[ruswick]

The iPad POS market is saturated, and Square already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether this system can succeed so late in the game.

Moreover, I can't really be brought to care about these types of POS systems, primarily because they're all categorically atrocious. Many of my favorite coffee shops have been replacing their registers with iPads, and the universal result has been longer lines and more errors in recording orders. These things have consistently caused a regression of the customer experience in businesses. They're slow, they're unwieldy, and for whatever reason people demonstrate considerable ineptitude at using them. In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the cash register. Things like Square should be used only in instances where using a traditional register would be untenable. The fact that companies are needlessly adopting these things and subsequently worsening the experience for their customers is tremendously disappointing.

The iPad will never be better at taking people's credit cards than a traditional register. It wasn't designed to, and companies should stop pretending otherwise.

[ngoel36]

> The iPad will never be better at taking people's credit cards than a traditional register.

Are you serious? You do realize that most "traditional registers" are used in conjunction with a credit card terminal and/or a computer + monitor POS system right? Both of those things are computers, and the iPad is slowly replacing a very large number of the things that a computer was traditionally used for...primarily because of three main advantages: portability, size, and enhanced UI (multitouch, gestures, etc.). All three of those (especially the last) offer huge advantages for registers and POS systems.

Sure, most offerings are currently somewhat buggy and scrappy. But what new technology isn't? I can guarantee it will get better. This is pretty classic innovation life cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:InnovationLifeCycle.jpg). What you're saying is the equivalent to somebody in 2005 saying "Flash memory will never be used in place of traditional hard drives in laptops." That person would, today, feel pretty stupid.

[jacques_chester]

> The iPad POS market is saturated, and Square already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether this system can succeed so late in the game.

The search engine market is saturated, and Yahoo! already has a tremendous foothold. I have serious doubts about the whether Google can succeed so late in the game.