Tasting the Apple of the future today

Posted on 13th Jun 2012 by Scott Goodson in Blog

How many times have you fumbled around in your wallet or pockets, desperately trying to find your boarding pass before catching a flight? Or arrived at a venue only to discover that you’ve misplaced your tickets? Well, Apple is about to change all that.

During an exciting announcement at its annual developers conference WWDC 2012, Apple unveiled ‘Passbook’ – a digital pass organizer for iOS 6, which lets you store and quickly access electronic versions of tickets, boarding passes, coupons and store membership cards – all in one place.

But Passbook is more than just an organizer. It’s also dynamic, which means it will notify you of any flight delays or gate changes. And when you’re walking down the street and going past a movie theatre, it will alert you to any available coupons or offers.

And rumour has it Passbook will automatically load up when your iPhone (or iPad) detects you’re in a specific location where you own a loyalty card, like Starbucks for example.

Right now, Passbook is simply about ticket aggregation. But in future, it could include credit card data, paving the way toward wireless payments for iPhone. And if that happens, Apple will corner the market in terms of coupons and payments. Particularly as it already has access to 400 million active and registered accounts on its iTunes store.

But why go to all the trouble of creating a new payment system when there are plenty of alternatives already in place? Simple. Apple isn’t interested in competing with existing infrastructures – its ultimate goal is to become a ubiquitous element to that infrastructure by completely replacing our physical wallets with digital versions.

In a nutshell, Apple wants to change the world. It wants to become so ingrained in our daily lives that we simply can’t live without them. Granted, it wants to make our lives easier by designing cool technology. But ultimately, it wants to be the platform that rules the world.

Passbook will arrive once Apple’s iOS 6 is launched in autumn. Be prepared for another taste of the future.