Apple and investment bank Goldman Sachs plan to launch a joint credit card later this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The report claims the card will be rolled out to Apple employees for internal testing in the next few weeks and officially launch later this year. The card would be accessible through the Wallet app on iPhone, potentially with unique features for setting spending goals, tracking rewards, and managing balances.
Executives have discussed borrowing visual cues from Apple's fitness-tracking app, where "rings" close as users hit daily exercise targets, and sending users notifications about their spending habits. There also could be notifications based on analysis of cardholders' spending patterns, alerting them for example if they paid more than usual for groceries one week.
The card will be issued by Goldman Sachs and use Mastercard's payment network, according to the report. The card is said to offer around two percent cashback on most purchases and potentially more on Apple products and services.
I have to wonder whether by 'spending goals' they mean 'spend at least £X,000 per month in credit' (preferably on Apple products and services) gotta close those rings o_O
All of this makes sense in the big picture if you recall the past to see where Apple is going in the future. Apple has a history of disrupting boring and/or broken markets that deliver services that people need but that they use only reluctantly because there are no alternatives.
Apple made the computer accessible and fun. It’s easy to forget but computers were for crunching numbers, mostly the realm of nerds who knew how to operate the command line. The Mac changed everything.
Apple disrupted music in the same way. The iPod came at a time when piracy was rampant. It was a terrible experience though. You’d download programs like Napster or Limewire and download music, not knowing if you’d get a bad recording and would end up with a junk pile of disorganized mislabelled music in folders. iPod + iTunes made it easy to pay a fair price for music and get a properly organized collection. That’s why it became so popular that nobody ever really caught up.
Apple is now pursuing two other sectors that absolutely need to be disrupted. Health and financial services. Both are full of bureaucracy and not consumer friendly. The only ones who do well in either are insiders or experts in those fields.
Apple is on one hand opening up health records to make our data our data, easily accessible and making it useful by helping us to be proactive and knowledgeable to improve our own health.
Now, on the other hand, most of us hate having to deal with banks, hidden fees and overly complicated services. Apple Pay has already made it easier and safer on the transaction side. Money management and growth is the next obvious step. I’m very interested to see what Apple does here.
Ah yes, you have to close rings by spending more money. Plus they can give you notifications - "Looks like you haven't spent enough money today, tap here to buy an iPad mini to hit your spending goal!"
Goldman Sach's has terrible optics - at least in the U.S. (they were actively playing both sides of the field knowingly helping to drive the U.S. housing market over the cliff and betting to profit off the crash, 5crew the country, that caused the financial crisis back in 2008 or so). When it comes to taking care of the customer or not doing something illegal - history has shown they actively choose the 3rd option which is do what makes the most money if they think they can get away with it (if that includes actively misguiding customers so be it).
Having Apple team with them is very disappointing - its almost like having Apple partner with the mob on a credit card - especially since Goldman is not a normal bank and doesn't normally do credit cards (that I know of). There must be something special in it for Goldman, for them to be doing this....I'd much rather have Apple stick with Barclay.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
/walks away slowly shaking head in disappointment:(:oops:
Goldman Sachs is a literal hot garbage organization.
Apple made the computer accessible and fun. It’s easy to forget but computers were for crunching numbers, mostly the realm of nerds who knew how to operate the command line. The Mac changed everything.
Apple disrupted music in the same way. The iPod came at a time when piracy was rampant. It was a terrible experience though. You’d download programs like Napster or Limewire and download music, not knowing if you’d get a bad recording and would end up with a junk pile of disorganized mislabelled music in folders. iPod + iTunes made it easy to pay a fair price for music and get a properly organized collection. That’s why it became so popular that nobody ever really caught up.
Apple is now pursuing two other sectors that absolutely need to be disrupted. Health and financial services. Both are full of bureaucracy and not consumer friendly. The only ones who do well in either are insiders or experts in those fields.
Apple is on one hand opening up health records to make our data our data, easily accessible and making it useful by helping us to be proactive and knowledgeable to improve our own health.
Now, on the other hand, most of us hate having to deal with banks, hidden fees and overly complicated services. Apple Pay has already made it easier and safer on the transaction side. Money management and growth is the next obvious step. I’m very interested to see what Apple does here.
http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-doj-settlement/
Having Apple team with them is very disappointing - its almost like having Apple partner with the mob on a credit card - especially since Goldman is not a normal bank and doesn't normally do credit cards (that I know of). There must be something special in it for Goldman, for them to be doing this....I'd much rather have Apple stick with Barclay.