I remember some years ago reading that the iPad Air 2 had NFC, but it was not enabled. Reading this news it seems to me that Apple had planned this feature already at that time. Having a this feature integrated to a POS software without the need of a third party device card reader would be fantastic. Small business would benefit a lot from it. I may be wrong, but I think current iPads do not have a NFC chip? So Apple removed it from the hardware later but now it would be beneficial to have it?

There is a project called Datar (https://github.com/pwwang/datar), which mimics dplyr in Python.