The Apple Credit Card Is Here, but Is It Any Good?

Irrationally loyal Apple fans and credit card points obsessives, rejoice: Cupertino's first ever credit card has (sort of) landed. The Apple credit card, announced in March, was finally rolled out this week to a select number of iPhone users (including yours truly). During the announcement event, Apple promised the card would be simple to use and apply for, include no fees, offer low interest rates, and come with better rewards than comparable cards. Apple says the card will be available to everyone later this month.

Let's start with that promised easy application process. To apply, as long as your software is up to date, you just go into the Wallet app of your phone and hit the plus button in the top corner. After hitting “Apple Card,” you’ll enter in all your information, much of it is auto-generated from your Apple account, and submit your application to Goldman Sachs (who are issuing the card). My application was approved in under a minute and the card was immediately added to my Apple wallet.

The physical card, which runs on Mastercard’s network, arrived in the mail a few days later. It’s a weighty titanium number with minimal detailing—basically just the Apple logo and my name in San Francisco font on the front. There’s no CVV number and no signature required. To activate it, you bring your phone next to it, just like you would connect AirPods or the PowerBeats Pro. I suppose this it meant to make me feel like what I assume other people feel when they put in AirPods, which is to say better than anyone who isn’t using an Apple product.

But Apple doesn’t want you to use this physical card. It wants you to use the card with Apple Pay. And if you use Apple pay with the card at any participating merchant, you’ll get 2 percent cash back. You get 3 percent on purchases made directly with Apple (like in an Apple store or iTunes). But only 1 percent if you use the physical card. Apple wouldn’t tell us how many iPhone users actually use Apple Pay currently, (they pointed us to a venture capital firm that estimates 43 percent of iPhone users had enabled Apple Pay by the end of last year). But Apple did confirm that “more than 70 percent of merchants accept Apple Pay in the US.”

These kickbacks are, as some have pointed out, not all that impressive. The card doesn’t offer any sign-up bonuses or truly game-changing rewards (unless you’re the kind of person who spends a considerable amount of money on games in the App Store). Considering that we have no idea whether people will actually benefit from the card’s budgeting features and nudges to get you to pay off more of your balance, the Apple Card is basically the Citi Double Cash card with a lot more restrictions.

What you get for these limitations is simplicity and speed. Rather than to go into an app and run through a whole slew of menus to access your rewards, Apple deposits any cash back you earn into your Apple cash automatically at the end of each day. You can use that money to pay off your balance, send it to a friend with Apple Pay, or just deposit into your bank.

This is actually valuable as credit card companies are making it harder and harder to discern microscopic differences between an infinite number cards with inscrutable names. The Apple Card caters to a wide audience by offering something that is certainly not the best card in every situation, but is a lot better than most cards in many situations. For people that already have one card specifically for dining or travel or business or groceries and don’t really want to get another card with rewards limitations or things to keep track of, the Apple Card could be their catch all, no-brainer solution for all their other spending. So in that sense the Apple Card’s lack of ambition is actually…a little ambitious.

Originally Appeared on GQ