of the impact on their projected growth in the retail payment business.
One thing PayPal has going for it is the private person to person payment capability and their worldwide presence.
I dont think paypal is worried about brick and mortar, but think about this, I keep a paypal account for 1 and only 1 thing :
- speciality websites that allow paypal as a card processor (common among small sellers), so that I dont have to give my card number to yet another place. There is quite a number of bad stories about them, but Paypal is etablished and my EMV card account it setup with "verified by visa" mandatory (auth code sent to my phone for each purchase, to be entered at (paypal) website) so there is little risk. I dont pay from paypal account (balance never left a big 0) but directly from the card.
Now Applepay enter, and it is pretty easy for Apple to do exactly this scheme but with TouchID and SMS. Even simpler, secure and convenient. They may even be able to send a reverse SMS so you dont have to enter the code on website.
does nothing for private to private, but that is probably a small part, if you exclude sexy webcams and scams.
Paypal is right to be shitless (remember, soiled pants) terrified.
So far I have not heard of Apple Pay being integrated with online shopping which is PayPal's major market. I agree they must be disappointed that Apple entered the brick and mortar payment realm because that was a market they had hoped to gain some traction in. I have seen a few stores where you could pay with PayPal but not many, so I don't think PayPal will lose much money in the near term because of Apple Pay, it is more a matter of the impact on their projected growth in the retail payment business.
One thing PayPal has going for it is the private person to person payment capability and their worldwide presence.
Apple pay is available for 3rd party developers to integrate into shopping apps. For example, you can pay with Apple Pay from the Target app when they update their app to support it. I should have been more specific when I said online. I haven't heard of any plans for Apple Pay to work through a web browser as that would defeat the whole point of their payment model where your payment info is stored in the "secure element," not online in an account like Pay Pal. Perhaps they could have a way for you to get a one-time payment number from the phone that you manually enter into the website but that would not get widespread adoption because it would be too inconvenient.
PayPal isn't going anywhere and it's differentiated enough to coexist with Apple Pay. But it does take money away from Pay Pal and that's why they're running a disinformation campaign. There's doesn't seem to be any other good exploitation as to why they'd be doing it otherwise except to perhaps leverage Apple IPhone buzz and awareness to get themselves noticed (marketing riding the coat tails of Apple.) Even if that's the case, why else trash Apple?
There are quite a few millionaires in China. As in millions of US dollars, and I'm sure they'd rather be seen with Apple products. And although quite a few of them are fleeing China, I'd bet that enough will remain to keep Apple quite happy and profitable in China. Then, gradually, as the iPhone 6 and 6+ become 1-year old and 2-year old phones, their price will drop a little and be more accessible to the rapidly growing Chinese middle class.
Just search for "chinese millionaires" and you'll see quite a few stories about rich Chinese moving out of the country. Makes no difference to Apple. They'll buy iPhone 6 Plus-es wherever they move to.
Agreed. Apple has a market to capture. It really depends on culture and which one is the one to be seen with. If Apple is the premium luxury brand in China, the millionaires will be getting iPhones if even as just a status symbol.
I'm unconvinced that this is a significant chunk of the market. People buy the humongous Samsung phones because they want a top-of-the-line phone, and that's the size Samsung's top-of-the-line phones are. I think that's absolutely all there is to it.
...
I suppose there are a certain number of people who really want an iPhone and really want a huge screen, but I think after the introductory surge is over, they will all have bought one, and sales of the 6+ will sag down to almost nothing.
If you look at phones in a carrier store, Apple's iPhone 5's look less attractive compared to large screens. A large percentage of the population is driven toward larger, brighter screens. Over the past year or two, "phablets" started quickly attracting older people and many women who carry their phone in a clutch case or inside a purse. Those people were driving all the high end sales of Samsung devices.
By offering a moderately larger 6 and a very large 6 Plus, Apple is going to take all the wind out of the sails of companies who were banking on picking up the biggy size buyers.
It's hard to say if mainstream users stick with 4" 5c/5s (assisted by cost sensitivity) or grow towards the 4.7" 6. But Apple is going to find out right away, and will have the best data to use in going forward. Regardless of 6+ sales' size or popularity proportion among iPhones, they are going to devastate the market for Samsung and Lumia just the same way that 4G LTE iPhone 5 instantly stole the majority of the LTE market from Android.
The "Samsung is winning" meme of 2013 died before Apple even released iPhone 6/6 Plus. This release is going to do severe damage.
I still use PayPal now, but a transaction with them years ago left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
In the early days, I sold a MacBook on eBay that was paid for by PayPal. It was in the early days of verified shipping addresses, but PayPal sent me the money when the package was accepted by the customer. A few days later, I was contacted by a guy who said that he was a professor at a university who had had his Amex card stolen by a student. I told him that the deal had completed, I had shipped the product, and that it was not my problem that the goods had been paid for with a stolen credit card. He agreed and said that he would make a claim with Amex to have the charge nullified. I didn't hear back from him, but PayPal tried to charge me back for illegal transaction even though I had shipped the MacBook. They expected me to take the loss even though it was a private sale and they had approved it up front. Long story short, they chased me for a while and then shut down my account when they couldn't get the money back from me. As it turns out, I went ahead and opened another PayPal account on another email address and have used this new account since.
This happened probably about 15 years ago when PayPal initially started. No doubt they have improved security substantially since those days, but I really don't think they have become much more customer friendly over time. Worst part is that after PayPal quit chasing me, they sold the debt off to a debt consolidator who continues to harass me to this day to try to recover the money ... even though it was undoubtedly written off years ago.
If only the Fandroids would practice such restraint in the forums...
One of Steve Jobs' great qualities that many overlook was his ability to assemble, drive and motivate amazing teams. He had natural concern about his legacy, espcially when he knew he was becoming increasingly sick. He was not about to install a bunch of monkeys in there.
It's too early to tell, but maybe, ultimately, Steve's greatest innovation will be seen as what he implemented as far as teams, systems and vision at Apple before he died. By many measures, Cook has already surpassed Jobs but remember, Jobs decided that Cook would be the CEO! And that Jony Ive would be VP design and so on. He knew what he was doing.
As to the OP, PayPal's ad seems desperate. The fees are rather high with PayPal, but I have used it a lot and like the interface. But NFC will be a leapfrog technology and if integrated into my phone it's one less step I need to take to pay for something. Lines move faster and everyone is happy.