Apple’s partnership with the banks and payment processors still puts the incumbent system firmly in control. The only thing that really changes is the payment channel.
Apple Pay is therefore still anathema to bitcoin’s mission, which involves disrupting centralized control in the financial industry and returning real financial control to the user.
Second, Apple is beating bitcoin in terms of the customer experience. Its ecosystem is exceedingly user friendly and customer focused.
The company has spent years perfecting a design and user experience language that is second to none in the tech business, and, whenever it turns its attention to an existing business model, it brings these tools to bear, recrafting entire industries in its own image.
People understand Apple phones, and thanks to Jony Ive’s team, they will quickly understand the Apple Watch. Moreover, they will crave these devices.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is still striving for mainstream adoption. Notwithstanding positive news from the likes of PayPal, Circle, and Stripe, the concept is still opaque to many. The market for wallets is fragmented, and scandals like Mt Gox still scare many away.
By its very nature, bitcoin is a grassroots movement. It doesn’t enjoy the same top-down organisation that Apple does. That means that design, user experience, and security are inconsistent across its many implementations. That makes it hard for mainstream users to understand.
A craving for control
Apple’s ability to control every detail of the user experience is also the source of one of its biggest threats: it is an inherently fascistic company. A penchant for total control is a dangerous thing in a company that likes to reinvent entire industries.
Ever since the early 2000s, if not before, Apple has thrived on locking people into its ecosystem, and it excels at cementing this structure up and down the supply chain. We saw this with the launch of the iTunes store, which Apple integrated with the iPod and iTunes products upon its launch in 2003, signing deals with the major labels.
Jobs admitted this fact not long before his death, explaining in an internal 2010 email that he wanted to “explicitly lock customers in Apple’s ecosystem”.
