Apple has just announced its new Apple Pay Later way of paying over time (the full text of the Apple Pay Later announcement, made yesterday at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is below). Now, if you thought that Apple Pay Later was a way to buy a new Apple computer or Apple device, that’s not really what it is (although it can be). It turns out that Apple is just the newest in a long series of merchants and financial institutions to have rediscovered the power of lay-away, although lay-away with a twist: you get the item right up front. (For those of you too young to remember when lay-away was a thing, stores like K-Mart (think old timey Target) would allow you to store an item, earmarked for you, at the store, and then make payments on it until it was paid off, at which point you could take it home with you.)

Apple Pay is crazy-convenient, and in some ways more secure than using your credit card. But everybody ‘knows’ that in order to use Apple Pay you ‘have’ to have an iPhone 6. Or do you? Actually, you can use Apple Pay even if you only have an iPhone 5, if you have an Apple Watch.

Let us start by saying that we were those people who thought the idea of an Apple watch was ridiculous. Then we realized that it’s a lot less rude to surreptitiously check our watch than it is to whip out our phone every time a message comes in, and that started the descent into Apple watch fandom. This is not a review of the Apple watch, so much as it is a list of things that are nonobvious, that you’ll want to know about your Apple watch.