The Design of Apple's Credit Card
arun.is
arun.is
How ununiquely lame is it to do that. Apple is to the design world what the diamond industry was to humanity, people believe its special not because their is any objective or creative merit to it, but simply because they've been told its special.
If it wasn't made Apple, we would not even hear it on HN for sure.
You have a credit card with no ink on it, just laser engraving?
You have a credit card that is made of metal? Not with a metal core and layers of plastic on top of that, as several of the cards in my wallet are, but completely made of metal?
Which card is this?
I mean, it's a piece of titanium with no outwards markings except for the Apple logo, cardholder's name, and chip, which is uncommon if not unique. But I wouldn't really write a whole article about it, especially since there's nothing new in it other than what we can see in the introduction video.
I don't think this is quite what concentric means.
The simplicity seems obvious in retrospect, but I am sure a lot of work goes into it esp. from manufacturing perspective. The resulting card looks like something that would come out of a 3 year old replication of a credit card using the simplest shapes, yet comes off as supremely sophisticated possession.
Then General Electric made a few things, and financed all of them.
Is the Apple credit card an indicator of Apple shifting from innovation to financialisation?
It worked out for General Electric, until it didn’t.
And the back? It's a mess, and important info is being rubbed off every time I remove it from my wallet.
And the card itself, the blue-colored surface plastic is separating from the metal core at one corner, so what seemed like a nice satisfying metal card now seems cheap and disposable.
These are silly things to care about if you don't, but the fact that people do is why we have nice things.
[0] https://millionmilesecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Sa... is an example of the back of the card I'm talking about, though it is not my card.
Then there is the laser process in the logos which uses two passes to make a V shaped bottom on the stroke so produce glints of specular reflection. This may not be totally new, but I’ve never seen one before.
That’s a lot of attention to detail.
Let’s contrast to American Express. My last three physical plastic cards have had their mag strips wear off, the signature strip one one couldn’t actually be written on with any pen I tried, the CVV rubs off so you can’t read it (hint: you need this to request a new card, so memorize it before it is gone) and one of them delaminated. Just bog standard plastic cards that have been evolving for half a century and I’m lucky to get 2 years service out of it.
I don’t have an Apple card yet. Maybe we’ll be reading about cardgate in 6 months and people moaning that they want their 2015 Barclays backed card back.