
How Square Made Its Own iPad Replacement - uptown
https://www.wired.com/story/square-register-tablet/
======
ggg9990
If this was so carefully designed why isn’t there an LED ring around the card
slot? The first time I used one, the clerk had to explain several times that
there was a nearly invisible card slot in front of me.

~~~
JohnTHaller
I've never seen any LED lights around a card slot on any self-service terminal
before. They all have a card slot at the bottom section of whatever
screen/keypad device is part of the UI and customers never seem to have an
issue finding it.

~~~
King-Aaron
In Australia at least, almost every self-serve POS in Coles, Woolworths,
Bunnings, [any other large retailer] etc has an illuminated card slot. Most
ATM's do too, as well as the particular brand of POS eftpos machines that the
Commonwealth Bank supplied to vendors.

------
krishicks
These things are pretty but terrible to use as a customer. It's not obvious
where the sensor for Apple Pay is and it's impossible to use with an Apple
Watch. Philz Coffee and Blue Bottle have them in San Francisco and I much
prefer the old card reader/Pay point.

------
throwaway427
These Wired articles that are clearly co-ordinated with product and redesign
launches are starting to wear on me.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Wired had been going down hill for ages, but these pieces are a new low when
for Wired standards.

------
breals
We use Square, using a 6 year old iPad and the first "stand" they made. It
works great. We also use it to pull up the website, control music and Chrome-
cast videos. We do this maybe 1-2x a year. But it still is multi-purpose.

I looked into this new stand but the customer signature screen sucks and you
can't install anything else on it.

~~~
irq-1
Wonder if they're planning to offer other services integrated through their
hardware? Music with blue-tooth speakers, lighting (or anything that uses
hardware power switches), security cameras/backup/AI recognition, temp/HVAC
with industry partnerships (or equipment instrumentation monitoring.)

------
huebnerob
They've decided to compete in the dedicated POS space, yet they continue to
compare themselves to tablet based solutions. To that end, I don't think
they're actually delivering much novelty here, they've only eliminated the
flexibility and low cost benefits that their other products provide.

~~~
jimbo999
>They've decided to compete in the dedicated POS space, yet they continue to
compare themselves to tablet based solutions.

How did you get that as a takeaway?

------
chrystianv
"Square’s tablet has 16 gigabytes of flash memory but hardly any internal
storage"

I am very confused by that sentence.

~~~
tbirrell
Flash memory == RAM

I think...

~~~
asavadatti
That's a whole lot of RAM for a POS device. Maybe this is the device that
finally runs Crysis?

~~~
chrystianv
16 GB of RAM for an Android tablet that is only running the square software is
probably way too much. I suspect the writer meant that it has 16 GB of
storage.

------
rpowers
TLDR - Square made a PoS machine. It is an Android tablet(s).

~~~
bena
I often notice that most things now are basically "Android tablets".

Those little machines popping up in restaurants where you can order/pay?
Android tablets.

Have a relatively recent car? Got CarPlay? Your stereo is probably an Android
tablet.

So this isn't too surprising. Instead of spending whatever amount of time
trying to design and build an embedded system, along with basic OS, library,
etc, you can just find an Android tablet that fits what you need and build off
of that.

~~~
tootie
It drives me up a fucking wall when clients want iPads for their retail
spaces. You are locked into their limited form factors and premium pricing for
a device that will likely be locked down to extremely limited functionality.
Android tablets come in any size and shape for half the price and are easier
to manage from MDM software. You can also just buy large touchscreens with USB
ports that can plug into whatever. They all look the same when they're
anchored to a case or kiosk.

~~~
frandroid
What you need is a rack which fits an android tablet inside an iPad case.
Branding and low cost, all in one.

------
dmitrygr

      > Square has designed its own secure enclave,
      > a co-processor for processing encrypted
      > payment information. About a dozen
      > employees at Square work on the silicon
      > team.
    

I do not believe this. $50 says it is just an STM32 with square-written
firmware

~~~
tdeck
Square has designed custom ASICs before. One of the older Square readers did
crypto just based on power from the phone's 3.5mm headphone jack, so they had
to get creative. Then in 2015 they bought Kili, a Canadian company whose
entire business was a custom payments ASIC [1]. I didn't work on hardware when
I was at Square, but I expect many members of the Kili team contributed to
this effort.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/square-buys-kili-
technolog...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/square-buys-kili-technology-
for-payment-hardware-hq-to-become-toronto-office/)

------
valenciarose
As a retail customer, I love this device. Ritual Coffee uses one in their
Valencia St store. It’s fast for both NFC and chip card purchases. The card
slot for the chip reader is a little too low key. The NFC reader is very
forgiving as to location.

------
kondro
I’m surprised this doesn’t have a built in receipt printer. Many legislations
require a receipt of sale to be provided (at least if requested).

------
mintplant
> OK, not really; streaming Netflix on something designed to be a point-of-
> sale-system is a terrible idea, worse than watching movies on a Linux-based
> in-flight entertainment system.

Is there a term equivalent to "suspension of disbelief", but for non-fictional
writing? This broke mine. I don't know what Linux has to do with anything
here.

~~~
mbreese
It gives the reader some context. Many of the readers of this will have had
the unfortunate experience of trying to watch an in flight movie on a Linux in
seat entertainment system. Fewer will have used the Square POS system,
particularly the new one.

~~~
glenra
How would anyone _know_ what OS their in-seat entertainment system uses? I've
watched the inflight movie on a wide variety of systems on varying airlines
and I don't recall the experience ever being branded in that way.

~~~
sigstoat
if you're watching when they reboot (which is not uncommon when you're on the
ground), you'll usually spot a tux or two up in the top left corner of the
screen, followed by high-speed kernel messages before their app takes over.

~~~
a-dub
fun fact: the virgin america systems had little keyboards on the remotes and
you could kill/restart the X server with ctrl-alt-backspace

you could also switch to a console with ctrl-alt-f*. was never able to login
though...

------
segmondy
A lot of companies have their own. PayAnywhere was using iPad and moved to
custom replacement device around 5 yrs ago. It's funny to see this as news
when many other company in this space have been doing the same for quite a
long time.

------
asdsa5325
Soooo they used Android? Unsurprisingly, it's cheaper when you don't have
Apple's classic markup.

~~~
Isamu
I think it was more a matter of total control, over the OS, the hardware
specs, etc. They needed to provide a better turn-key experience for their
users, including taking into account what long-term maintenance is like.

~~~
cpeterso
Square on iPads has inadvertently given Apple a beachhead in retail stores. I
imagine Square wants these new devices to block Apple from converting these
retail iPad users to a competing Apple services.

~~~
StudentStuff
Apple isn't interested in getting into a shrinking industry like retail. The
hand holding and R&D required are extensive, and don't generate enough profit
to meet Apple's margin goals.

~~~
cpeterso
I see what you mean. With Apple Pay, Apple can slide into retail payment
processing but they only have to deal with OEMs and banks, not every mom 'n'
pop retail store.

