Apple Card is now available to all US iPhone owners, adds new cash-back rewards - Ars Technica

• The Apple Card is first and foremost a virtual card—meaning you make contactless or online payments using your phone or other supported Apple device.

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• There's also a featureless, very Apple-like physical card that you can order.

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• A dashboard built into iOS on iPhones lets you manage your card.

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• Apple will optionally send you notifications to remind you when payments are due.

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• Apple is making an effort to make transactions in your transaction history appear by their real names, with other helpful data, instead of illegible codes or the like.

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• As is the case with almost every first-party credit card app, you can track purchases by category.

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• The card graphic in the dashboard is color-coded based on how you spend your money. Each purchase category has a corresponding color.

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• The dashboard includes a view for estimating how you can pay off what you owe with or without interest.

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• There's also a way to see how much "daily cash" (that's the cash-back rewards program) you're earning, and how.

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Applications to Apple's new digital credit card, dubbed simply Apple Card, are now available to all iPhone users in the United States. This follows a short period when Apple offered early access to a select number of customers who signed up and an employees-only test before that.

Apple Card is a MasterCard backed by Goldman Sachs, and it is primarily managed and used inside the Wallet app on iPhones running iOS 12.4 or later. Users can track their spending categories, pay off the card, order a physical card, and more from within the app.

Apple aimed to address a few common complaints about credit cards with this product—for example, credit card transaction histories are often cryptic, and it's sometimes difficult to determine which vendor a charge was made at if the abbreviated name behind the charge doesn't match the vendor's public-facing name; Apple Card's transaction history shows full names of vendors, along with splash images matching the spending category when possible.

Additionally, Apple Card offers 3% cash back on purchases made in Apple's storefronts or services like the App Store or Apple Music, 2% cash back on all other purchases made using Apple's Apple Pay digital payment system, and 1% cash back on purchases made using the titanium physical card Apple ships to digital cardholders on request.

Other key selling points for Apple's target customers are transparency about transactions and fees, tools to make it easy to pay off the balance, and various privacy and security protections uncommon in many other cards. Users also have access to customer support via the iPhone's Messages app and to transaction locations in Apple Maps.

While commentators in the press commonly speculated that it would be a somewhat exclusive card due to its ties to Goldman Sachs, a bank that does not tend to serve the lower end of the market, users in the early access periods found that the majority of people could apply for the card and be accepted, though credit limits range from a couple hundred dollars to many thousands, depending on the applicant's income and other factors.

Users can apply for the card in the Wallet app starting today if they have iOS 12.4 or later installed.

In addition to launching the card to all iPhone users, Apple announced new cashback vendors. Apple Card will offer 3% back on purchases from Uber or Uber Eats now, in addition to purchases from Apple itself. "Apple Card will continue to add more popular merchants and apps in the coming months," Apple's blog post promises.

Listing image by Apple

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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/apple-card-is-now-available-to-all-us-iphone-owners-adds-new-cash-back-rewards/

2019-08-20 17:20:00Z
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