Apple announces Apple Card credit card
theverge.com
theverge.com
Apple already has a lot more info on users then CCs do.
edit
Apple knows a lot about you IF you use apple products. Didn't think this would be a controversial point :)
Apple has nearly nothing on you. Amex knows what I buy, when, and where.
Maybe they do know lots about me, maybe they don’t. A significant part of their public reputation rests on their respecting privacy concerns however. So if it turned out that they were secretly collecting data on me they would take a hit to their public reputation and (very likely) their bottom line.
They are very much incentivised to keep my data private and imho that offers a strong likelihood that they’ll actually do so.
Wait? What?
Apple doesn't know what I buy. At least not currently. How can they know that? Only Mastercard and Visa know that.
Maybe Apple could buy that information from Mastercard or Visa? Is that what you're saying?
I'd wager that Google, Mastercard, Visa, and AT&T each know way more about me than Apple does. That's not even counting companies like Amazon, Target, etc. It seems to me that with respect to privacy, Apple is the least of my problems.
You could also argue that having multiple big entities doing payment processing is better for everyone to the extent that they are competing. I mean, Mastercard and Visa are undoubtedly going to pull every lever at their disposal to take out Apple. (And to take out Amazon and Walmart as well if they decide to jump into this thing.)
So rather than wishing that Apple were NOT a payment processor, I guess a better idea is to hope for the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Targets, etc to all jump in and join the cage match.
The images shown are labeled the "Apple Mastercard". So it's a Mastercard with Apple branding.
The Apple card isn't competing with Mastercard and Visa -- in fact, it uses the Mastercard payment network. It's competing with credit cards issued by other banks on top of the MC and Visa payment networks (and AmEx/Discover, which unlike MC and Visa combine the payment network and card issuing).
I doubt the other banks are too afraid of Apple though, I didn't see anything so compelling about the Apple card that would cause it kill other credit cards. It's a slick product, but not game-changing the way that e.g. the iPhone was to entrenched phone makers.
It's also disappointing though, because it means Apple is not competing as a separate entity. What we want is for Apple to jump in be an actual credit card company. Then for all of them to try to destroy each other. (Unfortunately, now that I think about it, there are probably legal reasons that Apple is restricted in this regard. That's a shame. Basically means that it's Mastercard and Visa forever.)
Interesting. I thought it offer fairly good Cash Back, no Fees, no hassle, ease of use. Even if it manage to reach 10% of the US iPhone users it will be a serious damage to other CC. While I may not get the best Rebate and Points when using Apple Card, I don't think those few percentage are worth it for my privacy.
Look at the personal finance scene in the UK—it's one of the more vibrant markets for banking right now with the likes of Monzo, Revolut, Monese, and countless others. Convenience and simplicity has prior art there.
I'm fully aware this is an unpopular opinion here, but cryptocurrency is one answer to the conglomerates everyone is complaining about. Is it perfect, or even very good? No. But I use it regularly on major merchants and get stuff delivered without much hassle and pay for my VPSes without trouble.
People want an alternative that is as good as Visa/MC without the conglomerate control. That is not going to happen. You can't get 100% of the convenience of the major processors with 0% of the problems.
When a platform is large enough (or has to be inherently large due to network effects), we should ensure (through regulation perhaps) that they act neutrally and provide service to everyone except where the law explicitly disallows it. That is, they should behave as a "dumb pipe" and not curators.
What's currently in the pipes to help fix this? Sure you can always support someone by mailing them a money order or cryptocurrency, but that is a huge hindrance to most people. It can cripple groups that are political unpopular. 20 years ago, that might have been gay rights groups.
The American finance and payment systems are a Rube Goldberg machine. Too many layers of middlemen adding cost and clunkiness; technology which was barely a good idea in the 1970s. But too many middlemen with a stake in it for anything but the state to blow it out.
I could imagine a system where everyone got a basic bank account for life-- each SSN and EIN is also an account number. The account is managed by the state as a public service, and you can assign it to a local brick-and-mortar bank to handle in-person banking. There would presumably be competition for the business.
That way, everyone would have guaranteed access to direct-deposit payroll and ACH-style-but-less-of-a-boondoggle electronic funds transfers. Push and pull payment APIs could be part of the state provided system, with enormous economies of scale driving the transaction price to essentially zero. Since the underlying service is state-run, it has to support any legal business purpose or the courts will shred it.
The financial tech sector is then freed from having to reinvent basic transfers and accounts again and again, and can focus on value-add services.
Yes, they've mostly captured all the regulators at this point so it's like the foxes running the henhouse, but at least in theory that's how it's supposed to work. . .
The jokes almost write themselves. . .
The decision to use GS is highly dilutive to Apple's brand.
You don't need the ball when the chain wraps around the whole world.
There are 3 or 4 tech companies big enough to pull this off, in the whole world.
That incident was the first time I've ever taken the need for alternative payment processors very seriously.
example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pres...
Apple will be piggybacking off of MasterCard's network.
I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.
1: So that's what? Anything from deep charcoal black to a subtle off-white?
(I work in payments)
AML = Anti-Money Laundering
(for those that are not in the industry :-))
So I went and looked up their payment options. And sure enough, they have a page on that. Which has the following notice:
"In order to stay compliant with our strategic credit card processing partners' policies and due to recently tightened regulations on the cryptocurrency circulation for the US-based companies, we are going to halt all support for cryptocurrency payments on this site for the time being."
What is this all about? Are they saying that payment processors will refuse to work with organizations that accept cryptocurrency? But then how e.g. Coinbase works with credit cards?
Cryptocurrencies accomplish nothing that wasn't already possible before, usually faster, cheaper and safer. Just because someone uses an alternative doesn't mean it's solving a problem, and in this case it's just creating more issues.
Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.
Bitcoin allows people in Venezuela to avoid wealth confiscation on the borders, either when they are running away or when they are sending money back home to family.
Bitcoin allows people in Iran to transact with outer world.
Bitcoin allows people in India to keep their wealth in face of demonetization.
There are many problems that Bitcoin solves for real people and real companies every day.
Just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean they don't exists.
Postal money orders already exists, and are exactly as expensive and inconvenient as you would expect.
The actual problem is KYC laws that require payment processors to do the job of the police and refuse service to customers under purposely vague corporate policies without due process, instead of having the police do that job and only have payment processing service denied with a court order and an opportunity to contest it under the law.
What is awful is that I expect it to be inconvenient and awful in the US because there is this idea that anything the government does will inevitably be bad and then there are multiple political parties that try their hardest to make that idea come true when they get elected.
There's no reason for the system to not work in the US other than people trying to sabotage it to the detriment of large parts of the population so their personal tax burden is lower since they don't believe they ever will need the service.
The EU in general doesn't provide government services, the UK does, France does.
When you're already the size of a state, there are basically no more economies of scale to be had by doing something at the size of a union of states. Your fixed costs are already being amortized over something like a million people or more, so the variable costs already dominate and spreading the fixed costs over even more people is past the point of diminishing returns.
But it's not past the point of expanding overhead. So suppose you want to do this in the US -- have the Post Office compete with Mastercard. You propose the bill.
The banks hate it because it's them you're competing with, they have billions of dollars, but more importantly they're a major industry in some states (e.g. New York) which have large numbers of legislators. So they not only use those votes against your bill, they trade their legislators' votes on other bills to get more votes against your bill. Moreover, their legislators are the ones who care most about things like finance, so guess who is on the finance committee.
Then you have states like Virginia where the major industry is defense. They want to destroy privacy protections, because you can't get a lucrative government contract for hoovering up and data mining financial data if you're not allowed to hoover up and data mine financial data. Guess who is on the committees related to that sort of thing. And New York is all for that -- data mining financial data for private purposes is lucrative too, and that amendment also makes it harder to pass the bill they don't like.
Then you have states where the government itself is a major employer, and what they want is more government jobs for their people. So they don't want your program to be efficient, they want it to be labor intensive, which is the opposite. But then it costs more, charges higher fees, requires the users to fill out more forms to use it etc. You may also see private companies looking for the same thing, because they then sell a solution to it, as with Intuit opposing tax simplification.
And so it goes down the line, at each stage making the program worse and harder to pass, until it either dies in committee somewhere or gets passed as some horrifying abomination that makes things worse rather than better.
This isn't some individual proposing to make the bill worse on purpose to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government, it's a structural issue that produces that outcome systemically.
Now you expect I'm going to suggest having the individual states do it. There are some states that aren't full of big banks or spooks or government bureaucrats, all we need is for one of them to do it. Which would work if they weren't subject to the same problematic federal laws as private enterprise is, created by the same problematic process, which is the reason the market isn't already taking care of this.
In order for the states to do things better, first the feds would have to stop standing on their feet.
Imagine if the post office was getting transaction fees instead of banks.
Since then I've seen post office banking as a way for getting poorer people out from under the thumb of exploitative banks, credit card companies, and check cashing places. Consider as well why should the government give a cut of EBT's cards and unemployment transactions.
Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.
https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/107369726493205299...
> I am not alt right, I am not a nazi. I've been on @SubscribeStar since @Vice terminated my @Patreon account in May. I haven't even recovered from that hit to my income. I am tired of being acceptable collateral damage in your culture wars. You sacrifice your livelihood- not mine.
But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?
Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (rather than via government strongarming) or by company-to-company action to persuade companies to adjust their behaviour to meet expectations of what is ethically appropriate.
In arrangement, the expectation is not that companies are 'neutral' but that they are sufficiently moderated by public will. This freedom not-to-transact is what allows things such as boycotts of Apartheid South Africa, boycotts of companies that abuse their workers or run sweatshops etc.
There are plenty of ways to rearrange things outside of a Capitalist model, but once you decide to have Capitalism but 'prevent boycotting on political grounds' you're basically suggesting that Capitalism ought to be stripped of one of its extremely few mechanisms for ethical feedback. The implications of that ought to scare you.
What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but I certainly think it's cause for concern, and call for an alternative that IS willing to behave as a neutral party. I don't want the noise of what is effectively a pipe to be making arbitrary political judgements when deciding what is allowed to pass through.
Now, publicly funded banks, that's a different question. I absolutely expect neutrality within what is legal from our government institutions.
If this action was completely unprompted, sure, but I think we're talking about payment processors choosing not to associate with people who have already been the subject of boycotts on their previous platform.
A better example would be WikiLeaks which enjoyed a fair amount of public support at the time Visa etc declined to process their payments, as we have reasons to suspect that the pressure on Visa to do this may have been from the U.S. Government.
By contrast, there have already been numerous public protests against people hosted on the SubscribeStar platform.
Apparently we do, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.
I'm pretty sure that if you're in position of quasi-monopoly, it should be illegal
See: AT&T after "we" did, Microsoft after "we" didn't.
This is the big problem with both the massive scale of certain businesses, their extensive interweaving with government, and of course monopolization.
For left leaning people it takes doxxing and instructions on how to commit acts of mass violence to get banned.
For the opposite ends of the political spectrum people have been banned for months-old videos - not even on a channel that the banned person runs - in which someone uses a swear word to tell the alt-right that they "are acting like n_____s" (which I interpreted as a deliberate word choice to emphasize irony that the alt-right is behaving how they often portray and see African Americans. Sargon's explanation is roughly similar). Meanwhile there are plenty of people who use the same slur regularly, some even in the usernames of their social media profiles. There is zero doubt in my mind that Patreon decided to ban Sargon on the basis of his political views first, then searched for something to justify the ban.
These are hardly the same situations.
It doesnt take that. But the far-left rarely insults people with racial slurs.
No, they prefer to use words like nazi, facist *phobe, which most likely won't get anyone banned, expect the target of those insults
Its just that coorporations are far more scared of beeing associated with the right, than the left.
Legally speaking you're not allowed to insult anyone, wether as a n-word, nor as a nazi
This is absolutely false, at least in the US where Patreon is based. Out of curiosity where did you get the idea that insults are illegal (assuming you're talking about the Unites States)?
Calling someone a nazi when you cannot proof that they do indeed follow that ideology would also be slander/libel.
Someone tried to sue for calling someone a Nazi but lost [1]. In this case the defendant claimed to have been presenting a hypothetical. I have not been able to find a successful defamation case due to someone being called a Nazi in the US. Not to mention it wouldn't affect calling a black person a n____r because such a statement is not factually incorrect (as the slur is a derogatory term for a black person).
1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thewrap.com/james-woods-bea...
We really need something better.
Their profit motive might save them. Or it could be a disaster, who knows. My guess is that Goldman would trade on the aggregate data
And then there's this, and a dozen other stories about Goldman Sachs deceiving its clients in the past.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/goldman-sachss-long-...
Typically it comes up in places where there's a question of whether the bank is responsible getting their client the best possible price in a transaction or whether the bank is acting as an arms-length counterparty who happens to be taking the other side of the transaction. It also depends on the sophistication of the client and whether it's a transaction where the client should expect Goldman to be bullshitting them.
Goldman acting as a bank for the Apple credit card is completely different from Goldman acting as the counterparty in a large FX hedge or bond deal.
Not that I like defending GS
It's hard to argue that Apple can keeps Goldman Sachs on a leash. GS can't get a worse reputation that it already has, shaming them is worthless.
That said, if the data is available in your iCloud backup in a form that can be read by other devices, Apple can presumably extract that data under subpoena. If it's in your iCloud backup but encrypted with a per-device key (like your non-iCloud keychain entries), Apple cannot extract that because decrypting the backup (which they can do) isn't sufficient to decrypt this per-device-encrypted data.
All that said, if the government wants to know your spending history, it would be simpler just to subpoena Goldman Sachs.
Source? I’m pretty sure the legal system does allow that.
I don't have a direct citation for you, besides having seen this spoken about before, but a simple thought exercise should prove it: If the government could compel that sort of thing, then we wouldn't have end-to-end encrypted chat (including iMessage) and the government would have already compelled Apple to give the government a backdoor into iPhones.
The FBI took a different view in a recent court case referencing the All Writs act of 1789 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d... but dropped it when they unlocked the device by other means., and the issue hasn't really made it through the court system, so it's unclear what the law requires.
Until a federal case gets to the appeals court level it basically won't establish any binding precedent in other cases under stare decisis.
Australia's does now.
Altering the OS to install a backdoor is a much different beast. It's non-optional, fundamentally weakens the security of the entire OS, and affects all customers everywhere, not just Australian citizens.
Also, if Apple did withdraw from Australia, any Australian citizen who wished to use an iPhone could still acquire one from overseas (though this is admittedly a fair amount of effort) and they'd continue to have a secure computing experience.
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-to...
Essentially, in this case, the underlying bank (Goldman Sachs) handles all the finances and the partner (Apple) lends their name/brand and receives a small kickback on card activities.
It does seem like a lot of work and potential risk if the sole purpose is to increase user dependency on the Apple ecosystem.
Apple has been very focused on not being a big-data company. Any sort of back-end shenanigans would be so damaging to the brand of information safety that they have been building as to be unworth any potential profit.
Roughly $50B are spent on App Store, and even more with growing number of Subscription along with other Apple Credit Card usage. That is a potential of $100B+ transaction volume.
It will likely be another entry point for Apple Cash, sending and receiving money from friends.
Once they have a foothold in the finance sector they can start financing their own devices and capture that revenue, instead of letting it slip to third parties.
This makes incredible sense. Lots of large companies have financing services that are very profitable. Finance is one place where it's much easier to enter than self driving cars.
Now I'm a bit sad I don't own any apple stocks.
With this game plan they can increase their leverage in the consumer market enormously.
Usually a percentage of each transaction and/or flat fee per cardholder or signup and/or a percentage of fees and interest paid. The exact details on these agreements are rarely published.
See here:
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-to...
Previously with other cards, using Apple Pay is just a matter of convenience for the customer. With the Apple Card, it's a matter of getting more cash back, so consumers are now financially motivated to prefer vendors that support Apple Pay.
That's why we have democratically accountable regulators
do you write for the onion?
A free market is the opposite of a monopoly.
This sort of deplatforming happens for moral reasons (adult content), discriminatory reasons (Suppression of gay activist movements in the 90s), political reasons (Suppression of IRA/ISIS symathisers), legal reasons (Enforcing international embargoes - ie, Iran).
For some reason, though, techies get up in arms when tech firms start doing this.
seriously though, i don’t really think it’s in a company’s purview to promote those values, otherwise they’d let their employees vote on who their ceo should be or wether their jobs should be outsourced or not etc... it definitely is in their purview to maximize their profit and at least in the short-term it would seem banning is “easier” (aka profitable) since it quells any “controversies” quickly enough...
please note, i’m not defending tech companies or payment processors banning merchants etc, just stating how i see it for my limited experience...
Indeed. I may not support the political views of (checks notes) ultra-nationalist furries, but I damn well think in a free society, their right to (checks notes) draw furry pr0n with Nazi flags in it should be abridged only by democratically discussed and broadly supported hate-speech laws.
An "ew no" to one is an "ew no" to all!
Or, a little more seriously, if we're not going to go through with actual social control over these decisions, we shouldn't control them at all. The lived experience of freedom is simply having the smallest possible number of choke-points between you and what you want, subject to not violating anyone else's rights or doing anything so morally horrific it was actually banned by the government (eg: organ trafficking or whatever). Our society needs to stop accepting that privatized, for-profit choke-points somehow give us "more freedom" than a law banning the choke-points (ie: common carrier regulations, First Amendment restrictions on state action, etc).
You mean big entities like transnational banks and payment networks?
In my case, Apple were attempting to charge me a monthly fee for an app that I installed last year before I ditched my iPhone. After using (and paying for) the app for a month, I realized I didn't like it and declined having a monthly subscription moving forward. After terminating my account with the app and uninstalling it Apple continued to charge me for it for months afterward. Repeated escalations in Apple's customer service labyrinth resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and, ultimately, an admission on their part that they didn't have a clear answer for what was happening or what I did wrong (one customer support person even told me that the same thing had happened to him once upon a time). Despite that, the relevant policy document they referred me to strictly prohibited me from being refunded for the erroneous charges. In the end, the only thing that saved me was being able to turn to my credit card company and flagging the months of charges as fraudulent. In this case I got all of my money back, but the experience really makes me wary of the idea of a big tech company being involved in my finances.
Both issue cards, and run two of the largest credit card processing systems. Bank of America Merchant Services and Chase Paymentech.
Most smaller providers still depend on one of those larger banks networks to process transactions.
You generally always need an acquiring bank to issue cards or process transactions. I believe this is the role of Goldman Sachs in this Apple news.
(Source: I worked at Square for 6 years, and my teams were directly responsible for the network integrations to connect to those merchant acquirers so we could process credit cards.)
You're misunderstanding how card networks work a little bit here. This is a credit card, not a payment processing service. Two different sides of the network. "Deplatforming" refers to getting kicked off a given payment processor, which is an entity that gives a merchant access to a card network (in this case Mastercard).
Perhaps issuers like Goldman Sachs could start banning their customers from using their card at certain merchants. But this wouldn't come from Apple -- they've already said they've engineered themselves out of that kind of control.
I think Apple is hoping that the Apple card will get more users to adopt Apple Pay at the point of sale vs. dominate payment processing. Apple collects a small merchant loyalty fee when someone uses Apple Pay at the point of sale, even in cases where the card being used is Amex or Chase. My guess is the overall adoption of Apple Pay is a bigger win for Apple than the card itself. I am not sure there is much cause of concern here yet as people like their CC points, perks, and rewards? It doesn't seem like Apple has leverage here unless everyone stops carrying credit cards?
It does look sharp as hell though.
I think the big indicator will be if payment overhead goes down with increased competition.
What's new here is they're tightly integrating it with Apple Wallet and in some aspects driving a better deal (like eliminating fees and points and data brokering). Overall I would characterize their offering as a "competitive" rewards card. But what's really distinctive here is the elegant Apple-designed UI around managing your spending and interest charges and rewards, which looks exceptional.
The other really clever thing is how they've leveraged the iPhone to improve the security of the backwards-compatible physical card. For non-ApplePay e-commerce they can rotate the CSC/CVV number you look up on your phone (since it's not printed on the card). And they can just reach out to you through iOS with suspicious transaction notifications and strongly re-authenticate you, instead of relying on antiquated robocalls.
One question I have is whether the card will have a stripe on it or just a chip. Traditionally merchants would be liable for fraudulent swipes without properly-checked signatures. If the signatureless card supports swipes, presumably Goldman Sachs would need to take on that liability now. Maybe that explains why rewards are 1% on physical card transactions instead of 2%.
Having said that, that doesn’t mean every issuer is going to come after merchants for this fraud... it’s typically the little mom and pops that haven’t fully migrated to EMV chip terminals. So maybe the lower rewards gives Goldman Sachs more leeway to be nice.
There seems to be a subfocus here about helping you manage your spending, which I can appreciate. The problem with ease of spending money is ease of going into debt, I think I could make this work for my wife and I fairly well, and easily at that.
Of course, the practicality of this for each person depends on their typical spending patterns and how often they can use Apple Pay in the first place. If you shop at places that don't accept it, you're pretty much out of luck.
Interesting foray into a gigantic industry that loves preying on people's inability to be responsible, though. I can think of a lot of people who could use more oversight with their spending.
But you should be able to use this almost anywhere, it doesn’t depend on contactless ApplePay.
You are correct and they really did think of all scenarios here. I dig it.
Disappointing.
I think many people, myself included, would still consider a credit card without the option to fall back to magstripe a nonstarter for their primary physical payment method.
I have a card that has a real number, but doesn't have the embossed numbers on it, so it too wouldn't work in such a machine.
To be fair, it's been years since I've run into one of those machines, so they may no longer be used, or people that use them are just used to rejecting cards they can't impression.
Secondly, I wonder if they can, for example, have a different number on the swipe, and have that number require extra security (such as approving each transaction on your phone).
- Cashback is generally lower here because interchange fees are regulated/capped to 0.3% for personal credit cards and 0.2% for personal debit cards. Offers of 2% cashback simply won't work outside the US so I'll be curious to see how (if?) they try and expand this globally.
- "All of the spending tracking and other information is stored directly on the device, not Apple’s servers" - can't see how this will work in practice. If you lose your phone, do you lose information on historical purchases? What if you want them for your records? Perhaps "spending tracking" just refers to data derived from the transaction information... but then, couldn't you just recompute it?
- "Apple also says that it’ll use machine learning and Apple Maps to label stores that you use in the app, and use that data to track purchases across categories like “food and drink” or “shopping.” " - I guess this is novel in the United States, but challenger banks like Monzo/Starling have been doing this for a number of years.
- "Customers will also be able to track purchases, check balances, and see when their bill is due right from the app." - not novel, CC providers like Amex and banks like Monzo already do all of this, including push notifications.
- "To get an Apple Card, users will be able to sign up on their iPhone in the Apple Wallet app and get a digital card that they can use anywhere Apple Pay is accepted “within minutes.”" - again, not novel. If you sign up for a Monzo account, the KYC checks are done reasonably quickly (certainly same-day IME) and then your account is open. You can add it to Android Pay (https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/19/instant-google-pay/) and make payments, bank transfer money in instantly etc.
Overall, I'm a little perplexed as to why this offering is interesting besides Apple having announced it.
There are higher cash back cards also the cash back is usually capped on a monthly basis rather than on a flat %.
So far for this year I have £341.92 cash back on the card.
Mind you that this isn’t a new card I had it for 5 years.
Much harder sell to get people to get the card if no merchants accepts it, and harder to get merchants to take it if nobody has one. There's a reason why the credit card market is almost entirely American Express, MasterCard, and Visa.
If they wanted to pay higher cashback than the standard interchange rates allow, they'd be charging merchants more than they're charged for accepting MasterCard or Visa, which means you'll end up with at most spotty acceptance like American Express.
With that said, I'm happy most merchants don't put up with the humongous fees—in the end the prices are just raised to compensate for them.
Source: used to work as a CC payments analyst.
Combine that with the fact that Amex gives targetted cashback offers I can well believe you can end up averaging several percent on a yearly basis if you're taking up some of the higher value ones (I currently have an offer for £100 cashback for £1000+ spend at Trailfinders, that would bump my average cashback up a fair bit!).
And even then, I don't think any machine learning is needed here. Monzo use the Merchant Category Code (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_category_code) to categorise purchases and public/commercial data sources like Google, Twitter and Foursquare (see https://community.monzo.com/t/where-does-monzo-get-its-icon-...) to get merchant locations, "friendly" names and logos.
You can back up your device to your computer (which Apple cannot access) or to iCloud (which Apple can access). If you lose your device, just restore from a backup.
This is also the reason that the bigger banks in Australia dragged their feet on ApplePay, there's little to no margin on those fees that Apple taking more made it untenable for them to support it here, until they did.
As for storing transactions on device only, there’s probably an encrypted backup on iCloud.
But that’s just it. Scratch another thing off my list of stuff — wireless charger, e-reader, television, car — that I’m waiting for Apple to come along and Get Right.
How does that work for US-based cards used outside of the US? I definitely don't lose my rebate while in other countries.
I've got the same services with BNP in France. I don't know how the data is computed/retrieved, though; maybe it's coming from manual tagging by users (since user can tag each individual payement).
The products offered by Revolut, Monzo et al are debit accounts, when you open an account with them you're not opening a new line of credit. With a debit account I assume on the whole the level of risk which the bank takes on is significantly less than opening a new line of credit.
As for the features you mention I concur - these are all well established here in the UK.
While interesting, it doesn't come close to solving what I feel is the largest problem with cards in the US today -- interchange fees.
Eliminating the set transaction fee could open up so many potential businesses. But I'm not sure what incentive Apple has of getting rid of it. It's a cash cow.
But also, how is this rent seeking? Rent seeking is defined as attempting to take a larger share of existing wealth without increasing total wealth. Electronic payment systems absolutely add to total wealth.
Unfortunately I agree with you regarding the lack of incentives Apple has. IIRC, the money for cash back rewards comes out of the interchange fee. How do you get consumers to adopt a card that's opaquely better for businesses and immediately worse for themselves?
I get why MC/Visa have a per-transaction fee. I don't understand why there's a percentage of the transaction on top of that. It's not any more work for a $1 transaction versus a $1,000,000 one on their end.
Maybe if you don't pay your balance every month, but the rewards are very real for me.
[0] https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/public-policy-discuss...
I never would be able to pay for as many long haul first class flights if I saved 2.2% of the transactions and used that to buy tickets
It's true that you pay the inflation regardless of whether you use a card or not, though. And you only get the reward if you do use a card.
The per-transaction fee existed to cover the additional cost of building out the network (literally running cables and wires to the merchants' stores) and providing card readers. The network is already built and has been paid for THOUSANDS of times over, and at this point it's largely obsolete. I'm also pretty sure merchants need to buy their own card readers now.
Finally, the best estimates for the cost to process a transaction is < $0.01. So that means, they're charging $0.35 for nothing, essentially.
Oh the joys of running a cartel.
The issuing bank sets interest rates (and late/missed payment fees, and penalty rates, etc.) to cover at least the defaults and payment issues part.
If you look at Visa's margins -- it's pretty clear the answer is: not much.
EDIT: In this case, payment processing is controlled by a few organizations. They have agreed to raise their prices at the same time, instead of free market style competition for the lowest price. They can do this because very few companies can do payment processing and it is very hard to become a payment processing company.
It doesn't necessarily need to be eliminated, but it should be regulated: see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32... and the effect it has had in the EU.
https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square...
I don't think that's a big component of it. It's probably has more to do with Apple users being inherently more credit-worthy. If you're well-heeled enough to be neck deep in the Apple ecosystem in the first place, you're probably less likely to be in credit default.
To the non-expert, what are interchange fees and why are they a problem?
Apple literally gets a cut out of every NFC transaction. So they get to double dip here.
AMEX once refunded me $1800 for speakers that were damaged in shipping with some documentation, photos and details about the issue.
Now, customer service varies from bank to bank but AMEX has always had the best customer service in my view, bar none. I wonder how Apple Card will stack up to it.
By comparison my Chase/Visa sided with me when I was ripped off by a shady accommodation listing.
I agree totally with the sentiment though, also the 1-2% cash back is great.
If true, this is the true real innovation.
Or is there interest, but just no fee for not making your payment on time?
At least in the US, charge cards also (historically) charged higher fees to retailers, so a lot of stores wouldn't accept them.
Given the rates charged by many cards, I'm not sure you'd want to do that. The US has an average of 15%:
* https://www.creditkarma.com/credit-cards/i/average-apr-on-cr... * https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-interest-ra...
You can't really compare it to mortgages or car loans, because those are both secured by a collateral. You can't really compare it to student loans because it's impossible to get out from under a student loan. Either way, the debt is less risky for the lender, so they're willing to offer it for a lower rate.
Never for truly big ticket items, but sometimes the $5 or whatever in interest to carry a small balance for a month isn't worth the extra effort it would take to free up the cash I'd need to pay it off in full without dipping below the minimum balance I like to keep in my checking account, and it's also not worth $5 to me to wait another month before replacing that busted transmission.
It depends on the matter of scale. Some folks either don't understand how things work, or are just bad at math. That's where the problems start for people.
Charge cards generally force you to pay them off each month (again, an Amex charge card expects you to clear out the balance for each cycle). This is a credit card, which means you can carry a balance.
But it appears they are much more forward on telling you how much interest you will be paying if you don't pay off the card.
FWIW late fees are a big revenue source for existing card issuers.
E.g. generally a credit card will have a minimum of, say, $29/mo., if you have a balance of maybe $500... if you have a balance of $10K the minimum might go up to $129 or something. And if you don't pay the minimum, you're hit with the late fee.
I never really understood the purpose of minimum monthly payment, except maybe it's useful in proving you're not a complete deadbeat, and also probably not dead? Getting rid of it does seem like a consumer-friendly innovation maybe?
Basically it means that borrowers should at least be paying off the interest incurred on the principal owed at the beginning of the billing period.
however this product to me is the premier product of the event. finally someone is taking credit card use to the next level in both usability, features, and security. Most important is the level of privacy they are offering.
Now if the three percent discount holds true it will be the defacto means of purchasing from apple.com, similar to how for prime users you pretty much have to use the amazon/chase card for five percent on all purchases.
I imagined Elizabeth Warren in a fit of rage sitting in her office watching the livestream.
I guess that, if Apple’s marketing power can sell a ton of these, there’s considerable upside for them, but it doesn’t sound like a truly impressive innovation.
Do you know a better card that always gives 2% cash back, no cap?
Citi DoubleCash is 2% on everything, dunno if there's a cap, no annual fee. (you have to redeem into a bank account, not as statement credit, to get the full 2%)
USAA Limitless is 2.5% cash back on everything, no cap. (military only, no longer available), no annual fee.
If you have enough cash invested with Merrill Edge ($100,000, including IRAs) the Bank of America Travel Rewards earns 2.625% cash back on everything, not sure of a cap, no annual fee.
If you value Membership Rewards at more than a cent, the American Express Blue Business Plus earns 2 Membership Rewards per dollar spent on everything, $50,000 cap, no annual fee.
Discover IT Miles earns 3% cash back on everything the first year, churnable (you can get a new one every year), no cap, no annual fee.
Alliant Credit Union Cashback Visa earns 3% on everything the first year and 2.5% after that, $60 annual fee (waived the first year), dunno of a cap.
Capital One Venture is (basically) 2% cash back on everything, $95 fee (which they usually waive if you ask),no cap. Only redeemable towards travel. Has a fairly large signup bonus.
Barclaycard Arrival Plus is 2% on everything, $95 annual fee, not sure of the cap. Only redeemable towards travel. Has a fairly large signup bonus.
Paypal Mastercard is 2% on everything, no annual fee, dunno of a cap.
Those are your basic options for no-fuss 2%+ cash back cards. If ApplePay is required to earn 2%, then I'd say the majority of those cards are better; my biggest expenses every month are bills (phone, internet, insurance, oil, electricity, etc) and I don't think I can use ApplePay to pay any of those.
I had to look this up - seemed way to good to be true - based on this site [1], it's "Discover: 1.5 Miles per $1 spent on all purchases."
All your other references check out - the Alliant seems very interesting. Fidelity requires a Fidelity bank account - too much effort.
However, I am guessing Apple made a lot of hay with the "no late fees" - and really identified their target market (ie, not necessarily you & me).
[1] https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/compare/?srcCode=GAX5&...
https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/resources/earn-more-re...
>With Cashback Match, Discover automatically matches all the cash back new cardmembers have earned at the end of their first year on their credit card.1 Discover will apply the match after the first 12 consecutive billing cycles, within the following one or two billing cycles.
At the end of the first year you can apply for a new one and get cashback match again for another year. You can hold two Discover cards at once, so the third year you'd have to close the first card, before applying for a third and at the fourth year close the second, and so-forth (people talk about actually doing this, not worth the hassle for me, and I got the USAA Limitless 2.5% card)
As for a Fidelity account - a Cash Management account has no fees and no minimums and is a useful account to have (offers ATM reimbursements)
It was labeled as an "online-only pilot" and it was rolled out state-by-state, though I'm not sure all 50 were ever all covered. Then they took away some states and then discontinued it completely. Guess it really was just a pilot program. Was available for maybe around a year?
Best part of the card is that you can redeem any amount of cash (no minimum) and you can redeem it right away, even before the statement closes.
You have to consider, for Fidelity Visa the foreign transaction fee is 1% and the cashback is 2%. So you can say it has cash back of 1% overseas and 2% domestically; which is a better deal for the vast majority of people than 2% on ApplePay and 1% on non-ApplePay. The only person who comes out ahead with the Apple card is someone whose parents pay all their bills and they spend most of their time on overseas vacations in a country where ApplePay is widely accepted.
But even for that person, PayPal Mastercard is objectively better. USAA Limitless also doesn't charge foreign transaction fees so it is also objectively better. (assuming you already have it - its military only and closed to new signups)
Not only that but the Uber card is pretty much objectively better as well; it earns 2% on ApplePay with no foreign transaction fees or annual fees and earns more than 2% on much more than just Apple (4% at restaurants, 3% on hotels and airfare, 2% on other "online purchases", $50 statement credit on streaming services if you spend more than $5,000/year).
Fidelity also has a sign up bonus sometimes and very frequent targeted spend bonuses (it remains to be seen if Apple can compete in those areas, but they probably will just rely on their branding and loyal fanbase). I've gotten hundreds of dollars in extra cashback from Fidelity's targeted spend bonuses.
There's also no foreign transaction fee on the Bank of America Travel Rewards, though, like I said, it requires a Merrill Lynch account (including Merrill Edge) with $100,000 invested in it to earn the highest rate of 2.625% cash back.
It doesn't always give 2% cash back, it only gives 2% cash back for places that offer Apple Pay. A significant portion of my CC chargers are at places that don't offer Apple Pay.
If you want straight cash it's 1.5%.
Apart from the flex of having an apple credit card of course :)
Apple Card is only available in the US.
How long until these companies start skipping payment processors like Visa and Mastercard and take the whole pie?
What do you mean?
How long until these companies start skipping payment processors like Visa and Mastercard?
Should that come to pass, the Apple card becomes...an Apple card.
The two seem intertwined, even though they aren't. I just assumed Apple -- if they became a payment processor -- would still provide those protections.
If they didn't, which I see is maybe what the OP was alluding to, why would anyone use the card?
There are other direct to bank account systems like Interac that skirt around the traditional “pay later” idea, without fees or benefits to the user.
All in all you could just do a direct to bank account NFC transaction but why would any company do that when they can build up an ecosystem?
Square/Clover/all the POS's used by coffeeshops and other small businesses have been taking Apple Pay for a few years now. But recently CVS started taking it, and CVS is everywhere (~6,200 stores in the US). Whole Foods is on Apple Pay. I understand Target will be following soon.
It's still not 100% penetration, but it definitely feels like the adoption expands every time a shop upgrades its POS.
Target has already deployed Apple Pay in NC at least.
I only recently bought an iPhone, but I was pleasantly surprised by the number of merchants that accepted Apple Pay.
https://corporate.target.com/article/2019/01/store-payment-o...
How often have you done this dance:
1. Notice the POS reader has an icon on it that vaguely indicates it supports some kind of NFC payment.
2. Pull out your phone and wave it around the reader.
3. No response from reader. Do I need to press something on my phone?
4. Still no response. The cashier and other customers in line are looking at you like you are wasting everyone’s time with your high tech crap.
5. Sheepishly put your phone in your pocket, pull out an actual card, and mutter something about “I guess it’s not working today...” to the cashier.
Have this awkward experience enough times and you’ll just abandon NFC payments entirely. Stores should not be allowed to indicate that their systems support NFC if their reader doesn’t work.
Supposed to have increased privacy, why I try it first.
Isn't this because Apple Pay is essentially built on top of the Visa/Mastercard/Amex contactless solutions?
We have had very good support for contactless payments for a long time, something that Apple/Google Pay will both fall back to if necessary. No one blocks them. Charges are capped in the EU, and low, so retailers are onboard. Add to that the fact that cash usage is declining fast and some places are going card only (London public transport being most notable), it’s everywhere.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment#/media/Fil...
Credit cards give better consumer protection, less hassle if your card gets cloned, and (if used sensibly) help your credit rating.
If you ever travelled to Asia and don't wanted to install WeChat then yes, cards are good unless you're ok with going cash only.
Yes, I don't care for running any of these blobs or other DRM garbage on my phone. And what's the selling point ? I don't see the difference between pulling out my card v/s pulling out my phone. Decent security (chip & pin for eg. or other 2nd factor) is perfectly possible with cards. US is just backwards in matters like these. We don't need to beat the security strawman.
Fortunately, most retail on the Navajo Nation takes Apple Pay, so I just drove over there every couple of days for supplies and paid with my Apple Watch.
Saved my bacon. But I'd still rather have plastic as a backup considering battery issues in places with extreme weather.
So if I went out and bought a new MacBook Pro today, either AppleCare or American Express will pay to repair or replace it for the next 5 years, until March 25, 2025. (Just for using the card).
https://www.americanexpress.com/us/credit-cards/benefits/det...
I have the credit card but pay it off monthly and only charge what I can afford at the time. As such a member, paying no interest and having received many thousands of dollars in savings has been great. They "win" if you run a balance of course. Ouchie rates.
Consumers should be able to just NOT pay for a service, and then it's on the service-provider to turn off the customer's access.
I can't tell you the amount of services I've past up on simply because I don't want to (potentially) deal with an awful cancellation process, and then go through the hassle of charging back on my CC. It's just not worth the time -- and they know it and depend on it -- which is frankly disgusting. Invest some time in a better product...
Some consumers would want complete removal of their data after deciding not to continue paying for service.
how about this - I dont use my cards that often - maybe 20 times a week. i'd be much happier if i got a notification through a side channel with a proposed charge and I could click 'yes' or 'no'.
it makes alot more sense to me than having to poll my account to look for potential fraud and argue with the bank about re-issuing a card with a new number.
wouldn't that be simple? i understand that for some usage patterns that would be inconvenient.
the broader point is that I shouldn't need to expose personal information just to buy a tea towel, I shouldn't even have to give you my email address so you can start sending my helpful hints about how awesome your other products are.
Secondly, I don't know of ANY company that deletes customer data upon cancellation. I've worked at a few ecom companies now, and the marketing team would just LOL at that idea. Past customers are pretty much your highest converters. No way are you gonna get rid of your data on them.
MAYBE in Europe with GDPR. Even still, no company I've worked at does this even for European customers. I'm skeptical a meaningful percentage of companies do.
"Invest some time in a better product" is not an appropriate solution since consumers have different incentive processes and those incentives changes throughout their lives. There is a diminishing return on investment for the producer of the g&s and they have to find the right balance.
The process of increasing cancellation cost (e.g. time), inadvertently puts the onus on the consumer to do their due diligence prior to purchasing a product.
Maybe you feel differently. But know that a lot of people feel the other way also.
What? Apple Pay does this. Oh they don't expose the numbers to you, but they use a virtual card at time of purchase.
In the case of Hover, I have performed a single authorisation, and it is now capable of performing repeat transactions against my card. There is no interface within Apple Pay (that I can find) to remove that authorisation, I have to ask Hover to do that.
In the case of Uber, I perform an authorisation for an expense before I know what the amount is, and I'm not required to re-authorise when tipping.
The Hover example is the problem. Not specific to Hover, but rather specific to the lack of virtual card management within Apple Pay.
Virtual cards by definition do not have to be single use, (un)fortunately.
The virtual card is also set up in such a way that it can only be used to make purchases through Apple Pay. Which makes it, unlike regular (American) credit cards, a 2-factor authentication system: Something you have (phone) and something you are (fingerprint or face).
That's a big part of why I use Apple Pay when it's available; it gives me a fair bit more protection against credit card fraud.
> When you use your phone to pay in stores with an eligible Visa card in Google Pay, we don’t send your actual credit or debit card number with your payment. Instead, a virtual account number is used to represent your account information – so your account details stay safe.
No need to do that manually.
also i doubt you'd get any spending points.. which is kind of a big perk
Apple Pay already does this via the "EMV Payment Tokenisation Specification":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pay#Technology
Anyone can implement it; it's not Apple-proprietary.
Jobs had an unparalleled way of steering that innovation into productive avenues. He always had his Wozzes, though.
Cook probably is more like a typical manager who is good at optimizing things. Nothing wrong about that but I wouldn't expect big leaps from Apple under him.
Who?
Apple has been traveling this path for what, decades now? It can't possibly be a surprise. I suppose we could all wish it to be different, but this is in line with what they've been doing for a long time now.
(2017) 'The world’s biggest firm has a financial arm half the size of Goldman Sachs'
'...Apple says that its “value-at-risk” (VAR), a statistical measure of the maximum likely loss in an average day, is $434m. That is huge: similar to the combined VAR of the world’s top ten investment banks. In theory losses on derivatives would be offset by gains in the value of Apple’s underlying business. But the sheer size of these positions gives pause for thought.'
'...Its foreign operation swims in cash while its domestic one drowns in debt. Profits made abroad are kept in foreign subsidiaries. That way Apple does not pay the 35% levy America charges when earnings are repatriated. Some 94% of Apple Capital’s assets are “offshore” and cannot be tapped for ordinary purposes. The domestic business must do the hard work of paying for dividends and buy-backs. Its profits are not big enough to cover these, so it borrows. Domestic net debts have risen to $92bn, or five times domestic gross operating profits. Each year Apple must issue $30bn of bonds (including refinancing), similar to the average of Wall Street’s five largest firms.
Apple’s core business is so profitable that it is—almost—inconceivable that a blow-up at Apple Capital could lead to it needing taxpayer or central-bank support, as was the case for GM and GE. Still, it is easy to imagine how Apple Capital could hurt its parent. A market shock could lead to losses on its portfolios. A two-percentage-point rise in interest rates would result in a loss of $10bn. If bond markets dried up, Apple might struggle to issue so much debt and have to bring home funds, incurring a big tax bill. It might also become tricky to run such a big derivatives portfolio.'
What's the point of this article? Apple is so big that its derivatives for protection from FX volatility are so big?
What does the author suggests here; that they stop protecting against FX volatility?
What about a brewery I went to this weekend where neither swipe or chip was available for their POS and the card number was manually entered?
Some people say you will be able to see the card number in your Wallet app, but somehow I doubt it. There is already a unique card number for every physical card you added to your walled, but you cannot see it. You can verify it on proof of purchase where last 4 digits are shown - they will differ from your physical card.
As for signed/unsigned, it gets vague these days. In the past you were required by your bank agreement to sign your card. If you tried to pay with spouse card the merchant was allowed to call police and destroy the card right away.
Today probably are still required to do all that with physical card, but with contactless payments its usually ignored all the time.
For Apple Pay you must agree to different set of rules, those don't require you to physically sign anything as its fully digital. Same thing here.
No, they showed a physical card as well.
Apply Pay users: how broad is Apply Pay adoption? Is this a viable replacement for a VISA, Mastercard or AMEX?
I'm intrigued by the privacy angle to this, seeing as VISA and Mastercard apparently share and/or sell a lot of transaction data with/to third parties.
Edit: The article has been updated: As rumored, Apple is partnering with Goldman Sachs for Apple Card, with Mastercard handling payment processing. The mastercard network, plus the benefits Apples is offering (eg 2pct cashback), could make this really attractive.
Edit: Apparently not.
However, if Apple can isolate most Apple purchases to using their own card, things get interesting. 3% off Apple purchases is pretty decent. Kind of like Amazon wants all it's data for purchases through it's own card.
Overall I try and use Apple Pay where I can and find about 2/3 of the time I want to use it I can. My biggest struggles have essentially been at smaller stores that still just have basic square swipers and obviously the occasional cash only locations.
It should work anywhere that touchless mastercard is accepted, though I do think that vendors can turn off apple pay specifically to avoid the fee.
I don't think merchants have to pay anything extra to accept Apple Pay. It's the banks that have to pay a "marketing fee" to Apple to let their cards work with Apple Pay.
Besides convenience, security and privacy are the backstop for my usage. I just trust Apple more to not be sleezy with my transaction history.
* Tokenization is using a unique per-device credit card. These are generated by the payment network, so Mastercard knows who is making the payment.
* EMV includes per-transaction tokens.
Here with Apple Card, even if Apple might not choose to centralise your payment data, the underlying network (MasterCard, in this case) most certainly can know where you spent it, and vendors at point of sale can keep track of it too.
Hooray for FaceID!!!
I agree with this. Maybe it's because I still have trauma from broken power buttons (back in the iPhone 4 era), but I'd like to not have to press buttons as much as possible.
For now. They are all still collecting and storing all the data. The only solution is lack of data collection to begin with.
cash is the most convenient secure and private form of payment. applepay if i run out of cash or its a larger transaction. chip (in the US) is hobbled by stupid UX (insert card, tap random buttons, sign, etc.), so swipe is usually quicker and more reliable. i never use debit.
Apple Card most likely won't be coming to Europe any time soon. The streaming service is also not likely to come to Europe as it includes US-only services such as Hulu and Amazon Prime.
I am aware that this is a bit of a 1st world problem, but all of these services being US-only can be really annoying. Recently I tried to legally stream Battlestar Galatica in Europe. Not available on Netflix or HBO. So I figured I can rent the show from iTunes. Nope, only in the US. How about Amazon Prime? Nope. US only. In the end, I pirated it from one of the private torrent trackers we have here. I was willing to pay and watch it legally. But aside from ordering the blu-ray discs, I had no choice. Wanna keep piracy alive? This is how you do it.
I do understand why these services are not _yet_ available in Europe. It doesn't make it less annoying though.
Thanks for the tip!
Content varies by region, though, of course.
And naturally nowhere do they tell you need to use primevideo.com instead of amazon.com as an international customer.
Very little sci-fi shows though.
https://www.justwatch.com/ca/search?q=manikarnika
In Canada.
In the USA?
https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=manikarnika
Not so much.
This only drives piracy -- it obviously has been ripped and it is available on torrent.
Other side of the coin, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to watch American Gods and it takes more than 24 hours for the latest episode to get to Canada from the USA. It is literally faster to drive across the border, record it and drive back. That's insane. Oh and there's no indication of when it drops. People posted the question for UK and there's simply no answer.
I honestly can say, I tried to move away from piracy -- I have been pirating things since 1985 -- but when I look at https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1110254374192889857 and the availability, I despair and just want to give up. I have the money but having all of these are just annoying. Every service has its own interface and problems. Like, you can't Chromecast Amazon Prime unless you cast the browser tab and that sucks quality wise. And yes, quality! Amazon Prime is not always 1080p but what I torrent is always 1080p and never degrades. Netflix is better quality wise for sure, it was the first I subscribed to watch their Marvel stuff... but I am really not keen on having eventually eight or a dozen different services to search when I just want to watch a movie and deal with the quirks of each.
Piracy is a service problem and these guys are making the service worse and worse every day.
Ps. try searching Roku stick on Amazon.ca , the first result is "Roku® Streaming Stick | Portable, power-packed player with voice remote with TV power and volume | US version – Not intended for use in Canada".
I often thought about building something like this, but always came to the conclusion that the potential legal problems are not worth it. justwatch.com is a life saver when it comes to figure out where to get the content from. +1 for justwatch.com!
No way Disney and Netflix and Amazon Prime will give their programming to Apple.
When I lived in the UK I signed up for an out-of-market subscription for NHL, it was something like $50 and I could watch any game from any broadcast (they always do a home and away broadcast) and they’d block out most of the ads because it was out of market and they hadn’t sold the ads there. Now the UK does air some nhl games, particularly during the playoffs, so how’d I do it? Used a vpn in like Peru or somewhere that wouldn’t give two craps about hockey. I paid for it, but still had to jump through hoops to watch it. What I time to be alive.
Whoever figures out the Netflix of sports, wins. I’m calling it.
When I travel in the EU, several sites refuse to show because of GDPR. My favorite paid porn site doesn't even explain anything just goes to an "under maintenance" page. I can't buy a cinema ticket for the time when I'll be home because the purchase page simply doesn't load. All of this goes away by SSH'ing to my home and using the OpenSSH SOCKS proxy. Or by using a VPN.
It is $15 a month and contains basically every sport my friends who like sports watch.
I'm looking forward to seeing it collapse into a pile of garbage when the governing bodies of various sports catch on and try to "extract value" from streaming.
The "available sports" on Kayo: https://help.kayosports.com.au/s/article/What-content-is-ava...
Or better yet, try to purchase the few remaining non “smart” TVs or have started using computer monitors instead of TVs to get a TV smaller than 40” and without smart TV garbage in it.
https://www.justwatch.com/ie/tv-series/battlestar-galactica https://www.justwatch.com/de/Serie/Battlestar-Galactica
Fully agree though on feeling like a second-class citizen regarding a number online services.
It's much easier to launch new ventures in the US due to considerably less regulation.
*—though it depends what you mean by 'better'. I don't think anything existing int the EU is as secure and as private as what Apple just announced. For sure the average EU CC is more secure than an average US one and our data protection laws are better. However our credit cards are still allowed to track us and our purchases. Credit agencies still follow us around and rate us. Getting hold of our histories is relatively simple but removing ourselves from those histories is less so.
... but it still costs the same, and that’s not even the part that’s frustrating
So no we won't have the exactly same stuff but most of it will end up there one way or another (except Netflix)
The access to third-party content (or lack thereof) isn't in Netflix' hands. That's basically the reason why they double down on their very own originals.
On the plus side, that gap presents sort of a business opportunity but the downside is, it's not a particularly big one.
Doing business in the EU is just a lot harder. Even though a lot of regulation is on an EU level, each country has their own rules and laws on top of that. Just invoicing your customers is a total mess. It's incredibly complicated. Then there is a ton of privacy and data protection regulation (GDPR for example). Germany for example has a dozen or so more rules on top of that. It's one of the reasons why Google Streetview is non-existent in Germany. I haven't even gotten to the the fact that each country has a different language. Although most people of younger generations do speak and understand English just fine.
I totally understand why companies avoid the EU as a result of this. It's a mess. Ironically, I do support a lot of these regulations.
For example, we don't have a unified banking system in the EU. Each country has its own preferred method of payment. In the Netherlands they have iDeal. In Belgium Bancontact. Dankort in Denmark. The list goes on [1]. Credit cards are not that common in Europe and not everyone has one. To appeal to a wider audience, one must support local payment methods. This is just one example of where things get more complicated compared to doing business in the US.
[1] select the "Europe" tab: https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods
Basically all you need is the IBAN.
The currency will be converted to euro but you don't need to be within the eurozone, only within EU.
The example I gave was regarding accepting online payments as a business from inviduals and other businesses. For US busineses, accepting credit cards is usually enough. Large bills can be paid by wire transfer. In the EU, accepting online payments is not that straightforward. Just figuring out the right VAT rate is complicated to begin with.
See: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/eu-vat-ru...
As for the supposed insane amount of regulation, the majority of international trade is regulated at the EU level so it's quite unified. Not to mention e-commerce which is completely regulated by the EU.
I am not saying that there is not a considerable amount of particularity that may be hindering small startups in fast expansion across Europe but I would find it quite hard to believe that it is much of a factor for the likes of Apple and Amazon.
Here are some examples I can remember:
- Amazon Prime
- Amazon selection and prices
- Amazon Dash
- Amazon groceries
- Amazon third-party selling
- Free shipping in most online stores
- Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay (now available in Canada)
- Google Voice
- Google Fi
- T-Mobile unlimited international data
- Credit card churning
- Credit card cashback (up to 6%)
- No taxes on online purchases
- Most prestigious schools in the world
- Netflix content
- MoviePass
- YouTube Red
- Venmo
- Pandora
- Spotify (now available in Canada)
- McDonald's dollar menu, $5 pizza
- Bitcoin exchanges (some options in Canada now)
- Charles Schwab (no international fee)
- Robinhood (zero fee stock trading)
- Cheap Costco booze
- Uber (now available in Canada)
- Airbnb (now available in Canada)
- Planet Fitness ($10, 24-hour gym chain)
- Walmart open 24/7, can camp in parking for free
- You can carry a knife
- Super Bowl ads
- US dollar (most recognized and best exchange rates internationally)
- Dirt cheap chicken and eggs
- Grass fed butter (not strictly US, but impossible to find in Quebec)
- Google Maps satellite resolution and Street view (now available in Canada)
- Best military
- Best Olympic athletes
- Best sport leagues
- Best space program (NASA)
- Most bands tour in USA
- Trader Joe's, Aldi
- You can find American brands (restaurants, foods, cars, clothes, sport teams, movies, electronics) everywhere in the world
- Over 90% of movies and TV shows I've watched are from the US
- Over 50% of the music I listen to is from the US
- Over 90% of podcasts I listen to are from the US
- FAANG, and the quality/compensation of American tech companies
- Most popular guitar brands are American
- Some of the most diverse climate and natural landmarks (Redwoods, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, beaches, deserts, Alaska, Hawaii)
- The world knows more about US politics than their own country's politics (at least that's my case, e.g., everyone can name the US president)
- Most online communities (HN, Reddit) are US-centric (they assume every user is an American)
Some of us do (me, for example). Travel enough and you realize what is actually awesome about America.
But complaining is something Americans do exceptionally well. It is at our core. Just how it is.
I personally have:
- Amazon Prime
- Apple Pay - Planet Fitness
- Uber and Lyft
- 24/7 grocery stores
- All the big musical acts (which, mind you, is part of being in Toronto and not, like, Winnipeg)
- Legal, weapons-grade weed delivered right to my door
The credit cards, boy, I will give you that. They'll take my Chase Sapphire Reserve from my cold dead hands. (Though Amex is getting aggressive here.)
From a cultural diversity perspective, the spread of american monoculture can become depressing.
From the perspective of trying to reduce climate impact to manageable levels, the amount of services you list which make it extremely easy to forget the majority of externalities in daily decision-making cost can be daunting.
From a political perspective, the success of US narrative-based, media-driven discourse represents a large impediment to actual democracy.
From an economic perspective, it can be depressing to know that these services you list exist in a bubble built on top of terrible social support, an exhausting over-work culture, wealth inequality, disgusting homeless and prison rates, a perpetual war machine, and a debt-based currency.
pizza and beer are way too expensive in Canada though, we agree there.
Google, Amazon, McDonalds, Walmart, AirBNB, cheap meat & eggs (you know why it's cheap, right?)... all topped off with some hands-down-the-pants fawning over elements of US culture and their 'best military' (do you have a 'top 10 best wars ever' too?).
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/apple-unveils-apple-t...
We have the same problem here in Australia.
(I bet that if regulations changes and merchants started passing on fees in a transparent manner to customers, then rewards cards would go away in the US. How exciting would 2% back be if you also paid an extra 2% directly to each merchant for the privilege of using the cash back card?)
Now the EU has limited the Interchange Fee paid by EU merchants by an order of magnitude:
>For card payments carried out by the cardholder in a shop ("Card Present Transactions"):
> 0.2% of the value of the transaction for debit cards;
> 0.3% of the value of the transaction for credit cards:
>For online payments ("Card Not Present Transactions"):
> 1.15% of the value of the transaction for debit cards;
> 1.50% of the value of the transaction for credit cards.
Source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-6655_en.htm
Perhaps they are too big too fail in America, but I'm pretty sure they are not in Europe and other countries. And those partnerships with banks are probably going to cease to exist.
But no word on MasterCard. Will they share the data, is that their business?
Plus there are normally other companies involved when a transaction is settled later, like First Data.
CC transactions are all settled later.
I had a card that won't swipe pretty frequently, after having to have my number typed or to produce a new card for the 3rd time I finally just reported mine broken and a new one was overnighted to me.
I've always thought that its the customers burden to produce a working payment method. If I got skipped in line because my card didn't work I'd have no problems letting someone else go ahead of me while I fumbled around with my phone and wallet.
Key point:
"Here's my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard's networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile. "
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[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t...
Does this mean that the card doesn't contain sensitive information in the chip or mag stripe? Will only work if it's near your phone?
If so, this is quite different from status quo, and touches on what the Coin card failed to do.
"Apple Card will be available to qualified customers in the US this summer." so US only
It is a self-propelling idea that would be almost impossible to kill because doing so would make your credit card offering less competitive.
It is also self-propelling from the consumer end. If you don't take advantage of these rewards, you're paying for everyone else's rewards by buying goods and services at a higher price. Some merchants flat out deny certain credit cards such as AMEX.
Though I guess lower fraud rate due to chip-and-pin requirement also plays a part.
Both the EU and China have introduced legislation that caps merchant fees. This helped with cashless adoption, but also killed off many of the bonus points/miles/cashback offerings.
In the UK everywhere has a payment terminal and that terminal accepts absolutely anything - credit, debit, Apple, AmEx, prepaid, cash-card, whatever. I don't know why Germany picks and chooses.
For reading the comments it seems like people are exited about the Apple Card solving a set of problem I simply don't see most people having here in Denmark.
- 2% on all Apple Pay purchases
- 3% on Apple purchases.
- Zero fees
- Virtual card numbers
- Privacy
can you create your own?
All those unique numbers are handled by your bank and linked to single card account.
You would not be able to "choose" a vanity number of your own choosing besides being really insecure but also because CC numbers have to fit an algorithmic pattern to be valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
[1]https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/
Switching to an Android phone at your next phone upgrade cycle will be a lot harder if it also means you need to switch your credit card. Plus, giving users a better rewards rate for using Apple Pay over the physical credit card will encourage them to build the habit of paying with their actual iPhone (and as a follow on effect, probably help encourage further Apple Pay adoption among merchants).
Smart defensive move as device manufacturers face an ever more saturated market.
Hi, do you mind linking me to some sources to this claim?
Goldman Sachs is among them.
Small businesses are the ones who still get bitten by fees, not just on payment processor level but on the physical machines themselves, the fees are still pretty high with some of the larger players locking companies into longer contracts too. [1] This needs to change.
There seems to be a lot of consolidation playing out too with the likes of WorldPay (who are the largest payment processor here in the UK) getting acquired [2].
[1] https://merchantcards.co.uk/providers/ [2] https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/72211/vantiv-closes-wo...
[1]
Secondly, Most cards run for profit on card processing fees. They are a profit centre to the bank. Is apple running this at a loss for other reasons or is this model of card cash-positive inside 1 year? Because its a long way to the bottom when you have a giant pile of cash, but at some time, in a year based financial reporting regime they will have to account for this thing, and if its not visibly in profit then either they have an opportunity cost/loss or a real world loss.
1. Apple News was announced again? I think it was already released wasn't it? Still not interested though. No matter how much "AI" they use to make recommendations.
2. Being forced to have an iPhone to have a credit card that seems like any other card sounds like a terrible idea. Plus where I live we already have multiple apps and services that allows me to create an infinite amount of cards and transfer money with zero fees.
3. The single game subscription seems interesting, specially the part where they say they can also be played offline. I wonder how they do that. I don't play games anymore, still, interesting, wouldn't mind trying it.
4. tv.channels looks like other similar services, and they seem to imply you can only use their app on smart TVs and their devices, which is a big no-no. Still, if with good shows and price competitive...
300 of those are Apple getting too much power and stepping into your payment. And Needs to break up Apple or Google or Amazon or whatever. Not sure why it matters as this is not Apple's first CC, they have had Barclaycard Visa with Apple Rewards as told in the 2nd Section Comment.
200 of those are Apple Card not having the best Rebate, as there are many other cards offering much higher rebate with no annual fees. I mean seriously, did anyone expect Apple to offer the best Rebate Card? No one is mentioning You are basically trading around 1% of your Spending discount for your privacy and Data. Along with better Financial Planning from your Data on Devices.
100 of those are about Visa / Master having duopoly and getting all the money. Well there are actually lots of other companies, transaction fees, cost and Interchange fees involves and Fraud Protection.
I understand the point is to increase Apple Pay usage, but how would I use this card with online websites which don't support Apple Pay?
What if we wanted a more general promise to not sell our data at all? Or to not use it for anything at all except for processing transactions? The loophole is so big one could drive a truck through it
3% on Apple products is great. However, I only buy a new product once every half, minus Apple TV subscription.
The 2% cashback is only on purchases made through Apple Pay. I already carry the Citi Double Cash card, which does this.
"Apple also says that it’ll use machine learning and Apple Maps to label stores that you use in the app, and use that data to track purchases across categories like “food and drink” or “shopping.”"
"Like many of Apple’s products, privacy is a big push here. “Apple doesn’t know what you bought, where you bought it, and how much you paid for it,” said Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay. All of the spending tracking and other information is stored directly on the device, not Apple’s servers. The company also promises that “Goldman Sachs will never sell your data to third parties for marketing and advertising.”"
It's obviously not a good idea to have a credit card from a company thay make up to 20% of their profits from advertising. But somehow because they called it X-pay instead of X-credit card, everyone ignored comon sense. /shrug
Apple Maps 'significant locations' feature and similar are also on-device only - Apple does not know where your home or work is – your phone does, but that data never leaves it.
MasterCard obviously knows what you purchase and where, as they are the ones processing the transaction, but that data transits Apple's servers in encrypted form, which Apple is unable to read by design, I expect.
Apple doesn’t know what you purchased, Goldman Sachs is not allowed to sell the data.
1. Apple doesn’t get any information (it’s all done on-device) 2. The data GS gets (and probably needs to keep, for auditing/paper trail) they “will never sell.” This probably means they have some kind of special agreement?
Not sure what MasterCard would get though.
This is a much more compelling sales pitch than "forget about these suspicious practices, everyone does that, but hey isn't this convenient!" which is so common now with the others.
The thing is, it requires the capturing of all of the information Apple claims to not be gathering and then some....in fact, depending on the device you are using it on some of the data capture for 3DS can be downright creepy.
Are they? I had to look this up to see that it's referring to the "Verified by Visa" and "MasterCard SecureCode" products. I had to sign up years ago (2007 for Visa, 2011 for Mastecard) for each of these for some online purchase, but can probably count on a single hand the number of times I've used them, and I think at this point it's been years since I've used either.
I don't believe Apple itself would be the party pulling your credit history though. They've partnered with Goldman Sachs as the issuing bank, so it would probably be Goldman that runs your credit.
Yes we will give you a card... your credit limit is $0.
But surely many intermediaries do know this information and store it forever?
I'm not sure I see the value of Apple not knowing this information, when credit cards are inherently one of the most trackable and most-tracked purchasing mechanisms ever.
The value to them is the ability to consistently use "we care about your privacy" as a marketing tagline on new product launches.
I’d wager this is much better than what the majority of Americans currently have.
Not to mention cards like the Chase Freedom Unlimited where 1.5% is closer to 3% when redeemed through their travel portal.
The downside is that their physical card rate (1%) is not as competitive, but they're trying to nudge people/businesses towards digital payments.
Depending on your spending habits, you are probably better off having 1 general purpose card, and then a card or two from the businesses you spend the most money at (target, amazon, walmart, costco etc) or one that fits your spending profile.
The Apple Card might make a good general spending card, but you should still have one that gets you 4-5% somewhere.
That's simply not possible, is it? In terms of an all purpose spending card?
I see this as a 1% card with special "categories" that I don't care to keep track of. The world is littered with those. Double Cash is OK, but has international transaction fees last time I checked.
Denmark has a services that will ensure that your bills are paid automatically, on time, from a bank account you choose. I just never heard that the US having anything similar.
I would assume that you can't pay of you bill with another credit card, seeing as that would be illegal, at least in some countries.
No fees. No penalties. Baked into iOS via the wallet and cash back available daily? Count me in!
Lounge access? Hotel discounts?
No reason for me to switch from my AMEX or Costco card for puny Apple points.
Unless I missed something.
For me personally, getting ~2% cash back on every purchase would be better than a moderate discount when I actually need to stay at a hotel.
Just depends on your situation.
I'm not sure. But somewhere along the way, I lost my lunch.
then...
"The company also notes that “late or missed payments will result in additional interest accumulating toward the customer’s balance."
Reality distortion field is still going strong I see.
Trump - "And all these people lined up to pay me to put my name on their products".
Tim Cook - Silently taking notes
Trump - So, I was telling you about ... Tim, Tim Apple?
Tim Cook - Will be back later, on a call with Goldman + Mastercard.
...we bring you: utter lack of privacy!
PenFed you have to be active duty military to qualify for 2%... Fidelity you have to put your 2% (not going to call it "cash") into a Fidelity product, no balance credits.
Apple requires you to use Apply Pay to earn 2%, so it comes with it's own caveats.
Until apple pay is much more widely accepted that's a caveat for them. Probably stick around with Capital One 1.5% for now.
- Chase Freedom / Discover It (Quarterly 5% categories (examples: Wholesale, Gas, Grocery, Department Stores, Mobile Pay, Home Improvement, etc.))
- Uber Visa (4% Dining, 3% Travel, 2% Online Purchases, 1% everything else)
- American Express Blue Cash Everyday (3% Grocery, 2% Gas/Department Stores, 1% everything else)
- Citi Doublecash (2% everything)
- Costco Visa (4% Gas, 3% Travel/Dining, 2% Costco, 1% everything else)
- Amazon Prime Visa (5% Amazon, 2% Dining, Grocery, Pharmacy, 1% everything else)
These are just the cards I use right now. There are no annual fees, although some require membership like Costco and Amazon. Pay your balance in full every month and it's a much better option than debit. There's a bunch of different ways to maximize rewards. See /r/churning [1] for more info.
- Chase Freedom / Discover It (Quarterly 5% categories (examples: Wholesale, Gas, Grocery, Department Stores, Mobile Pay, Home Improvement, etc.))
- Uber Visa (4% Dining, 3% Travel, 2% Online Purchases, 1% everything else)
- American Express Blue Cash Everyday (3% Grocery, 2% Gas/Department Stores, 1% everything else)
- Citi Doublecash (2% everything)
- Costco Visa (4% Gas, 3% Travel/Dining, 2% Costco, 1% everything else)
- Amazon Prime Visa (5% Amazon, 2% Dining, Grocery, Pharmacy, 1% everything else)
These are just the cards I use right now. There are no annual fees, although some require membership like Costco and Amazon. Pay your balance in full every month and it's a much better option than debit. There's a bunch of different ways to maximize rewards. See /r/churning [1] for more info.