The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Apple Credit card
You’ve heard the story a thousand times. Amateur computer gurus Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak create the first home computer in their garage, instantly catapult themselves to international fame and usher in an entirely new technological age. Years later, Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone and finds himself transformed into a perpetually turtleneck-ed technological deity, before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dying a tragically early death in 2011. That is the Apple we know and love. A company dedicated to making the user experience as seamless and intuitive as possible, pushing the envelope as far as possible and embracing their homegrown image.
Not a company that tries to sell you a credit card.
That’s right folks, as of this week in the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen, Apple has announced plans to create a physical credit card. At its core, the credit card idea feels like nothing more than a stepping stone in Apple’s quest to be an ubiquitous part of everything we do during the course of a day. Even more strange, Apple already offers a virtual wallet and Apple Pay, two extremely popular money based services. It seems that they simply couldn’t resist the temptation to slap an Apple logo on a credit card and reap the profits anymore.
The problem adds an even more philosophically conflicting layer to our already strained relationship with our devices. 20 years ago, homes had maybe one computer. Now, every member of a household has an iPhone in their pocket, MacBook at their desk, Apple TV in their living room and an Apple Watch for everywhere else. A company whose products once only helped us write papers and check our email is now attempting to be at the core of every purchase we make. Even worse, the card is being created in conjunction with Goldman Sachs—GOLDMAN SACHS! Though Steve Jobs was by all means a consummate capitalist, it still hard to picture him giving the green light to a collaboration with a company that profited off the 2008 housing crisis.
On top of the fact that an Apple credit card is just plain weird, it also exemplifies the sad reality that tech products have become nothing more than status symbols . Instead of pushing the technological envelope, Apple has become a designer brand doling out the same – slightly thinner and larger- rehashes of the same devices we’ve seen for the last ten years. New phones promise only slightly better processing speed and cameras, but retail for the price of what a MacBook used to cost. Apple cuts the headphone jack out of the iPhone in a quest for aesthetic uniformity, only to sell wireless versions of their headphones (headphones that used to be free) for $300. With this in mind, I guess only a natural progression that Apple would try to sell us a glorified piece of plastic with their logo on it.
Under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple has become a shell of its former self. At this point though, we’re all too far into the ecosystem to retreat. After all, you’re probably reading this on an iPad.
