Author Topic: Chip on Apple credit card fails  (Read 6750 times)

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Online Halcyon

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #25 on: December 15, 2021, 09:22:35 pm »
The history of Apple is fascinating and even I (a non-Apple user) was impressed and even lusted after some of the earlier models, like the original PowerBook with the ball mouse. Some of the first computers I ever used were the earlier Macintosh's.

However Apple has come a long way since then and not all of it is positive. Apple have hardly innovated anything in the last decade or two. Their primary focus is on the packaging and what a product looks like. They are a company that sells "style" and fashionable items. Under the hood, they are really no different to the other big hardware players out there. One example of what I'm talking about is their smartphone products. Android (and Android-based phone manufacturers) have been one step ahead of Apple for quite some time. Even back in the early days when recording video and copy/paste were standard features on many phones, Apple users missed out. People largely buy Apple because they like the look of the products or maybe due to peer pressure, rather than for the features or value for money, or perhaps because they are simply stuck in their ecosystem and are unable or unwilling to change.

Aside from the obvious aesthetics and the cult following that Apple provides, in 2021/2022, I'd say the one key advantage Apple has over a company like Microsoft is their MacOS operating system and that's largely owing to the fact that Microsoft made such a dogs breakfast of Windows 8, 10 and 11. Had I not taken the time to learn Linux, I probably would be typing this on a Mac right now.

Those are just my thoughts. I'm not trying to sway anyone in any direction, this is just how I see it with my eyes.
 

Online magic

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #26 on: December 15, 2021, 09:31:34 pm »
So how does one test that stupid thing with a scope and/or logic analyzer to see if it's completely dead?
 :popcorn:
 

Offline thm_w

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #27 on: December 15, 2021, 10:20:00 pm »
IMHO case being metal increases the chance of ESD damage as there is a current path for a spark to jump from IC. As you insert it into PoS terminal, you hold its metal enclosure while IC is connected to a device with different electric potential.

"The Titanium Apple Card With Apple Card you can make digital ‌Apple Pay‌ payments, but Apple is also providing a physical card. Since this is a credit card designed by Apple, it is, of course, unique among credit cards. It's made entirely from titanium, which is laser etched with your name."

Goddamn these metal cards, they destroy credit card readers as the edges are sharp (not sure if this is specifically Apple or was another brand). The card should be the sacrificial material.
It looks like the apple card is of normal thickness (0.82mm) though.
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Offline eti

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #28 on: December 15, 2021, 10:34:19 pm »
The history of Apple is fascinating and even I (a non-Apple user) was impressed and even lusted after some of the earlier models, like the original PowerBook with the ball mouse. Some of the first computers I ever used were the earlier Macintosh's.

However Apple has come a long way since then and not all of it is positive. Apple have hardly innovated anything in the last decade or two. Their primary focus is on the packaging and what a product looks like. They are a company that sells "style" and fashionable items. Under the hood, they are really no different to the other big hardware players out there. One example of what I'm talking about is their smartphone products. Android (and Android-based phone manufacturers) have been one step ahead of Apple for quite some time. Even back in the early days when recording video and copy/paste were standard features on many phones, Apple users missed out. People largely buy Apple because they like the look of the products or maybe due to peer pressure, rather than for the features or value for money, or perhaps because they are simply stuck in their ecosystem and are unable or unwilling to change.

Aside from the obvious aesthetics and the cult following that Apple provides, in 2021/2022, I'd say the one key advantage Apple has over a company like Microsoft is their MacOS operating system and that's largely owing to the fact that Microsoft made such a dogs breakfast of Windows 8, 10 and 11. Had I not taken the time to learn Linux, I probably would be typing this on a Mac right now.

Those are just my thoughts. I'm not trying to sway anyone in any direction, this is just how I see it with my eyes.

"One example of what I'm talking about is their smartphone products. Android (and Android-based phone manufacturers) have been one step ahead of Apple for quite some time."

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤦🤦
 
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Online richard.cs

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #29 on: December 15, 2021, 10:40:34 pm »
Something is wrong here. These chips just don't normally fail, I've been using chip and pin since it was introduced here nearly 20 years ago, never had one fail, even cards that were horribly abused mechanically. Nor am I aware of anyone I know having broken one.

Bad batch seems unlikely, if you've been through 5 cards it must have been over a significant period of time and a batch that big would surely have affected many others. Given it's a bit of an oddball card perhaps there's a card reader somewhere near you that kills it somehow, a bad design that shorts a power supply to the metal body or similar and lifts it to a damaging voltage relative to the contacts - easily done if you assume all cards are insulating. Or maybe the shorting of the card reader contacts as the card is inserted upsets some power supply with poor transient response and it murders the chip as it recovers. Who knows, but the conductive body is the main thing that differs from normal cards.

Unless it's just some weird bug with your account and the cards are fine.
 
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Offline tooki

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #30 on: December 15, 2021, 10:42:45 pm »
Goddamn these metal cards, they destroy credit card readers as the edges are sharp (not sure if this is specifically Apple or was another brand). The card should be the sacrificial material.
It looks like the apple card is of normal thickness (0.82mm) though.
Bearing in mind that the physical card is intended to be the backup to the primary method of using Apple Pay (contactless via phone/watch), I don’t agree with your assessment that the cards are wildly damaging to terminals. I will tell you what is damaging, though: idiot people (cashiers and consumers alike) who think they need to ram a card into a reader like a gorilla, or that a magstripe needs to be blasted past the reader head at supersonic speeds.

If anything damages the contacts of the chip readers, it'll be something that snags them. The Apple Card’s edges are slightly beveled, and subjectively feel less sharp than those of many a plastic card, which are often not cut particularly cleanly.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #31 on: December 15, 2021, 10:50:58 pm »
Something is wrong here. These chips just don't normally fail, I've been using chip and pin since it was introduced here nearly 20 years ago, never had one fail, even cards that were horribly abused mechanically. Nor am I aware of anyone I know having broken one.

Bad batch seems unlikely, if you've been through 5 cards it must have been over a significant period of time and a batch that big would surely have affected many others. Given it's a bit of an oddball card perhaps there's a card reader somewhere near you that kills it somehow, a bad design that shorts a power supply to the metal body or similar and lifts it to a damaging voltage relative to the contacts - easily done if you assume all cards are insulating. Or maybe the shorting of the card reader contacts as the card is inserted upsets some power supply with poor transient response and it murders the chip as it recovers. Who knows, but the conductive body is the main thing that differs from normal cards.

Unless it's just some weird bug with your account and the cards are fine.
Exactly.

But frankly, given that literally millions of these cards have been issued (3 million accounts, they say. And while the physical card does need to be requested as a separate step, I can’t imagine that many account holders haven’t requested it, given that it’s free and is an unusually handsome card), if Apple’s metal cards had inherent electrical compatibly issues, there would be widespread reports of them, and there aren’t. (Not to mention that Amex has been issuing metal cards for well over a decade, and it doesn’t suffer from compatibility problems, either.)

Hence my suspicion that there’s something weird with the OP’s account or situation, be it something they’re doing without realizing it, or a shop they frequent that has a terminal that is somehow frying those chips, or something their post office is doing, etc.
 

Offline thm_w

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #32 on: December 15, 2021, 11:04:08 pm »
Bearing in mind that the physical card is intended to be the backup to the primary method of using Apple Pay (contactless via phone/watch), I don’t agree with your assessment that the cards are wildly damaging to terminals. I will tell you what is damaging, though: idiot people (cashiers and consumers alike) who think they need to ram a card into a reader like a gorilla, or that a magstripe needs to be blasted past the reader head at supersonic speeds.

If anything damages the contacts of the chip readers, it'll be something that snags them. The Apple Card’s edges are slightly beveled, and subjectively feel less sharp than those of many a plastic card, which are often not cut particularly cleanly.

If they are properly beveled, that is great, Apple may have designed it well. But I've seen hundreds of damaged credit card readers (plastic tab going in was gouged), where I tried myself with a new plastic card to reproduce the problem and was unable to. Making me think there are metal cards out there with razor sharp edges (or bent metal cards?).

Don't disagree people ram them in, that is also part of the problem for sure.
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Offline amyk

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #33 on: December 15, 2021, 11:23:12 pm »
So how does one test that stupid thing with a scope and/or logic analyzer to see if it's completely dead?
 :popcorn:
You can use a card reader, which will at least show whether it responds to commands and basic inquiries.
 

Online Halcyon

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #34 on: December 16, 2021, 02:08:56 am »
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤦🤦

This exactly the response most people come to expect from die-hard Apple fanboys. Emoticons with no substance. It's the online equivalent of when someone chuckles because they feel uncomfortable, nervous or don't know what to say next, particularly when you ask them "What exactly has Apple innovated recently?".
 

Offline Bassman59

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #35 on: December 16, 2021, 02:22:43 am »

However Apple has come a long way since then and not all of it is positive. Apple have hardly innovated anything in the last decade or two.

Clearly you've never used one of the M1- or M1 Pro-based machines.

Quote
Those are just my thoughts. I'm not trying to sway anyone in any direction, this is just how I see it with my eyes.

It would help if you opened your eyes.
 

Online Halcyon

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #36 on: December 16, 2021, 02:32:09 am »
Clearly you've never used one of the M1- or M1 Pro-based machines.

I have two of them sitting right next to me right now. So yes, yes I have. Time will tell how reliable and well built they are...
 

Online coppice

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #37 on: December 16, 2021, 02:48:41 am »
The chips on my Visa cards used to die quite often when visiting EMC labs. I lost 3 or 4 before I realised there was a connection with my lab work, I tended to be doing some pretty extreme discharge testing, but I was still surprised to find the cards in my wallet, in my trouser pocket trouser failing.
 

Offline Brumby

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #38 on: December 16, 2021, 03:13:41 am »
I will tell you what is damaging, though: idiot people (cashiers and consumers alike) who think they need to ram a card into a reader like a gorilla, or that a magstripe needs to be blasted past the reader head at supersonic speeds.
Speaking of abuse, a couple of times I have seen a customer use the tap'n'go process - wherein they felt the need to press the card into the screen very hard and bending the card itself almost 90º.  It made me wince at what might be happening to the chip inside.   :scared:
 

Offline mc172

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #39 on: December 16, 2021, 03:26:19 am »
The chips on my Visa cards used to die quite often when visiting EMC labs. I lost 3 or 4 before I realised there was a connection with my lab work, I tended to be doing some pretty extreme discharge testing, but I was still surprised to find the cards in my wallet, in my trouser pocket trouser failing.

I don't buy it. I've done a bit of discharge testing myself varying from human body static, to induced current from lightning strikes near CATV/networking gear, all the way up to direct lightning strikes on conductive parts of aircraft and no matter which one you choose, you're never anywhere near it when the "main event" happens for safety reasons, the gap just gets bigger the more exotic you go. These tests have always been conducted inside a Faraday cage where everyone is taken out for a number of reasons - mainly to de-pollute the spectrum but also it's seriously dangerous to be anywhere near it.

I've worked at places that have their own EMC lab, and at places where they've outsourced the EMC testing. Something I've seen across the board is that EMC labs both respect a quiet spectrum and also do not contribute to a noisy one. Put more brutally, running an EMC lab doesn't give you free reign to operate a spark gap transmitter - any credible lab will run discharge tests inside a shielded enclosure for obvious reasons.

If you don't like that response, I've previously put, or should I say dropped, some of my cards (one of which was my everyday Visa card) and my phone into a field with a strength of about 30V/m at 10 GHz and they worked fine afterwards.
 

Offline Bud

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #40 on: December 16, 2021, 03:45:30 am »
I once fried a chip card in the kitchen mictowave oven for a few seconds and it was still working when tested after. But this is not the same as static discharge.
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Online coppice

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #41 on: December 16, 2021, 08:12:38 pm »
The chips on my Visa cards used to die quite often when visiting EMC labs. I lost 3 or 4 before I realised there was a connection with my lab work, I tended to be doing some pretty extreme discharge testing, but I was still surprised to find the cards in my wallet, in my trouser pocket trouser failing.

I don't buy it. I've done a bit of discharge testing myself varying from human body static, to induced current from lightning strikes near CATV/networking gear, all the way up to direct lightning strikes on conductive parts of aircraft and no matter which one you choose, you're never anywhere near it when the "main event" happens for safety reasons, the gap just gets bigger the more exotic you go. These tests have always been conducted inside a Faraday cage where everyone is taken out for a number of reasons - mainly to de-pollute the spectrum but also it's seriously dangerous to be anywhere near it.

I've worked at places that have their own EMC lab, and at places where they've outsourced the EMC testing. Something I've seen across the board is that EMC labs both respect a quiet spectrum and also do not contribute to a noisy one. Put more brutally, running an EMC lab doesn't give you free reign to operate a spark gap transmitter - any credible lab will run discharge tests inside a shielded enclosure for obvious reasons.

If you don't like that response, I've previously put, or should I say dropped, some of my cards (one of which was my everyday Visa card) and my phone into a field with a strength of about 30V/m at 10 GHz and they worked fine afterwards.
I wasn't thinking of extreme on the lightning scale, but extreme on the hand held scale. Take the hand held discharge guns from people like Noise Ken and Schaffner, and just keep running them for hours, sweeping over every detail of a piece of equipment, searching for vulnerabilities. Most people doing formal approval testing use those guns in a very benign way, usually with the gun in a clamp and nobody near.
 

Online Halcyon

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #42 on: December 16, 2021, 11:30:23 pm »
On the subject of chip cards, I've never have one fail me. That being said, inserting a card in a reader is seldom done these days in Australia as most bank cards have NFC capabilities. They seem to be pretty resilient, even after they've been through the wash a few times ;-)
 

Offline Bud

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #43 on: December 17, 2021, 12:06:31 am »
This one is all metal, so can't have RF antenna inside.
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Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #44 on: December 17, 2021, 12:20:28 am »
Something is wrong here. These chips just don't normally fail, I've been using chip and pin since it was introduced here nearly 20 years ago, never had one fail, even cards that were horribly abused mechanically. Nor am I aware of anyone I know having broken one.

Bad batch seems unlikely, if you've been through 5 cards it must have been over a significant period of time and a batch that big would surely have affected many others. Given it's a bit of an oddball card perhaps there's a card reader somewhere near you that kills it somehow, a bad design that shorts a power supply to the metal body or similar and lifts it to a damaging voltage relative to the contacts - easily done if you assume all cards are insulating. Or maybe the shorting of the card reader contacts as the card is inserted upsets some power supply with poor transient response and it murders the chip as it recovers. Who knows, but the conductive body is the main thing that differs from normal cards.

Unless it's just some weird bug with your account and the cards are fine.

You have to "insert" your card??? :-DD
Or are you talking about ATM machines?
 

Offline IanB

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #45 on: December 17, 2021, 02:29:18 am »
You have to "insert" your card??? :-DD
Or are you talking about ATM machines?

In the UK there is a limit of £100 on contactless transactions, but not so long ago it was £30. Any more than that you have to put your card in the card reader.

Those who are paranoid might prefer to have contactless payments disabled and use the card reader all the time. Contactless payment doesn't work on UK cards unless you enable it first.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #46 on: December 17, 2021, 06:42:28 am »
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤦🤦

This exactly the response most people come to expect from die-hard Apple fanboys. Emoticons with no substance. It's the online equivalent of when someone chuckles because they feel uncomfortable, nervous or don't know what to say next, particularly when you ask them "What exactly has Apple innovated recently?".
It’s the appropriate response for a patently ridiculous statement like claiming Apple’s phones are behind Android. Their performance, for many years now, has been two generations behind (as in, whenever the brand new, fastest Android phone comes out, it’s only catching up with last year’s iPhone).

Clearly you've never used one of the M1- or M1 Pro-based machines.

I have two of them sitting right next to me right now. So yes, yes I have. Time will tell how reliable and well built they are...
Yep. But build quality wasn’t what you were talking about. You said Apple was “behind”, which is utter nonsense.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #47 on: December 17, 2021, 12:57:40 pm »
You have to "insert" your card??? :-DD
Or are you talking about ATM machines?

In the UK there is a limit of £100 on contactless transactions, but not so long ago it was £30. Any more than that you have to put your card in the card reader.

Those who are paranoid might prefer to have contactless payments disabled and use the card reader all the time. Contactless payment doesn't work on UK cards unless you enable it first.

There is a contactless limit on Oz cards, but it is pretty high.

From memory, the last time I went over it, I was buying a battery lawnmower.
I still used the contactless method, but had to enter my PIN as well.
 

Online coppice

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #48 on: December 18, 2021, 05:13:45 pm »
You have to "insert" your card??? :-DD
Or are you talking about ATM machines?

In the UK there is a limit of £100 on contactless transactions, but not so long ago it was £30. Any more than that you have to put your card in the card reader.

Those who are paranoid might prefer to have contactless payments disabled and use the card reader all the time. Contactless payment doesn't work on UK cards unless you enable it first.
I keep going in shops in the UK to spend maybe 80 pounds. I waft my Barclays debit card over the reader, and it says the payment is rejected because the limit for contactless payments is 100 pounds. I push the card into the slot and complete the transaction. I haven't done anything about this, because I can still pay without problems.

 

Offline Bud

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Re: Chip on Apple credit card fails
« Reply #49 on: December 19, 2021, 01:57:35 am »
You better keep it that way. If you lose your card and someone finds it they can use it but the damage will be limited to the per transaction and cumulative limits set on the account. This is the risk banks are willing to take for contactless payments trying to balance customer convenience and loss caused by lost and stolen cards. For amounts exceeding the contactless limit people have to enter their PINs which only they know.
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