[PeterisP]

Even the first line of illustration is kind of misleading - "Paycheck is deposited into employee's bank account"; there's no such thing as a paycheck in most places worldwide, no checks get involved. The employers pay out the salary with free or cheap bank-to-bank payments, and have done it long enough that the term 'check' has no colloquial relation to your salary.

The main difference for accessibility of such payments is that, unlike cards, there's no percentage fee involved; and that, unlike paper checks, processing them can be so automated and cheap that payments can be offered for free or nearly so.

[nneonneo]

I believe “paycheck” is now understood as a catch-all term for the periodic payment of wages or salary. It doesn’t have to mean a literal check - paychecks can be direct-deposited too, in which case they go through precisely the bank-to-bank transfer that you mention.

[bas]

Remember that we still call our pocket supercomputers "phones".

[tialaramex]

Also we keep thinking the important thing is that they're computers but actually the important thing is the Network. So in a way phones (which are all about being connected to the network) might be the best term anyway even though we rarely use them to make a voice call.

[ForHackernews]

Again, only in America. They're "mobiles" many places.

[nneonneo]

When I was in Korea, the term "handset" seemed ubiquitous among the English-speaking people I interacted with. This is even stranger because, as I understand it, the Korean term is a transliteration of the English "smartphone", so I don't know where people were getting "handset" from.

[krapht]

... which is short for mobile phone.

[ams6110]

Many, many small businesses in the US still issue paper payroll checks.