Though very few and far between at this point, I'd say there are still a few times a year when I explicitly need to swipe a magstripe on my credit card - most recently a rural gas station in the California desert where I was seriously dependent on being able to fill up a tank.
I think many people, myself included, would still consider a credit card without the option to fall back to magstripe a nonstarter for their primary physical payment method.
I still see many, many places that have chip readers, but the slot is taped over with a sign saying "swipe please" or something to that effect. And I don't mean dinky shops, either.
What about people that use "knuckle-busters" to make a carbon impression of the card's numbers?
I have a card that has a real number, but doesn't have the embossed numbers on it, so it too wouldn't work in such a machine.
To be fair, it's been years since I've run into one of those machines, so they may no longer be used, or people that use them are just used to rejecting cards they can't impression.
Seems like an easy way to commit fraud. They copy down the numbers and then you walk way with your merchandise/product and then use apple to revoke the card number.
I'm curious to know what the percentage of places are that 1. Support contactless 2. support chip 3. only support swiping.
Secondly, I wonder if they can, for example, have a different number on the swipe, and have that number require extra security (such as approving each transaction on your phone).
Anecdotal - I'm in Canada and pay mostly with credit cards. I don't even recall swiping my card in the past two years. I've basically been doing contactless under $100 whenever I can and chip and pin for all other transactions.
I used to live there 6-7 years ago and even then I used contactless all the time. I've since moved the US (silicon valley no less), and no one had contact-less. Just this year my credit card finally got tap support... So yeah Canada is easily a decade ahead when it comes to this.
