If You Lose Your iPhone, You Can’t Pay Your Apple Card Bill on the Web

You can't borrow a friend's phone? Or buy a cheap burner at Wal-Mart and pop your SIM card in?

And you can't at least call the general support number(s) Apple surely posts online?

Usually your name, another credit card or debit card number (and sometimes its expiration date and CVC number unique to that card). Pretty similar to what you'd put in a web form, or manually enter into a card reader machine if the card's magnetic stripe or chip isn't being read properly.

That is true however how do we think it works if you loose your credit card ? You would call and cancel. This would be the case most of the time as none is going to trust website to cancel the card. You would need a human intersection here.

IMO you are less likely to loose your phone then credit card. We think of actual physical credit card only when we need to pay with it. 99% of the time it is just sitting in the wallet being all useless. Phone is something we are using every 5 min or more so chances are less that one would loose phone like that. Now if you do loose it, and hopefully it is locked then no one can use your card. However one can just cancel the card by calling it from borrowed phone or something like that.

> What if someone loses their phone before Apple “fixes” this?

As the article notes, they'll have the option to call in and pay over the phone like many other banks allow. It's not ideal, but it's not the end of the world.

Actually if I loose my phone, then high probability that I am outside and I am not waiting on going to a website to cancel my card. I would absolutely call them by borrowing someone's phone. How would you do this if you are outside and need to cancel your credit card ? Would you try to go online login to bank website and look for the option to cancel the card or call them ? It is a low priority feature. You will want a human interaction here.

At some point someone needed to add a layer of security and like so often picked something that they assumed someone would know.

I don't have a magic solution but all this using random factoids about us as identity verification seems to be a big hassle.