Today, Apple unveiled the iPhone 5 and, contrary to the expectations of many, it did not include NFC.

As I and others have written previously, NFC doesn’t work for payments because it solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Whenever the topic is raised, though, I get responses saying that people actually think that paying with your phone makes sense. While I may agree with that (to an extent, habits are hard to break) I don’t think that NFC adoption is quick enough to warrant that it, and not internet connection + location services will replace the swipe. That’s what NFC is competing with: taking your card out to swipe it at the POS device.

While NFC is seen in certain retail sectors I strongly believe that it’s merely driven by hardware vendors looking to make more money from a locked in community of merchants; once these have another option (such as the dozens of POS companies out there) they will move. There is no reason to remain with the old device while you can get a fancy Apple device with the latest POS software that will do your analytics for you, and hardware companies understand that (VeriFone and Sail is maybe the latest example). When you look at these trends, betting on NFC seems like a bad idea.