Most rumors are pointing towards a larger iPhone, and a whole different experience in aesthetic. But what about NFC? Apple has been noticeably silent about the technology.

Google and Microsoft are already going big into the tech, with Google already having its own mobile payment service: Google Wallet. Microsoft announced in June that it would be adding a digital wallet service with NFC capabilities to Windows Phone 8 to store credit card and mobile payment information. Samsung has its cute and functional NFC stickers too.

But what about Apple? In the iOS 6 announcements, mobile payments were left out of the agenda, and the company unveiled Passbook, a service to keep track of tickets and coupons but not credit card information. The Wall Street Journal says that some Apple engineers fought for mobile payment functionality but the decision was to leave mobile payments out of iOS 6.

“Apple is always a comfortable number two,” said Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster to the Wall Street Journal. “They let their competitors do their market research for them.”

Mobile payments is slated to be a big thing, with the market expected to hit $600 billion worldwide by 2016. The mainstream consumers are not adopting them yet which, makes it bleak for now. But the technology, allows you to tap your phone on a surface in order to pay, making convenience a key factor of easy payments. However, one of the drawbacks is that it also isn’t expected to be available in most merchants for another few years.

According to the WSJ, Apple doesn’t want to be the one facilitating mobile credit cards payments when the service isn’t ready, for fear that customers will blame Apple for merchant’s failures during the process. That makes sense.

And as we know, in Apple's terms, being the first doesn't necessarily mean having an advantage over its competitors.