I used to be a customer of Simple, which sends out white credit cards -- plastic, yes, but still white. And in a leather wallet, every one looked like crap in weeks. In my current Tom Bihn, non-leather wallet, they... didn't get any worse. But the reality is that white cards get crappy easily. (In fact, the reality is probably that all cards get crappy easily, but most cards don't show it as easily.)

The form of the physical Apple Card is: the form of a credit card. I would argue that it absolutely shouldn't have been a white credit card, given my experience with Simple, but, welp. I'm not sure I'm going to be carrying the damn thing anyway, less out of concern over its pristine Ive White Room-ness than because it only gets me more cash back than my Discover Card does when I pay with it electronically.

If Apple didn't publish this silly-seeming "how to take care of your Apple Card" document, then in a month, pundits would be screaming about how the Apple Card already showed signs of wear and tear, photos of cards showing unremovable leather stains or blue streaks from denim or whatever, and we'd be subject to endless bloviating about how terrible this was or was not. For better or worse, they've opted to front-load the bloviation.