So Apple had their big "special event" this past Monday, the one with Oprah walking out on stage and Steven Spielberg on a satellite feed and all that. Everybody and their cousin has already written the "here's everything Apple announced" post, so I'm not going to do that. What I can't stop thinking about, five days later, is the credit card. Specifically: it doesn't have a number on it.
Not "the number is hidden," not "you need an app to see it." There's no number. No expiration date, no CVV, nothing but your name (laser-etched, apparently, into titanium), the Apple logo, and a little Mastercard mark on the back. That's it. The actual card number lives inside the Wallet app on your phone and changes for every transaction, which is a neat security trick, sure, but it also means the physical object in your hand is basically decorative. A titanium business card that occasionally works at a register.
I keep going back and forth on whether this is brilliant or completely impractical, and I honestly don't think it's fully one or the other. On one hand, if someone photographs your card or your waiter is dodgy, there's nothing useful for them to copy down, since the number that matters isn't printed anywhere. That's a real improvement over the card sitting in my wallet right now, which has all four sensitive numbers printed right on the front like it's daring someone to steal it. On the other hand, what happens when your phone dies at the gas pump? Or when you're buying something over the phone and the person on the other end wants you to read them sixteen digits? I assume there's a workaround buried in the Wallet app, but "assume" isn't a great word to build a payment product around.
The whole Daily Cash thing is the part that actually affects whether I'd use it, and it's a little more complicated than the headlines made it sound. You get 3% back on anything you buy directly from Apple, 2% back on purchases you make with Apple Pay anywhere that takes it, and 1% back if you're stuck swiping the physical titanium card because the terminal doesn't do NFC. Which, in my experience, is still a lot of terminals. My grocery store two blocks from me still makes you swipe. So depending on where you shop, this card might functionally be a 1% card most of the time, and that's not exactly thrilling compared to what a lot of the cash-back cards from actual banks already offer.
No annual fee, and Goldman Sachs is the bank behind it, which is its own small "huh" moment since Goldman has basically never done consumer credit cards before. I'm curious whether that's Apple picking a partner who'll stay quiet and let Apple run the show, versus a partner who actually knows how to run a credit card business, because those aren't always the same institution. We'll see, I guess, whenever this thing actually ships, since as of the announcement there wasn't a firm release date, just "this summer."
Unrelated tangent, but related in my head: I still carry a debit card from my credit union that has a lighthouse on it. A literal lighthouse, in that airbrushed late-90s clip-art style. I am clearly not the customer Apple is designing this thing for, a customer who apparently wants their card to look like it belongs on a MacBook. And you know, fine, I get the appeal of it looking clean. I just don't think "clean" and "you can't read the number off your own card without unlocking your phone" is a trade I'd necessarily want to make for every single purchase.
The News+ and TV+ stuff from the same event is probably the bigger long-term story, especially once you notice the New York Times and Washington Post both declined to put their journalism inside Apple's bundle. But that's a post for someone with more patience for streaming-service tea leaves than I've got tonight. The card is the thing I keep thinking about because it's such a weirdly specific decision, a company that makes phones deciding the phone should also be the credit card, and the credit card should pretend it isn't one.