Apple Pay

Apple Pay launched this week on Monday. So far I've used it on perhaps half a dozen transactions at various places. I love it up to this point. Partially I'm digging it for the convenience of the transaction -- it really does work very slick-ly.The even bigger thing I like is that it's a lot safer than an standard swiped card. You only need to look at products like Coin or Plastc to see how easy it is to make a mag-stripe -- even on the fly as with these products.More important than the mag stripe is that the same magnetic information is read at each transaction. More important than that is that it's stored at all of those merchants.When you read of any of the high profile hacks at merchants like Target or Home Depot what the hackers got was the car info so they can use those cards -- or even manufacture those cards for use -- at other places.What you get with Apple Pay is more than convenience, it's security.The credit card number (and associated information) isn't even on the phone. When you register a card with Apple Pay the bank generates a unique token for the phone that's tied to the account. At each transaction a unique code is generated for the merchant and transaction that the bank can tie back to your account. The beauty is that even if the merchant is hacked, the codes that are there can only be used once -- the one time you were there.As an added bonus if I happen to lose my phone it's still protected with my fingerprint or PIN. Even with that, I can deactivate the phone and associated tokens without changing my credit card number since that doesn't even exist within my phone.

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Today I paid for a fire extinguisher at Home Depot using Apple Pay.I didn't worry about it getting hacked.

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Convenience and security. I dig it.