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by alwillis 1597 days ago
I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

Apple isn't Microsoft. When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist? They generally don't explicitly compete with commodity businesses unless there's something unique they're attempting to accomplish. They do stuff just because they can.

They partnered with the banks to create Apple Pay.

They partnered with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard to create the Apple credit card.

Besides, it would be a huge undertaking to build out a payment platform like Square to compete with them. Of course they could have bought any number of payment processors if they wanted to if they wanted to go that route.

Stripe and Shopify already have millions of customers so it only makes sense to partner with them.

The obvious thing most people on this thread is this being the basis for Apple's cryptocurrency aspirations.

Tim Cook owns some and he said Apple as a company is looking into cryptocurrency [1]. It only makes sense that Apple will eventually support bitcoin and other transactions natively on the iPhone, peer to peer.

[1]: "Tim Cook said Apple is looking at cryptocurrency – Here’s what the company is likely to do" https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

2 comments

> When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist?

I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often. Last exemple I have in mind is maps. As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?

I'm too lazy to recall every detail, but it happened, often.

Uh huh.

Last exemple I have in mind is maps.

They're working with several providers, including Yelp, Open Maps and Garmin. I've submitted corrections and additions to Apple Maps; anyone can do it.

As far as tech is concerned, I believe metal is their own inhouse invention?

Metal is a set of APIs for developers; it's not customer facing. Most users aren't going to know which graphics API their software uses. Apple supported and uses OpenGL for a long time and it's still available for backwards compatibility I believe.

The most obvious things are their cash cows: the iPhone and the app store.

The M1 is also customer facing, vs partnering with Intel to make it

Did they not partner with TSMC?

IIRC, Apple wanted Intel to fab their silicon, but Intel refused. It’s only since Gelsiner took over that Intel is open to fabbing other designs.