I said last summer in my Apple Watch Diary series that Apple Pay arriving in the UK was the tipping point for me in transforming the Watch from a useful device into something I was reluctant to be without. That was confirmed last week when a fraud attempt left me without Apple Pay for a couple of days.
I received a text from my bank asking me to call them as they suspected my card had been compromised. I call them to find that they’d blocked an attempt to use my debit card for a £1200 ($1700) online transaction. As it was for a gadget purchase, I was impressed that they caught it – though perhaps it was the surprise at a large purchase from a non-fruity company …
Having confirmed that I didn’t make the transaction, they put a stop on my card and said they’d send a new one out within a few days. Interestingly, the UK seems to lack one Apple Pay feature the US has …
When I tweeted about it, Zac said that when a similar thing happened to him, his bank automatically updated Apple Pay with the new card details. That’s a nice feature, as it means you can start using the replacement card before the physical piece of plastic arrives in the post.
Update: Some UK banks do this too.
But it didn’t happen for me: I needed to manually remove the old card and then wait for the new one to arrive before I could add it. I could have added a second card to tide me over, but I decided to use it as an opportunity to see what life was like without Apple Pay now that I was so used to it.
I’ve mentioned before that the UK has had contactless cards since 2008, so in London at least, contactless terminals are literally everywhere – which means Apple Pay is accepted by almost every business, large or small. It’s a surprise to find a retailer that doesn’t offer it; even London’s famous black cabs do.
We do have a transaction limit for contactless cards, but this is high enough to cover most everyday purchases – so my Apple Watch is my normal method of paying for things.
I realized just how habitual it had become to raise my Watch to payment terminals when I tried to pay for a cup of tea in Starbucks. That was very shortly after the call to my bank, and I instinctively just raised my wrist to the terminal. I hadn’t yet removed the old card from Apple Pay, so my Watch pinged and told me I’d paid. The till initially told the cashier the same thing – but then reported that the transaction was declined.
I immediately realized why, of course, and used a second card. In true ‘first world problem’ style, it actually felt like a hassle to have to put down the cup of tea, reach into my wallet, pull out the card, tap it against the terminal, replace it in my wallet and put the wallet back into my pocket.
I had to laugh at myself. This was, after all, something I’ve done from my first ever bank account right up to last July – and here I was feeling like it was a hassle.
Part of it was the fact that Apple Pay didn’t reach the UK until after the launch of the Watch. Most American users will have experienced the halfway house of using their iPhone to make payments, which still requires you to reach into your pocket, but I’d skipped that stage. For me, Apple Pay has always been about simply raising my wrist.
Reverting to digging a piece of plastic out of my pocket felt like returning to the Stone Age. I breathed a sigh of relief when the new card arrived and I was able to revert to the far more civilized habit of simply waving my arm to pay.
As an aside, a friend who is concerned about the security of contactless cards has always refused to use them, insisting on his bank providing the non-contactless variety. Despite his physical cards lacking the contactless payment chip, they still work just fine for Apple Pay, giving the best of both worlds: the convenience of Apple Watch payments without the risk of a contactless card.
As a former skeptic who still wears my Apple Watch every day, it seems a good time to update our poll on whether the Watch has succeeded in becoming an indispensable item for you, or whether the novelty wore off. At the end of last year, 71% of you were still wearing it every day. Please take part in our updated poll and share in comments your reasons for wearing or abandoning it.
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Still waiting for real Apple Pay in Canada…
I sold mine. I was sick to death of waiting for to unfreeze/ not load what i wanted to see. It was almost always more frustrating than just getting my phone out. Hopefully Gen 2 or 3 will be substantially better.
Ummm what….all of a sudden buying starbucks with a credit card is burdensome? Apple Pay is used at far less places than it is accepted, yet in starbucks you feel as though you were launched back into the stone age because you had to do what you already have to do at 95% of the locations you frequent? I am totally confused.
Nope: “The UK has had contactless cards since 2008, so in London at least, contactless terminals are literally everywhere – which means Apple Pay is accepted by almost every business, large or small.” So I use it everywhere.
Very true, ben. in the UK not having contactless capabilities is annoying. I go to Costa instead instead of all that charge up your accont nonsense startbucks forced
Ahhh, jumped and missed that part. Makes sense from a Euro perspective then….totally different world here in USA. Sorry for the American ignorance there.
Lucky. In the US it’s still hit or miss. What’s even more bothersome is when a business has the appropriate terminal, but for some reason or another decided NOT to activate it. It got to the point where I don’t want to hold up the line trying to tap my watch/phone to see if it works that I just default to using my card. Hopefully one day we’ll catch up and have contactless payments everywhere.
In Mexico and other third world countries it’s even worse than in the US (I used apple pay there and loved it). Not only is apple pay unavailable yet, but contactless payments are really not in use, so there is no way to test apple pay even if you have US cards. Many businesses in Mexico do have terminals that would support contactless payments but they never have the feature enabled -they just set them up for swiping (magnetic band) or inserting (chip) because very few people have contactless cards-. In addition, none of the businesses have the terminals accessible to the customers like they do in the US (forget about self checkout!) nor do they use the screen for signing; usually the card has to be handed over to the sales clerk, who will swipe or insert in in the terminal and then print on paper the receipt to be signed by the customer. It’s a real pain in the neck.
Are you in the US? Because, you’re right, that is definitely the current payment trend. But he’s in the UK, where they’ve “had contactless cards since 2008, so in London at least, contactless terminals are literally everywhere – which means Apple Pay is accepted by almost every business, large or small.” I have never been to the UK, and I don’t pretend to know the payment trends, so I take him at his word that contactless payments are far more prevalent there, than in the US.
Still no Apple Pay in most countries. Not even 1 in Europe I think.
So please 9to5, stop acting as if Apple Pay is everywhere
the UK is in europe :) I live lot in france too, and it drives me mad not having it here. hopefully it will come soon. Contactless termals are everywhere now, and Android phones can use it with various banks and phone carrier through NFC. Apple is behind
Yes, I felt exactly the same way waiting for it to reach the UK. At least there is some comfort for you – it’s on the way: http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/26/apple-pay-france-launch-date/
Apple doesn’t think so. All continents can be selected from when you want apple pay support on their website, except Euope.
(In b4 Europe isn’t a continent, i know, Eurasia)
Hopefully not much longer.
It’s amazing that the chip system here in the U.S. takes longer (have to leave card in reader during the transaction) and is less convenient (I always have to search for the chip slot) than the old swipe method. I love the speed and convenience of paying with Apple Pay on my Watch now.
“it actually felt like a hassle to have to put down the cup of tea, reach into my wallet, pull out the card, tap it against the terminal, replace it in my wallet and put the wallet back into my pocket.”
Wow, Ben. You must’ve been exhausted after exerting all of that work!
I was: I needed a sit-down and a cuppa after all that!
I had the screen replaces on my 6+ and therefore had to disable touch ID. I found out the hard way this then means you have to call your bank and get your credit card re-activated on Apple Pay
I don’t have a watch as I’m waiting for the native podcast app to arrive on watchOS
I use Apple Pay in the UK, and had to block my card after an ATM ate it. I didn’t have a watch at the time, but the card on my phone updated to the new automatically. Perhaps it is a feature your bank has decided not to use, I’m with Santander.
Also why are you paying for Starbucks with anything other than the app? At least so you can get a free drink every 15 times, if not so you can order ahead and skip the queue.
Also do you find it takes a bit longer for Apple Pay to register as successfully (it pings before this annoyingly) than compared to actual contactless card?
(I mean it updated automatically within a few hours, long before the physical card arrived)
Interesting, must be a feature my bank doesn’t use, then.
I can rarely be bothered with retailer apps. I cycle everywhere in London so can’t order ahead anyway (without stopping to do so, which defeats the object).
Supposedly this should all change when UK retailers roll out loyalty card support. Little sign of that happening yet though?
Maybe it’s just me but I still feel self-conscious about using a phone to make a contactless payment (unless it’s a self-service till) – it just feels too much like showing off, especially if the staff don’t earn much, and also, as a non-watch owner, the time it takes to use a contactless card vs the iPhone isn’t much different.
I am looking to all-in-one loyalty cards though as that’ll make a genuine difference to transaction time and the number of cards you no longer have to carry.
I did feel self-conscious about using the Watch at first for exactly that reason, but go so many “Wow, that’s cool” responses the first week or two that I soon lost that concern.
I live in the US and my bank sent me a new card (so we could get ‘current’ with ‘leading edge’ chip technology). I was amazed to find: 1) using the chip in the US is PAINFULLY slow – much faster to swipe (not to mention how much faster Apple Pay is) and 2) once I activated the new card, it automatically replaced the card I had set up in Apple Pay on the iPhone and Watch. Awesome. That was very slick. I was able to use that card with Apple Pay and I hadn’t even put it in my wallet yet.
Although not accepted everywhere yet, it is so nice to be able to use ApplePay. Really saves a lot of time. (Only problem I have is when the card reader is in a weird place such that I need to rotate my arm in a not-super-easy manner, or when I actually have to touch the two devices (but this is only in like older restaurants and stuff, and isn’t all that common.)
“Digging for a piece of plastic” Huh? AppleWatch still requires you to keep an iPhone in your packet – so presumably, you could have just as easily pull out the phone while pressing the TouchID, and use ApplePay that way? Yes, there is a time waste of about 0.02sec, due to a hand motion being 20cm longer.. But I am confident you survived.
In seriousness – as long as AppleWatch requires you to keep your iPhone, it’s a worthless piece of gadgetry (to me). Just another gizmo to keep charged on a daily basis. Simplicity is the king.
Well, my phone would always be on me anyway, but I of course couldn’t use it in these circumstances.
Not entirely true. To use Apple Pay on the Apple Watch there is no requirement to have the iPhone nearby. I once forgot my iPhone and my wallet and was still able to make a purchase using Apple Pay on the watch.
Apple Watch does not require the phone to use apple pay. They’re independent just like Bertie Muller said. That’s why apple pay needs to be set up separately for each device and assigns a different account number to each.
No, Apple Pay on the Watch will work WITHOUT having the iPhone on you which is why you have to set up Apple Pay on the watch separately even though you already did it on the phone!!!! Clearly another person that have ZERO idea what they are talking about. A so called expert that doesn’t even own the device. Almost sound like a fandroid.
With big screens being what most people want, how is tossing the phone and only using a watch a good thing? So you want to do everything on a TINY watch screen? Browse the Web on the tiny watch screen? Look at pictures on the tiny watch screen, do your banking on a tiny watch screen, type out a letter on your tiny watch screen. I can go on and on. That’s just crazy. Trying to use SIRI for everything is just silly. Every time I hear that argument, it’s just DUMB!!!
I wear my Apple Watch every single day. It’s all the little things that make it great. With a quick glance, I can see the time and date, and what the Temp is outside and what/when my next appointment is and my activity for the day. I can keep track of my heart rate for the day, week, Year, etc and see if there’s any changes over time. I can quickly glace and see what the important Notification is that my watch just dinged me or tapped me without having to dig out my phone. I can even send a quick reply with one of the pre-made messages or create one with Siri. I can glance and see who’s calling me, even answer on my watch and talk using that.if I want. It’ll display turn arrows for driving direction when you use Apple Pay and tap you a different way for left or right turns. I could go on and on.
Clearly you have no idea about anything the Watch can actually do. You’ve never tried one or used one for a week. You’re just throwing out garbage info.
There’s been stand alone Cell Watches in the past and they’ve all FAILED. They’ve all SUCKED. Unless you can pair a Apple Watch with like Contact Len’s for screens, like of like a Terminator heads up display, a Stand Alone Smart Watch is just DUMB!
I am sadly still waiting for the next version of Apple watch.
I was going to wait for a Second generation version, but said screw it last November and I’m glad I went for it!!! I wear mine every day and it would suck not to have it.
Excellent summary of what for me too has become probably my most used feature (other than the time) on the Watch. Using Apple Pay is incredibly simple, reliable (in my experience) and still, after nearly a year of using it, never fails to get an ‘Oooooo that’s clever’ from the cashier. In fact, I always groan and begrudgingly pull out my wallet when contactless isn’t available.
When they introduced the Watch, I thought payments or boarding passes (basically the wallet functionality) is a nice gimmick but nothing people would use every day.
After using the then called Passbook for a boarding pass on my Apple Watch I was literally wow’ed and use it every time now. It’s almost a killer feature for me to just lift my arm and rotate the crown to make the barcode stick when approaching the gate. No more getting my phone out or even a paper pass.
See, I don’t think it’s one BIG Killer feature, but all the small little things that overall make the Apple Watch great!!!
Its almost a treat to be able to use apple pay in the US….so ironic
I would have liked the option: “I wear it every day, Useful” as this is actually my feeling about it. I tell everyone it s “nice”, lots of little handy things, nothing revolutionary, but as is customary with a watch, I always wear it
Another little annoyance to note: The wireless pay stations tend to be positioned on the right hand side of the client as traditionally people being right handed, this is the most logical place. The same applies to the Oyster card readers at the London underground. Should be starting to wear our watch on our right arm?
I have an Apple Watch and use Apple Pay for 90% of my purchases in the US. About a third through Apps. I tend not to use my watch for Apple Pay unless I’m in Whole Foods. Apple Pay is the secure alternative and I want people to use it because we all pay the fraud costs indirectly. So I want them to see my credit cards which the phone does show. This goes for Android Pay and Samsung Pay as well. If Apple Pay became more ubiquitous here I would definitely switch to the watch because I can help bag up merchandise if I’m not holding my phone.
I definitely prefer Apple Pay merchants and I’m surprised at merchants who have the necessary equipment but don’t turn on the NFC capabilities. The Chip cards are slow here partially based on perception but also on slow networks. Since we don’t have to input a PIN we are staring at the card doing nothing. With a swipe or Apple Pay we give the approval and the machine processes. I have heard of people forgoing certain cards with chips or even certain stores because of the delay. Personally, I’ve seen some very awkward interactions with other customers trying out Chip cards.
I’m surprised that 30£ limit isn’t more of a problem. With Android Pay rumored to arrive in the UK in March along with Barclay’s that seems to be the next step.
Most days, I’m not spending more than £30 in person in any one transaction. I buy most stuff online, so Apple Watch transactions are stuff like drinks in bars, snacks, tickets, etc. About the only common times I go over that is restaurant meals or buying clothes.
I don’t have an Apple Watch, but I will get one when Apple Watch 2 is released!
Amex in the UK auto updates your ApplePay card within seconds of a replacement being requested.
We have contactless payment everywhere here in Australia, have for years. No Apple Pay yet though. Grrrr!!
I can remember that frustration well!
I wear it pretty much every day, but I only really use it to check notifications and tell the time. I’ll occasionally use it to control the lights at home with Siri, but I usually take it off when I get home. I’m still on gen 1.. maybe I’ll consider an upgrade in the future, I hear the recent ones are a lot faster (not to mention Series 3 being compatible with Qi charging).
As for Apple Pay.. I hardly use it, because there are so few opportunities. Take the example from the article — Starbucks in the US doesn’t accept Apple Pay at the register. But I always use the app to order anyway (even if I’ve already walked into the store). The only places I go with any frequency that accept it are Duane Reade and McDonald’s, and perhaps the occasional vending machine. So many places just don’t accept contactless payments.