The wonderful future, or my phone is slowly becoming my wallet

Since Alicia and I moved back into Boston proper, I’ve started to hold cash on me much less frequently. Back in NYC or up in Salem, most of the establishments we frequent only accepted certain credit cards; many were cash-only.

Now, I can use Apple Pay or order online from pretty much anywhere I frequent - cabs & Uber, groceries from Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and most other local chains - for everything else, I’m only really using one of two debit/credit cards. My only actual use for cash, except when I’m not in Boston, is to pay my barber every month. This has been a wonderful way to live, if anything because I have to worry about having less with me at any given time. My only further request is that I could get my driver’s license and MBTA subway pass somehow onto my iPhone - then I could ditch my wallet almost completely.

Having a thinner wallet is kind of amazing, but my iPhone is starting to feel like a single point of failure. What if I drop it and crack the screen or damage the NFC chip or the Touch ID button? The 6s Plus has amazing battery life[^1], but what if it dies? Do I replace my wallet with my little Anker portable charger in my back pocket? What if I lose or forget that? What if I get mugged? Or worst yet, what if I lose the phone due to my own idiocy? How will I get my goddamn Venti iced coffee? 

It gets me thinking about product redundancy - the physical wallet begins to act as backup for my virtual Wallet. But what happens when I have no need for a physical wallet anymore, other than to cover my ass if my phone dies? That’s kind of an annoying prospect? Is that what Apple’s betting on with the Apple Watch, if you ignore the lifestyle play? When does the “all-powerful device” with several obvious Achilles heels require redundancy, especially when you don’t want to also carry your phone in an Otterbox case and with a portable charger constantly?

It’s all really fascinating, is all. It’s interesting to me that we still don’t have a good, trusted, redundant solution here that’s also convenient and cheap. We have it with our digital files thanks to name-your-cloud-storage-and/or-backup solution, but credit cards, identification and other highly physical-world things are still confined in your pocket or purse one way or another.

I get excited for our inevitable Minority Report-like future in which we could have public kiosks where, via a retina or thumbprint scan, you could retrieve a temporary copy of your ID, driver’s license, last credit card used, or whatever you lost while out in the world. Dropped your phone and it’s useless? Scan your finger at a Touch ID kiosk and you can automatically have a temporary ATM card printed instantly for use. Got mugged or lost your phone in an unfamiliar place? A quick scan could get you quick access to emergency response care, your Medical ID and history, and/or automatically wipe your phone and notify a loved one that you’re okay. I don’t know nearly enough about the technical complexity of making this work in practice - the scanners would need to be sanitary, damage-resistant, weather-proof, whatever else - clearly there are a lot of holes to this. It’s almost certainly easily hackable if we’re not careful.

But it’d at least be super cool, right?

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