Prominent iOS developer @Chronic seems to indicate in a series of tweets this morning that there is indeed NFC hardware in the iPhone 5 (or at least prototypes), but it perhaps is not set up to be used for payment systems.
all of you annoying doubters of a certain technology being present in the new iPhone, all I will say is: gpio12
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Will Strafach (@chronic) September 12, 2012I have no way of knowing what will be in the production models, but there would be no reason to remove a major technology that was in an EVT
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Will Strafach (@chronic) September 12, 2012clarification: N42AP had NFC. I am assuming that if that's CDMA and N41AP is GSM, they both will have it. no reason for just CDMA to.
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Will Strafach (@chronic) September 12, 2012@stroughtonsmith people don't understand other uses, which is quite annoying. much more than just payments.
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Will Strafach (@chronic) September 12, 2012The tweets seems to fall along the same lines as what we had heard earlier about prototypes. However, Jim Dalrymple from the Loop disputed claims of NFC hardware, perhaps to temper expectations.
Just as a note: The iPhone had the capability to use FM RX/TX radio for years, but Apple decided not to enable it for listening to radio stations or even broadcasting to your car stereo for whatever reason. This could be a similar situation.
We will not know for sure until the iPhone is torn down later this month.
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