With Metrocards, you can walk into most stations and purchase a card anonymously, with cash, and use it right away.

With OMNY you simply cannot do that. You can either pay with smartphone or credit card (easily tracked, any chance of anonymity is lost) or otherwise you have to go out of your way to find a Duane Reade or other retailer that happens to sell OMNY cards. There may not be one anywhere close to the station. Even if there is, it's definitely not as convenient as having a machine in the station itself.

If NYC cared about its citizens and didn't want to inch towards becoming a police state, it would realize that the "upgrade" (IMO, more of a downgrade) to OMNY removes this functionality--and removing functionality should not be a major side effect of any upgrade/update.

No idea what you're on about.

>Hopefully you get a reality check and realize being an insufferable self aggrandizing tool won't actually get you anywhere before it's too late.

Are you projecting your own failures? Did this happen to you when you were younger, so you just assume that everyone else will have the same miserable experience?

Well, it's okay! Keep doing whatever the city tells you to do. If that's what you've been doing all your life, it might be hard to kick the habit. So I have some sympathy.

Have fun following the crowd and using OMNY, lol.

If you can't tell clear satire apart form real technical advice then it seems like a waste of time to try to communicate with you.

Then again, if everything you read seems disagreeable to you, then you start to disagree with everything.

You can try to write off that lack of knowledge as a "lack of will". Then again, for all I know, maybe it's both.

Have fun embracing every new technology as change for the sake of change, and see where that takes you. I'd rather live in a world where I can go to an MTA station, buy a MetroCard with cash, and use it right away.

NYC's ignorant embrace of OMNY is one of the (many) reasons I'm happy to not be living in NYC anymore. Sixteen years was enough for me.

>Who is maintaining these ancient systems?

Employees of the MTA, presumably.

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>Security patches?

That isn't a full sentence. Anyway, security patches get released as new security flaws are discovered. A system that gets fewer updates is actually less prone to requiring regular security patches than a system that's constantly changing. If anything, the introduction of OMNY will probably result in tens or even hundreds of times more security patches being required for the MTA's systems than if they'd just stuck with metrocard! Concerns about security patches are an argument in favor of sticking with what's tried and tested, not trying something new.

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>How does it interop with modern hardware?

Why does it have to? Or are you one of those tech bros who thinks that everything should be "IoT" and my microwave and toaster should regularly be getting firmware updates over wifi? Ugh, can't stand that mindset...

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>Who is making old supported hardware?

The same companies that have always been making it. If they go out of business, there will be sufficient financial incentive for someone else to step up to the task.

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>How much does keeping this working cost over a new system?

Depending on the cost of the upgrade... likely, much less. Plus, cost isn't the only factor to consider. The default implementation of OMNY (using credit card or smartphone with NFC) offers far less privacy than a metrocard. You can't buy an OMNY card at every station the way you can buy a metrocard; you'd have to go out of your way to do so.

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>Will payment processors allow it?

They've allowed it so far. And they allow much older systems to operate. Why would they object to it?

If there's anyone here who is "confidently incorrect", it's you.

I have a degree in engineering and I'm currently working as a software developer for a large bank.

Do you have any experience in engineering, software development, or anything remotely relevant? Or are you just saying stuff?

Metrocards work fine and there is absolutely no reason we can't keep metrocards running "forever".

If you think we can't then please enlighten me and explain the technical hurdle.

In reality, there is none. OMNY is "change for the sake of change". It's plainly kinda stupid.

>It's not possible to keep technology running forever.

Sure it is. What would stop us? The wheel is about 6,500 years old. Is it time we phase that out, too?

As they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

There is nothing worse than change for the sake of change.

It's almost as if letting everything directly charge our credit cards isn't the best or safest option.

Metrocards work fine. Adding OMNY as a secondary option would be nice, but completely replacing Metrocards with OMNY seems like a solution in search of a problem.

A passport is all you need to identify a person and get it back to them.

Is it a US Passport?

>How often do you actually break your iPhone that you can’t retrieve data from it?

I don't know. How often do you need to make an emergency call via Satellite to have emergency services rescue you from the wilderness? For most people the answer is also "almost never". But it's clearly big enough of a deal for Apple to flex it in every iPhone 14 ad. Same thing applies here. Even if you probably won't need to use it any time soon, it's good to have the feature there. Why remove it?

$165 is still pretty steep for a spare phone.

If it's just something to keep in the glove box in case of an emergency, I'm not going to invest $165 into it. An iPhone 6 (usually around $50-60 in used condition) would do the trick.

Not if one of them is broken. Which is one of the most common cases where you'd need to switch sims urgently.

And, what if I want my "spare phone" to be an older iPhone (or even an Android) that doesn't support esim? I'm not going to keep a $1,000+ iPhone as a spare. I'd rather have it be a <$100 phone from a few years ago.

It's "not needed", sure, but you lose the convenience of being able to remove a sim card and put it into another phone and just having it work.

What happened to Apple's mantra of "it just works"?

Physical SIM cards on a GSM network are the pinnace of "it just works".

I have a physical T-Mobile SIM. I can put it into an iPhone and it "just works". I can then take it out and put it into a different phone and it still "just works". It's great! If my phone breaks, I can take a old spare phone out of a drawer or out of my car's glove box, pop the sim in there, and I'm good to go.

With an eSIM you just can't do that. You need to call the carrier or go to their website in order to transfer service to a new device.

What if I'm away from home, and my phone breaks, but I have a spare phone with me? If my primary phone was an iPhone 14 with eSIM, I'm screwed regardless. I can't move the SIM over because it doesn't physically exist. I can't call my carrier to move it over because my phone is broken. Apple took something that worked great and created a situation which makes it more likely to be stuck without a working phone.

From a technical perspective, eSIM v.s. physical SIM shouldn't have any real impact on service quality.

"SIM" stands for "Subscriber Identity Module". It's just something that stores an identity (a fancy serial number).

It's not an antenna. It doesn't do any "connecting" or "receiving". The phone asks the SIM (whether physical or digital) for its fancy serial number and then passes that number along to cellular towers when establishing a connection with them.

Any difference in service quality would be the result of the phone and its antennas *or* the network and its cellular towers, not how the SIM part is implemented.