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"Start doing the math and it gets scary: Apple would have massive margin, and vendors who didn't accept iPhone payments would be at a massive disadvantage..."

That's if we do Jason's bad math. His assertion that X% of $Y billion market is pure profit assumes that 100% of the X% of mobile are iOS purchases. Even still X% must be further drilled down to Apple's actual cut. So, assuming Apple could take 1% of the $600B restaurant market and facilitate $6B in transactions, their cut assuming his crazy 10% transaction fee would be only $600M. Common jCal sensationalism.

I'm the furthest thing from an Apple analyst, but it seems that all "built-in" Apple things like iCloud, the App Store, etc. are not simply cheap entries into a market to make money. Each deeply complements and satisfies a fundamental need with a piece of Apple hardware. A payment application of this nature doesn't seem to sit quite at the "essential" level of Apple's other apps/services.



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