Do you trust Apple with your credit card details?

In business as in comedy, timing is everything. What is hilarious one day becomes the epitome of bad taste the next, and a certain profit centre one moment looks like a joke if the timing is not right. Apple could possibly not have picked a worse time to announce its long-anticipated play for the electronic payments market, Apple Pay.

Prior to the event at which Apple Pay (and the new iPhones and watches and stuff) was announced, it played a video all about how being first wasn’t as important as being better – an important point, since Apple is far from first in payments.

Of course, not as many people saw that video as Apple might have liked. The live video stream was basically garbage for the first hour or so. It dropped out, it skipped back and forth, it refused to connect. At one point, Tim Cook was accompanied by simultaneous translations in multiple languages.

The reasons for the disaster are many, and theories abound. At least partly, it appears to have been a result of someone at Apple not configuring something correctly with Akamai. There’s also a report about hackers from Brazil – who knows?

It wasn’t a good look for the biggest technology company in the world, and one that is no n00b when it comes to live video streaming.

And it came only weeks after the theft of some celebrities’ private photos, allegedly the result of breaching iCloud’s security. There is considerable doubt about exactly what happened there – some of the photos are reportedly fakes, so one might wonder why celebrities would have fake nude photos of themselves – but the vector by which they were stolen appears to have been Apple (though I’m told some of the celebrities are seen in mirror-selfies holding non-Apple smartphones – again, who knows?). Whether managing to guess a weak password counts as breaching iCloud’s security is another argument.

Apple has struggled to make its name in the area of cloud services. Aside from the colossal success of iTunes, pretty much every other online endeavour to which it has turned its hand has had more than its share of complaints.

Oh yes. iTunes. That brings me to the ‘U2 virus’ (people really called it that).

At the end of that same event, Apple announced that every single iTunes user could look in their library and find U2’s latest album, for free. Not that they could look on the Store and download it, but that they had effectively already done so.

Well, all hell broke loose. It turns out that giving people 12 songs that they didn’t ask for constitutes a grotesque breach of privacy and is unspeakably evil. Who knew?

The album’s frankly not great, but among the thousands of songs in my iTunes collection, that is not a unique descriptor. I sleep at night unperturbed by the notion of Bono on my iPhone. Others are less sanguine. Apple had to set up a special web portal for people who wished to rid themselves of the scourge of middle-of-the-road Irish pop.

Then we had ‘Bendgate’, wherein it was discovered that putting a phone in your back pocket and sitting on it is a bad idea – who knew? – and the disaster of the iOS 8.0.1 update, which accidentally deprived iPhone 6 owners of certain non-core functionality like making phone calls. Who even does that anymore?

In the midst of all this, Apple announces that it would like to be the middleman, facilitating electronic transactions with a tap of a phone or a watch. Put your credit card details on your phone and use it instead of the plastic card. Trust us, says Apple.

Not like the photos you take on your phone are vulnerable. Not like Apple would ever alter the contents of your phone without prior consent. Nope, your iPhone is like a bank vault. A bank vault that can be rendered useless by a buggy software update.

The perception of Apple’s competence is not great right now, and it doesn’t matter that the iPhone has NFC if people think Apple has NFI.

The reality is that Apple handles millions upon millions of transactions a day via iTunes and has never had a serious breach. Apple Pay is not iCloud, and it’s not being run by whoever was supposed to set up the live stream (likely a former employee by now). Apple Pay will more than likely be secure and be the thing that finally kick-starts electronic wallets.

But geez the timing was bad.