Apple rolls out new apple credit card preview to select users issued in partnership with Goldman Sachs.
Apple says a random selection of people who signed up to be notified about the Apple Card will be invited to sign up today, although the company won’t disclose exactly how many people will be in the preview group.
The signup process, which requires iOS 12.4, involves entering your address, birthday, income level, and last four digits of your Social Security number.
That information is sent to Goldman Sachs, which will approve or decline your application in real time Apple says it should take less than a minute.
Apple says the Apple Card is not meant to directly compete with premium cards like the Chase Sapphire or American Express Platinum cards the goal is to be broadly accessible to every iPhone owner, so the signup requirements will not be as strict as those cards.
The card itself doesn’t have a expiration date or security code, and it doesn’t have a number printed on it, but you can lock the card if you misplace it or deactivate it entirely from the Wallet app with a single tap.
The Apple Card interface in the Wallet app is extremely nice: it provides detailed information about all your purchases, using machine learning to clean up merchant names and categorize your spending over time.
You can set payment schedules in a variety of ways, play with a circular slider to see exactly how much interest you’ll be charged, and see how much you’re spending weekly and monthly.
And just like any other credit card, while it’s easy to sign up for an Apple Card and easy to spend money with it, it’s not necessarily easy to get rid of it: canceling an Apple Card requires messaging or calling Goldman Sachs.
But the end of the day, Apple can’t issue a credit card without a bank, and Goldman Sachs is that bank. We’ll just have to see how the experience of the Apple Card matches up with the high expectations of Apple customers.