I absolutely love the idead of the Apple Pay.

A single device that you have with you all the time that affords you the touchless transaction experience.

In Europe, they’ve been using NFC (Near Field Communication) — the same technology that Apple Pay uses — for transactions for years. They typically refer to the concept as “touchless”.

North America is finally moving in that direction.

You have your phone, so NFC is literally at your fingertips. If you have an Apple Watch, you can even catch people off-guard by just waving your hand around a pay kiosk like a Jedi.

Right, so it seems that NFC is too advanced for some — or too trivial and easily exploited for some others — and in several places, they only support chip-cards, which require physical contact.

Apple has revealed their new concept for an Apple Card. A card for those occasions when businesses haven’t quite stepped into the 21st century with NFC… er, I mean… for those businesses that don’t yet support Apple Pay, and are still dependent upon a physical card with a chip. A single card that

• is meant to integrate seamlessly with Apple Pay
• contains the encryption enclave chip
• doesn’t have a trivially-skimmed or accidentally-erased magnetic stripe
• presents only your name: has no trivially-exploited card number, card security code, expiration date emblazoned across it —  that’s human-readable and exploitable by onlookers or malicious parties

Yes, please.

No, it’s not perfect — nothing is perfect and if you wait until it is, then you’ll be waiting forever. But it certainly is intriguing.

Oh, and you won’t have to charge it.

But something is bugging me: what about those establishments that haven’t yet joined us in the 21st century to use the latest, more secure technologies? Those companies that only support magnetic stripe cards?

You know, things like fuel pumps.

It seems that I’ll need to retain my card for the periodic swipe until we can move everyone else culturally and socially into the future of commerce.

Or find a way to simply no longer need to use them.

The Apple Card? Yep, I’ll be one of the early adopters and even look into transferring my other credit cards’ balances to it.