Apple Card Review One Year Later

Alright, we've almost reached exactly one year since I first got my Apple card, and man, I should probably start paying this thing off. No, I'm kidding. I don't carry a balance at all. And thanks to the Wallet app, it makes it very, very easy to know exactly how much you owe, when you need to pay it by, and how to avoid interest payments. Which I have to say, from prior experience with using other credit cards out there, there has not been another card this simple to set up, use, and understand how it works. Which is why it's so uniquely Apple, you know, makes a whole lot of sense in my opinion. Let's talk about one year of use. There have actually been quite a few features and changes with the Apple card within the first year. I mean, 3% cash back used to be basically just with Apple, when they first launched it. And now, we're getting 3% back if you buy gas from Exxon or Mobile. You're getting 3% back at Nike with Uber Eats, as well as T-Mobile, you know, regular Uber, and Walgreens, which is great because I've picked up a few of my prescriptions from there. So, I get 3% back on my overpriced American medication. The other big change that I've talked about in previous videos is, of course, we can now finance lots of different Apple products, pretty much anything except the Apple Watch for some reason. But between AirPods, HomePods, Macs, the Pro Display XDR, and even the Mac Pro, you can stretch out payments with 0% interest, just like you have with the iPhone installment program. So, over the span of 24 months, you can pay off an unlocked iPhone. No interest involved at all, so Apple's basically just saying, like, you know what, you can owe us on that one, considering this is a free credit card, doesn't cost anything to sign up. And when it comes to free credit cards, I know some people were saying that the rewards aren't that great compared to others, but I have to say, with all of the different services supporting 3% back now, the fact that you get 2% back with Apple Pay, and it's daily cash, it's not a reward system, which my wife is still using, you know, traditional credit cards, and the fact that she has to wait until she hits a certain amount of reward in order to redeem them, and I don't, is pretty sweet. I love the fact that there's no point system in place, and it's just, hey, you want some money? Have some money back, okay? Thanks for using our card. Thankfully, all of the grocery stores and places we shop at typically support Apple Pay anyway, so most of the time, I'm getting 2% cash back. And before you think I'm just the apple sheep here praising why everyone should get in debt with this thing, I do have a few complaints, okay? I do have a few criticisms of the Apple Card after one year, that I'm still surprised have not changed. Okay, for one, it's very, very hard to load it into third-party finance apps. Yeah, I know that Apple gives you some data on, here's what you're spending, here's some goals or whatever, but it's definitely not as in-depth as Mint, which is not the mobile carrier, but a finance tracking app me and my wife like to use. Not a sponsor or anything like that, it's just personally what we use, and it's very, very hard to plug in your Apple Card data into that app. Now, most recently, within just a couple months, it almost took a whole year for them to do this. They have finally let you now pay off your Apple Card via a web page. So before this, the only way to pay off the Apple Card was through the wallet app on your phone or to call a certain number, which I've seen so many people say, yeah, you just call them and tell them to pay it off, but I still don't know what the number is. Thankfully, I have an iPhone, so I don't need to know what that number is, but it's crazy to me that they've had this credit card for nearly a year and still don't really have a web portal of some kind to pay it off if you'd like to. And they just now added that, but it's still somewhat limiting, so because of this new web portal that lets you pay off the card online, you can now plug in that data to the Mint Finance app, and you can track what your actual balance is of the card, but it will not give you the individual transactions. So it's kind of compatible with Mint, but not really, because again, it's not giving you the individual transactions, which is kind of helpful for Mint, because then it can show you what you're spending or what you're spending too much on, what you need to work more towards, so it's almost completely compatible with those third-party trackers, but still not quite. And the other complaint I have with the Apple Card is the lack of reporting to credit bureaus. So this is obviously what credit unions have to look at to increase your score, so if you're young and you want to increase your credit score so you can get lower interest rates on loans or a mortgage and that kind of thing, the Apple Card was taking its oh-so-precious time not reporting to most of them. In fact, for the first six months that the Apple Card was out, it basically didn't report to anyone. It wasn't until December of last year that they started reporting to TransUnion, but that was it. And it wasn't until around this month that we're finally seeing reports that they're reporting to Experian as well, but still no sign of them reporting to Equifax. And it's crazy to me that after a year of use, still a lot of places where I check my credit score, the companies are like, eh, you don't have a credit card, you're not using one, aren't you? It's like, I've been using it every month since I got this thing, and they're still like, eh, yeah, I don't see it, it doesn't exist. Thankfully, they are finally catching up on it, but it took them way too long to report to this many credit bureaus, and I hope they can be reporting to all three by the end of this year. Let's hope. What's also been nice with the Apple Card this year is, of course, due to the pandemic, a lot of people are in financial trouble or kind of been in a bit of an economy crisis, so Apple Card has been letting people defer payments interest-free for many, many months now. Luckily, I've been fortunate enough to not have to worry about that, so I just keep paying it off anyway. But if you were in a tight spot and you needed to buy some things for your family or loved ones of any kind, but you weren't able to pay off the Apple Card, Apple is not holding interest against you for the past, I think, four months now? They've been letting people defer payments. It might even be going longer, actually. And I know, Apple's a billion-dollar company, so it's not really much concern to them, and I think Goldman Sachs is kind of the one suffering from it anyway. But it's just been kind of nice that Apple's been comfortable with people carrying a balance and not penalizing them for it, given the situation we're in right now. So I get that. I love the iMessage integration as well, when I wanted to increase my credit limit for the month. All it took was a text, which I found interesting. I had to get connected to a Goldman Sachs expert or whatever, you know, a genius bar as specialty or something like that. But I basically texted them and said, hey, I've been using this card for a while, can you increase my credit limit? And they were like, uh, sure, okay, just wait a couple of days. And I waited a couple days, and boom, I woke up with, you know, $1,500 extra of credit limit if I want to use it. Not that I needed it. I was just curious if I wanted to add some more stuff to the card as Apple products look to be getting more and more expensive. Yeah, I was just like, why not? Let's just go for it. I haven't had any fraudulent charges, luckily, but it is nice to know that you can very, very easily mark those as fraudulent via iMessage text or just from within the Wallet app. You can tap and say, hey, that wasn't me. Don't charge that. It's very easy to change the physical numbers within the card. You can just tap one button and change everything. It's all protected by Face ID, and one of the reasons I love the Apple card is it's all integrated through an Apple ID, which I have to use with my iPhone anyway, so it means I don't have to worry about another third-party banking app. I don't have to worry about another email, another email that banks are going to use to send me crap all the time and fill up my inbox. With this, I don't have to worry about it because it's just through Apple, which I'm using anyway. Also, I get 3% back on all of the services I bill through Apple, so iCloud Storage, Apple Music, as well as Over, which I subscribe to annually. I get 3% back on all those now. Didn't get to do that last year, which is kind of cool. However, I do wish within the transactions part of the app, it would just give you the date instead of telling you, you know, like Monday or Wednesday because when we're trying to fill in data on our spreadsheets, it's much easier to know what the physical day was instead of just, oh, that was Monday, so it's a nitpicky thing, but just a setting would be nice if I could change that. And when it comes to the physical aging of the card, it has been chipping on me. I haven't been getting that much like staining or oil smears like other people have been getting online, but maybe just from the wallet I've been using where it kind of slides in in a very compact manner, that just kind of scrapes off the little white paint of the titanium a little bit. It's a little distracting, but honestly, I'm using the Apple card digitally most of the time anyway, so I almost never see this part. Luckily, I could request a brand new one for free. If I wanted to, they would send me a brand new fresh titanium card that of course makes that beautiful every time. But honestly, it's just not worth the trouble for me because like I said, I barely use the physical card in the first place. So if you care about credit cards because of their aesthetics and you're bothered by after a year of use, the aging not looking that great, I mean again, you can just get a free one replaced if you'd like. Or maybe the card isn't for you, if that bothers you enough, I don't know. But overall, this is probably my favorite new Apple service because it's the one that cost me nothing and I get free money out of it. A daily cash, typically around 10 to 30 bucks a month just from me spending how I normally spend. We put most of our bills on here, we put most of our food budget on here, we put most obviously Apple products I purchase throughout the year on here. So I'm getting a bunch of money back that I'm not used to getting in prior years. And I think when it comes to free credit cards, the ones that don't cost you anything to use, this is a pretty nice one. This is as simple and integrated and easy as it gets. And while the rewards might not be amazing, the risk is not that amazing, you know? I handed it to someone at a restaurant once and they asked me, hey, is that Apple card thing worth it? And I was like, I mean, worth it, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything. I mean, if you buy stuff with Apple products, I guess why not? The only thing you have to worry about is, I guess, your credit score if you decide to switch away from iPhones someday. I suppose if you do switch to Android, you still can pay off the Apple card via a web portal now. So it'd be kind of weird, but you can still do it. If you spend a lot of money on Apple services or Apple products or any of the things I mentioned that get 3% back, if you like using Apple Pay, you get 2% back with that. Sure, it's worth it, yeah. It doesn't cost you anything. So it's not like Apple Music or iCloud or those kind of things that charge you once a month. This thing makes me money once a month. As long as you stay on top of it, people, okay? Don't be holding a balance for months and months and months. Because the interest rates on these things are pretty bad. But in my opinion, if you're using a credit card properly, you don't care about the interest rates because you're just paying it off at the end of the month anyway. Oh, and before I conclude this review, let me remind you that if you return an item that you purchased with the Apple card, this was a very common question I've got over the year, Yes, you still get daily cash back with that item, but once the item is returned and that balance is removed from the card, they apply the daily cash back adjustment. So you just get this little charge that says, this is what we gave you in cash back, so we're applying that now to your balance. So no, don't think that you can order a $20,000 Mac Pro, get the cash back, and then return the Mac Pro. Infinite money, right? Stonks! No, they thought of that, okay? I just wanted to set the record straight, it doesn't work like that. Anyway, if you have any further questions on the Apple card, feel free to hit me up over on Twitter, join my Discord, and we'll talk more about it there. This is Alpshape here, and I'll be in debt in the next one.