The Card Apple Would Rather You Not Use

(Last week's Broadcast was about a small genre of apps that thank you for leaving them. This week is about a different small genre, also hiding in plain sight: the physical card you did not actually need.)

Apple Support, the wing of the company that unironically calls themselves geniuses but actually just exists to tell you how much it will cost to replace your cracked iPhone screen, has a web page called How to clean your Apple Card.

Just so we’re clear: despite what the marketing people say, the Apple Card is a credit card.

And that page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a page describing, in persnickety detail, how to properly keep your precious credit card free from the grit and grime of daily purchases.

It tells you which household chemicals will discolor titanium, and which wallet slots will scratch the white multi-layer coating. It tells you how to dry it, for example, if it should fall into your toilet along with your purchasing power.

It is, by every measure I can find, a care and feeding page for a credit card.

…and it's for a credit card the company would prefer you not use very often.

Apple's own product copy is unambiguous about this: "The best way to use Apple Card is with Apple Pay," the app that sits on your iPhone that enables tap-to-purchase at the grocery store. And by "tap-to-purchase," I of course mean, "submit-to-usury-fees-as-Apple-collects-data-about-you."

This improves your life for some reason. Ahem.

Apple Pay is accepted at 85% of US merchants. If you use the app, you get a 2-3% bribe cash reward. Use the titanium card instead and you only "earn" 1% Daily Cash.

So to recap: Apple manufactured a laser-etched titanium object, shipped it in a package with a hidden NFC tag that pairs it to your digital wallet on touch, gave it a care and feeding regimen so you can keep this delicate object of commerce in an unspoiled, unfettered condition... and then they priced it as the inferior option.

This is, by any reasonable read of consumer incentive design, unhinged.

The Wall Street Journal called the launch "the credit card of the future," precisely because it was, per their headline, "no card at all."

Apple shipped the titanium one that same week.

So why does the titanium card exist?

Last week, Apple generously offered me 0% financing on a new MacBook. I had been eyeing a laptop because all of my new AI friends need a bigger house.

I did the whole transaction on my phone and I tapped through the Apple Card application in a moment of weakness we shall laughingly refer to as "fiscal responsibility." It was easy and frictionless and “just worked.”

“Too easy,” some might say.

The titanium artifact is, as I write this, somewhere in the postal system between Cupertino and my mailbox. Trucks and airplanes are burning fuel to get its pristine façade into my greedy, grubby fingers. I am told it will arrive in a package with a hidden NFC tag, weigh more than I expect, and have no number printed on it… just the most minimal of etching to make it “mine.”

I have set aside a soft pillow for His Maje$ty to rest upon his arrival so he can soon begin his thankless task of depleting my bank account while making me feel good about it.

I am looking forward to feeling the heft of all this debt, objectified in my hands.

I am Exhibit A, but there are at least three more.

Cash App's debit card is mailed to you in a plain envelope and activated in the app you already have on your phone. Cash App is also effusive when it tells you that you can choose from exclusive card styles and add stamps and emojis, even draw on it. 😘💸👋🏼, indeed. The app-first product still ships an artifact, and the artifact's whole pitch is what other people see when it leaves your wallet... and, spoiler alert, it's not the interest payments.

Robinhood's Gold Card is stainless steel, sold alongside virtual cards and disposable card numbers for private spending. The most active members can earn an actual 36-gram solid 10-karat-gold card through a referral program. Like the digital finance version of the Mary Kay Pink Cadillac.

The virtual card is for the transaction. The metal is for the gesture. The gold is just for the End Times.

Coinbase approves you for a virtual card immediately, and then mails the physical version anyway, because, per the help page, you still need to spend "anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted." The app handles custody and control. The plastic handles the physical world where real money is exchanged for real goods.

(The irony is not lost on me that “real money” is actually a raging river of fake digital bits the banks keep flowing in the background in spite of governments. Don’t question it, though. You’re doing your part to just keep enjoying breakfast cereal and gasoline as they keep wetting their beaks. Win-Win. Capitalism, etc, etc.)

All four of these payment products could plausibly skip the artifact but ship it anyway.

The first reading is that the cards exist for the parts of the network the app has not absorbed yet. "Where Apple Pay is accepted." Cards are for consumer convenience.

That is the polite reading.

Offering a physical credit card at places "Where Apple Pay is NOT accepted" is subtly presented as a crutch. As if a store is unacceptable if it doesn't take that transaction straight from your phone.

Millions of people drink coffee at Starbucks every day. (Before you ask: I don't know, either)

So the seconds saved through the tap-to-pay experience add up quickly. 31% of Starbucks store transactions flow through its app. The closed loop handles ordering, payment, memory, and identity in one place. When the network can carry all four, the artifact really can recede. The same thing has happened to print-at-home tickets and to paper boarding passesand, yes, the Apple Store.

When the artifact's only job is transactional security and transferability, the database wins, and wins fast.

So what is left, when you take away the actual function of a card? What survives? Look at what Apple, Cash App, Robinhood, and Coinbase are actually sending you. It's not commercial infrastructure. The backend is fine and arguably becomes more inefficient for having to maintain all this physicality of actual credit cards.

They are sending you a small heavy object you can hand to another person. They are sending you something you can draw on. They are sending you the gesture of producing it.

Of course, the psychological tricks are still in play at the moment of transaction (see "Spendception"). But flashing your credit card when you have tap-to-pay apps is becoming more rare the same way counting out paper cash (and, my goodness, actual metal coins) is the exception in a world of card transactions.

Wired called the titanium Apple Card "status-signaling" the week it shipped. People value physical versions of equivalent goods more than digital ones, across multiple experiments, in ways the database does not seem to fix. The payments industry is now landing on the phrase "statements of identity." All three are circling the same observation:

The network carries the transaction. The card carries the gesture.

Search YouTube for "Apple Card unboxing" and you will find hundreds of videos of strangers narrating, in close-up, the small ceremonial steps of opening a wallet-shaped envelope, peeling a paper sticker, tapping the hidden NFC tag, sliding the titanium out of its sleeve. What they are doing, mostly, is performing the receipt of the card. Nothing has foundational changed in their lives or ability to buy things. Apple is shipping two products: the card and the unboxing.

Ronny Chieng spoke at Harvard's Class Day this week to "make sure their offline world is better than their online world," and that the work in any profession was the fun part worth protecting from AI substitution. Different domain, same underlying observation as this issue: the embodied act of doing the thing carries something the substitute cannot.

Devin Stagg recently walked 2,000 feet of sidewalk in each of 15 NYC neighborhoods and counted, individually, every pile of dog waste. The 311 complaints data badly underrepresented what he saw: Hell's Kitchen has 3 official complaints, but 14 actual deposits. (I lived near Park Slope for a little while. The doggie entitlement rings true.)

I have been walking my own neighborhood counting things, but my tally is a phone full of virtual Ingress portals and virtual animals. Stagg is making rather better use of his sojourns.

/ David

On repeat: Credit Card Baby, Wham!, 1984. 🎶 "You can have my credit card, baby / But keep your red hot fingers off of my heart..." 🎶 (Wham! had it backwards. The card is the heart.)

Reading: Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle. Turkle on objects as carriers of memory, identity, and relation. The pattern under everything in this issue.