A smart MagSafe wallet could alert you if you leave a card behind after using it in a store, thanks to a simple approach described in a new Apple patent application.
The wallet could also better protect you against accidentally losing cards when carrying only one or two cards …
In the UK, contactless payment is so ubiquitous that I make almost all of my card payments using Apple Pay on my Watch. But I do still carry a couple of physical cards in a MagSafe wallet for the rare occasions when contactless payment isn’t available, or I’m making a purchase above the £100 ($124) limit with terminals which don’t support the far higher Apple Pay limits.
One risk of using physical cards is forgetting to replace it in the wallet after use, while another is the card falling out unnoticed – a particular danger when carrying a single card in a slot designed for three. A new Apple patent application spotted by Patently Apple aims to prevent both of these.
Apple describes including a spring-loaded clip, with a similar design to a mousetrap, intended to keep cards safely in the wallet.
The internal view exposes a spring clip, which can be employed to exert a force against physical cards that are inserted into the smart wallet. Under this approach, the spring clip can help prevent the physical cards from simply falling out of the smart wallet under common scenarios, e.g., when only a single card is stored in the smart wallet when the smart wallet is placed into an upside-down orientation, and so on.
The addition of a strain gauge would allow the wallet to determine the number of cards in the wallet. If a card is removed, and not replaced soon afterwards – as would be expected when briefly removed for a transaction – the wallet would alert you.
Apple uses five minutes as a suggested time before a missing card alert is triggered.
[This] involves the iPhone determining that a threshold amount of time has lapsed and that physical card is still missing from the smart wallet. Reaching this conclusion first involves the iPhone performing an update to its event log in response to receiving a periodic update from the smart wallet about the physical cards stored therein.
In turn, the iPhone identifies, based on the information stored in the wireless device event log, that the physical card has been missing from the smart wallet since at least 8:02 AM. Subsequently, the iPhone compares the current time to the last time the physical card was detected by the smart wallet in order to determine whether the threshold amount of time (e.g., five minutes) has lapsed. In the example illustrated, the current time is 8:08 AM, which means that (1) approximately six minutes has passed since the physical card 122-1 was last detected, and (2) the threshold amount of time has lapsed.
If you have already left the place at which the card was removed, your iPhone would give you directions back to the location.
It goes on to describe more sophisticated options. For example, if a card is still not replaced in the wallet some time after your phone alerts you, it could proactively offer to contact the card issuer in order to freeze or cancel the card.
As always with Apple patents, there’s no way to know which of them will ever be turned into actual products, but for however long we need to carry physical rectangles with us as backup for Apple Pay, this one seems a solid idea.
Image: 9to5Mac composite from Christian Pérez on Unsplash & Luke Chesser on Unsplash
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