NFC dying? In Taipei, Taiwan, you go to a public parking lot and you get a poker chip when you drive in the gate. You go shop or whatever and when you are done, you put your poker chip in a vending machine and the nfc in your poker chip lets the system know when you arrived and the amount you owe shows on the screen, typically less than $100NT for an hour in off peak times. When you pay, you get the poker chip back, only this time it's coded to let you through the gate so you can exit he parking lot. And yes there's an attendant for those who lost their chip, etc, but the sheer throughput at the exit indicates 99% of cars are having no problem with the system.
We are so freaking backwards here.
Perhaps you mean Detroit instead of the US. There's a garage here in Tampa that has a chipcoin system and it sucks. It's across from the Tampa Times Forum (where the Lightning play) and there are only a few kiosks to pay at. Sometimes it's quick, but when any of them break it takes FOREVER to leave because the kiosks are slower than people. Once I got stuck in line for over an hour (with only about 60 people) because they were slow to accept credit cards that day. We started to cheer when people could pay with cash, and people who only had cards publicly apologized. It's probably the same system in use in your example.
You also only get 10 minutes to leave. Luckily they waive it for game days.
Even when it all works, it's still slower than just paying the attendant. Unfortunately this replaced all of the attendants so when things break it takes forever. The only benefit is that it's easier to get validated parking since all you have to do is walk in someplace and scan the coin.
Perhaps having NFC on your phone would work better, but municipal garages are going to hold out forever on systems like chipcoin because they're harder to skirt than an NFC device you can program to give whatever information you desire.
Anyway, I just thought you should know that there are places in the US that aren't "backward" according to your standard. I also thought you should know that sometimes this glamorous use of technology is worse than what existed before. It just allows people to save money and cut entry-level jobs—at the cost of the consumer.
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It's funny because we (Europeans) always say NFC isn't big here, but is much more widespread in the US
I'm pretty sure it's mostly big in Asia. I've only seen a few of the scanners for whatever card it is that offers it. I remember thinking it was neat years ago. Now I can't even remember the last time I saw it in real life or even in an ad.
I wouldn't mind it being more widely available although I also have privacy concerns.
Passbook makes more sense. It knows the right thing to use by location, it's easier/cheaper to design for and much more of the infrastructure is already in place. But even it has failed to gain traction (in company support mostly).
If Apple can't get it accomplished with all of that in place, how can people think Apple can ever popularize NFC? And Apple's share numbers are a lot less than android phones—maybe not than NFC androids, but that won't take long. If the market is there Apple will capitalize like it always does. If not, they won't support NFC just like they avoided Blu-Ray.
