Before the iPhone 5 was officially revealed, several photos of a component within the phone had many wondering if it was an NFC chip. It was later concluded that it wasn’t, and we guess with the iPhone 5 now official, NFC is most definitely not one of the new features of the phone. However we’re sure that there are users out there who believe that NFC could be incredibly useful and might have been disappointed by the news, but here’s an explanation by Apple’s Phil Schiller (via AllThingsD) that will hopefully answer your questions.
According to Schiller, “Passbook does the kinds of things customers need today,” and does not require additional hardware and works without existing merchant payment systems. Given that Passbook stores all sorts of things, such as loyalty and gift cards, boarding passes and etc., many believed that NFC was a great complement to Passbook which might have prompted the earlier speculation. Since Passbook is a feature of iOS 6 that has yet to be released, we can’t say for sure that it will work out the way Apple intended, but what do you guys think? Should Apple have included NFC to complement Passbook’s capabilities?