Originally Posted: August 15th, 2019

Apple Card Preview

It seems like every company has their own credit card. It’s hard to go to a retail store and not get offered one. Not just stores, plenty of other businesses have their own branded credit cards, too. NASA has one. Hello Kitty has one. The International Brotherhood of Magicians has one. So why not Apple?

This is the new Apple Card. It is first and foremost a virtual card, and it lives within your iPhone. The main way to use it is with Apple Pay, Apple’s standard for contactless payments. The Apple Pay ecosystem has benefits - security, privacy, convenience - if you can find a retailer who accepts it. The US is behind other countries in accepting contactless payments, and it’s still common to find a store that doesn’t. For that, there’s a physical card you can swipe or use with a chip reader.

Signing Up

Signing up for Apple Card is easy. Open the Wallet app on your iPhone and fill in a few details to verify your identity. If approved, you get an instant offer which shows your credit line and interest rate. At this step, it is a soft pull on your credit. If you accept the offer, it performs a full hard pull and is instantly activated. The whole process takes a few minutes.

Along with the virtual card, you can order a physical card made of titanium. Pairing it is easy, just hold your phone up to it and pair it like AirPods, or any other Apple accessory. The card features no numbers on the front, no signature on the back, and has minimal branding. If you’ve felt a metal credit card, you know what to expect. It’s not flexible and it’s fairly thick and heavy. It looks and feels like what it is: a status symbol.

Features and Cash Back

Once you start using the card, the wallet app helps keep track of purchases like Mint and other financial apps do. It turns cryptic vendor names into a human-readable form, along with a map so you know where that transaction happened. It categorizes your purchases and assigns a color to them. The color of the virtual card changes based on your recent purchases. The app also encourages you to pay off the balance before your bill is due. It shows a red warning when you are paying the minimum, and clearly shows how much interest you will pay.

Beyond swiping the physical card and using Apple Pay in person, you also get assigned a traditional 16 digit card number that you can use at online stores or other places that require it. If you’re on an Apple device, that number is stored in your Keychain, and will auto-fill so you don’t need to bother remembering it. If your number is ever exposed, you can instantly regenerate a new unique number, without a phone call or having to wait for another card to be shipped.

The cash back rewards are not overly generous. It offers 3% cash back on purchases from Apple, including subscriptions and things from iTunes and the App Store, 2% back on any Apple Pay transaction, and 1% back on all others. Plenty of cards have higher reward percentages. What is special about the rewards is once a day, they are deposited as cash into your Apple Pay Cash account. No points, no gimmicks, no waiting, just cash back. It’s one of the things about the card that make you wish all credit cards behaved this way. 

Who is this for?

So, who is this card for? Clearly, you must be an iPhone owner, since that is a requirement to sign up. There is no website to manage the card (yet), it must be done from an iOS device. Android users need not apply. Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend this card if you have any doubts about staying with an iPhone for the foreseeable future. If you thought leaving the Apple Ecosystem was hard now, imagine trying when one of your payment methods lives within your phone. This is another step in Apple’s push for growth in services revenue, and the lock in effects are desirable to them as well. Whether that is desirable for you is your own choice. 

The Apple Card is a decent credit card, with some unique benefits. It is another way to further integrate the iPhone and Apple’s products into your life. If you firmly live in the Apple ecosystem and are looking for a new credit card, I can recommend it. I took the plunge this week, only time will tell if I regret it.