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Farhad and Mike’s Week in Tech: Android Pay and Apple Products

Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the industry.

Farhad: Hey, Mike, how’s it going? I was off last week. I bet you missed me. Well, don’t worry. I’m back now!

Mike: I noted your absence in a brief moment of silence.

Farhad: Thanks. So, tech news. It was Apple week, of course. At an event in San Francisco, they announced a new iPhone (faster, pink), a new iPad (huge, stylus) and a new Apple TV (Siri, not an actual television).

Mike: Apple Pencil, Farhad. Styluses are for squares and art students. One-hundred-dollar pencils are the new hotness.

Farhad: Right. I thought all of it was pretty nifty, though perhaps the best trick was what Apple did to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a cavernous San Francisco concert hall usually associated with hippie jam bands. Apple turned it into a gleaming palace of minimalist design, actually building its own theater of 1,500 seats, complete with a gleaming night sky, and redoing all of the signs in the place into Apple’s own typographical style.

Mike: I saw Nick Cave play there once. The acoustics were awful. I hope it was better for a two-hour-20-minute product announcement.

Farhad: In non-Apple news: Ellen Pao dropped the appeal of her gender-discrimination lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Ms. Pao, the former chief executive of Reddit, will now owe the firm $276,000 in legal fees. And The Wall Street Journal had a crazy story about the lengths that the firm RadiumOne and its investors went to to save Gurbaksh Chahal, the company’s chief executive, who pleaded guilty to domestic-violence offenses. Man, tech sure is ugly sometimes.

So let’s talk about something much more pleasant: Money! Android Pay began this week – Google’s answer to Apple’s wireless payment system. Except, weirdly, Android already had wireless payments that it scrapped. You cover the payments industry. What’s going on here?

Mike: So, Google is basically swinging again on a project it completely whiffed on a few years ago.

Google Wallet, which was introduced in 2011, worked with only one type of credit card, using one mobile carrier, and only on certain phones. Google pushed ahead without the blessing of getting banks, credit card companies, carriers and merchants on board. Surprise, surprise, no one used Google Wallet, and it tanked.

Enter Apple Pay, years later. Apple lines up the banks, the card companies and does a huge marketing blitz to train merchants. The carriers’ own project — the unfortunately named “Isis” — never took off, so they’re not an impediment to making this work anymore.

Basically, Apple Pay paved the way for mobile payments to actually work, and now Google — and Samsung — are trying to do the same thing in pretty much the exact way Apple has done it.

Are you still awake?

Farhad: I’m still laughing about the Isis thing.

Mike: Ok, good. What I don’t really get is why I would use Android or Samsung over Apple Pay, or vice versa. It seems to be basically companies bringing feature parity to their platforms, which makes the choice really about whether you’re an Android loyalist or an Apple acolyte. And that’s an age-old battle. Or, I guess, a five-year-old battle. It seems longer in Internet time.

Farhad: This is the fundamental problem with all these payment systems — none of them has reached ubiquity on devices or at stores, so you’re always left wondering what works where. The easiest thing to do: Use credit cards.

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Injong Rhee of Samsung describing features of the company’s mobile payment service last month.Credit...Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

There’s a similar mess in money-transferring apps, and since I’ve got you here, let me ask you this: I owe our boss $10. Why isn’t there a simple, easy way to send her money without a lot of negotiations in advance about which app to use? I know there are lots of apps, some of them quite popular, like PayPal, Venmo and Square Cash. But I can never be sure who has what, and some of them seem particularly tied to certain demographics. That is, I get the sense that Venmo is for hipsters in Brooklyn. With all these money services, we’re in the same state we were in with social apps before Facebook. Nothing is huge, so nothing really works as well as it could. Who’s going to fix this?

Mike: First of all, I didn’t know I could borrow money from the boss, so I’m making a mental note of that. Second, this very question proves you are not a millennial, the exact demographic that loves these peer-to-peer payment apps.

As of right now, most of the world is stuck in old-school ways of sending money: Bank transfers and wiring across borders, the ways we’ve done it for decades. Apps like Venmo and Square Cash are growing popular because they’re fast, easy and free. And I figure they’ll catch on with young crowds and slowly trickle up to older users as time goes on.

But as you said: Not everyone has these apps, while many people have bank accounts. So it’s sort of tough to find a technological, nontraditional standard that everyone is familiar with and able to use. For that reason, I have a little more faith in Facebook, which is sticking money transfers into its Messenger app. Facebook has 1.5 billion users, and that’s quite a bit more than use Venmo or whatever else.

That said, Google tried sticking money transfers inside email a while back, and its revamped Google Wallet app will become yet another peer-to-peer payments app. The former never took off, and who knows how the latter will fare.

In sum, no one knows how to fix anything, and the traditional financial institutions will probably win because that’s basically what we’re all used to using. I hope you’re still cool with your local Western Union guy.

Farhad: O.K., I guess what you’re saying is, there’s just no good way to pay back the boss. I’ll let her know you said I’m off the hook. See you!

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