Why the Apple Card is the gleaming future of money
WILL YOU SIGN up for the Apple Card? You probably will, frankly. Apple’s latest innovation, which arrives this summer, is a credit card that comes with all kinds of conveniences: No late fees! No long strings of numbers! No wait to qualify! No card, either, if you’re using it the way Apple intends. This is the money of the future—instant, invisible, and a little bit innovative—and it’s all nested beneath the beautiful glass screen of your iPhone.
Apple has a way of turning our everyday activities into little moments of art. The iPod changed the way we listen to music. The App Store and the multitudes it contained gave us dates on demand, personal chauffeurs, and endless photo streams of our friends’ lives. It hopes to reinvent the magazine business. And change the way you stream TV and movies. Now, it’s gunning for the last piece of our lives that Silicon Valley hasn’t quite commandeered: your wallet.
But the Apple Card is only the latest example of how our spending is changing. Money and technology have been holding hands on the park bench for years, just itching to get closer. Venmo and Square Cash popularized the act of paying our friends with our phones; Apple Pay and Android Pay paved the way for paying with your phone in a store. Amazon dematerialized the shopping mall (and its checkout lines). Apple isn’t even the first tech company to slap its logo onto a credit card: Uber makes one; so does Amazon.
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