Later this fall, Apple Pay Later will let customers in the United States pay for online and in-app purchases through a six-week installment plan with no interest or fees.
Previewed at WWDC, Apple Pay Later will let customers split a purchase into four equal payments paid over the course of six weeks. Apple Pay Later will include zero interest and no fees and will be available "everywhere Apple Pay is accepted," according to Apple.
Inside the Wallet app, users will see a new overview of all of their upcoming payments and how much they owe and can set a personal budget. Apple says that Apple Pay Later will only be available to qualifying applicants, but no further details have been shared.
I find the 3 x fortnightly payment thing a bit strange. The use case for this would normally be to spread the cost across salary payments which, in the UK, normally happen monthly. I appreciate this is US only, so perhaps the payment frequency is different in the US?
US workers generally get paid fortnightly, and this is a US-only feature for now. Here in the UK it is common to have a credit card where, if you pay back your debt monthly with direct debit, you end up having ~1.5 month interest-free (I have that with my Amex). PS autocorrect wrote that US workers get laid fortnightly, does Apple know something I don’t?
Well that would be the fiscally responsible thing to do... but so many people lack the discipline to do that.
(those with such discipline, as well as not spending everything they make, typically don't use buy-now-pay-later financing...)
Paying cash when you can get an interest-free loan is not smart, financially speaking.
I can afford to buy anything that Apple currently sells in online store, but given the choice between paying all upfront, or paying over time, I would choose paying over time, every time, and I do.
Now, if there was a discount for cash, that would be a totally different story.
For more info about Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), CNBC ('https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/13/buy-now-pay-later-is-not-a-boom-its-a-bubble-harvard-fellow-says-.html') has some good articles. Search for "BNPL"- this is still a new 'product' in the US, "without much regulatory oversight, the BNPL market currently exists in “a legal gray space,” according to Lux."
The merchants / stores are able to ring up higher purchase totals; the banks loaning out the money are making their money through late fees, etc.
Good point...I was thinking about the money they make if the customer pays on time...the banks stand to make even more money on late fees, etc if the customer pays late. They only lose in a complete default which is probably relatively rare given the short terms and relatively low amounts of the funding.
Bleagh, now that it's clear what this product really is, it feels pretty unsavory for Apple to be getting involved with it.
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...
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Here in the UK it is common to have a credit card where, if you pay back your debt monthly with direct debit, you end up having ~1.5 month interest-free (I have that with my Amex).
PS autocorrect wrote that US workers get laid fortnightly, does Apple know something I don’t?
I can afford to buy anything that Apple currently sells in online store, but given the choice between paying all upfront, or paying over time, I would choose paying over time, every time, and I do.
Now, if there was a discount for cash, that would be a totally different story.
Bleagh, now that it's clear what this product really is, it feels pretty unsavory for Apple to be getting involved with it.