{"id":635092,"date":"2026-10-03T10:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T10:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/635092\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T10:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T10:34:11","slug":"apples-new-phones-fold-apple-pay-still-wont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/635092\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple\u2019s new phones fold. Apple Pay still won\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time\u2014every week Subscribe here<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%], <\/p>\n

You are reading our weekly newsletter The Collection \u2014multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time every edition <\/p>\n

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I surprised myself last week when I switched on a news channel on TV. It was muted, as you do, and there was the usual September coverage. Reporters were standing outside an Apple Store, panning across a queue of people who had slept on the footpath to pay the price of an expensive motorcycle for some variant of iPhone 18. Why does this segment run every single year with the exact same energy? Beats me.<\/p>\n

Flipped the channel, and there was a panel arguing about UPI\u2019s new 0.4% merchant fee. Was it a toll or a tax or, per one very annoyed guest, a betrayal of everything UPI was supposed to stand for. Unremarked on by either was a promise Tim Cook made almost a decade ago to ICICI Bank\u2019s then-CEO Chanda Kochhar, that he wanted to bring Apple Pay to India, had finally come true.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is an old story of ours about that trip: Cook in Mumbai, Apple even filling out an RBI questionnaire about how the thing might actually work, back when it didn\u2019t seem like it was the opening move in a decade-long negotiation. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Apple Pay rethink<\/p>\n

The absence of a coherent NFC-enabled payment ecosystem could force Apple to look elsewhere: maybe, mobile wallets<\/p>\n

Read now<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Apple Pay rethink<\/p>\n

The absence of a coherent NFC-enabled payment ecosystem could force Apple to look elsewhere: maybe, mobile wallets<\/p>\n

\n Read now<\/a>\n <\/p>\n

And this week\u2019s announcement is so small it almost explains why nobody mentioned it on either channel. One lender partner\u2014Axis Bank\u2014 and credit cards only, Visa and Mastercard, nothing else. HDFC, ICICI, and SBI Card are all still apparently arguing with Apple about terms.<\/p>\n

Which, fine, except for the thing that keeps nagging at me. Apple clearly knows how to want India when the thing on offer is a phone, badly enough that Counterpoint\u2019s now saying it will cross 10% of the smartphone market by year-end, double digits for the first time ever, up from 4% just four years back. So it\u2019s not that Apple doesn\u2019t understand urgency. It understands it fine when the transaction flows toward Cupertino.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My best guess, and I keep going back and forth on this, is that there are really two things going on here. First, there is the principle thing: UPI wants transaction data to stay on servers inside India, and Apple has spent years, including again this week, saying it keeps no transaction data tied to a user at all, anywhere. So something there had to give. But then there is the less noble reason, the one about money. UPI stopped being free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time\u2014every week Subscribe here Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%], You…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[85,46,321,125],"class_list":["post-635092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mobile","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}