Mine arrived Tuesday. No box, just a plain white cardboard folder about the size of a greeting card, and inside it this weirdly heavy little slab of titanium with my name lasered into the bottom corner. That's the Apple Card, in case you missed the run-up to this back in March. Apple's been rolling it out to people in the US this week, invite by invite through the Wallet app, and after weeks of "you're on the list" emails mine finally converted into an actual account I could activate.
First thing I noticed: there's nothing on it. No number, no expiration date, no CVV, no signature strip even. Just the chip, the Mastercard mark, and "APPLE" etched near the top. It's genuinely disorienting to hold a credit card that tells you nothing about itself. Every number lives in the Wallet app instead, which I guess is the point (steal the physical card and you've got a metal paperweight), but it also means the first time I tried to read a number off the card to a phone rep I just sat there for a second like an idiot before remembering I had to go dig it out of my phone.
The other thing that got me: it ships with a little insert instructing you to sign it with the pen included in the box, because apparently ballpoint ink doesn't take on titanium the way it does on plastic and can smudge or wear off if you use the wrong kind. I did not read this insert before signing my card with a regular pen from my desk drawer. It's fine so far, but I feel like I've already voided some unwritten Apple contract about card care and I half expect the signature to be gone by Halloween.
Money stuff aside, the part I actually think is well done is the Daily Cash setup. Apple's calling it Daily Cash and it's basically real-time cash back deposited straight onto an Apple Cash card the same day you spend: 3% back on anything bought directly from Apple, 2% on anything you pay for with Apple Pay, and 1% if you're stuck swiping the physical titanium thing somewhere that doesn't do tap-to-pay yet (which, still, is a lot of places in 2019, coffee shops especially). No annual fee, no late fee, no over-limit fee, no foreign transaction fee. Goldman Sachs is the actual bank behind it, which is a strange sentence to type since Goldman's never issued a consumer credit card before this. Apple picked an odd first partner for their finance debut, but I guess when you're Apple you get to pick whoever you want.
The spending screen in Wallet is the other genuinely nice bit. It buckets your purchases into little colored categories, week by week, and there's an interest calculator built right in that shows you, in real dollars, what carrying a balance actually costs you over time instead of just quoting an APR at you and hoping you do the math yourself. I've never once seen a bank make that math easy on purpose. Whether Apple's doing it out of genuine goodwill or because Tim Cook wants credit cards associated with "trustworthy" the way iPhones are, I don't actually care, it's still a better experience than every physical statement I've gotten from a bank in fifteen years.
Do I need another credit card? No. Absolutely not, I have three already sitting in a drawer that I use for maybe two things a month each. But there's something about the physical object here, cold and blank and unnervingly light for how solid it looks, that got me to sign up anyway, which I recognize is exactly the reaction Apple's design team was going for and I fell for it like everyone else apparently did this week too. My mail carrier probably delivered forty of these white folders on my block alone.
Not sure I'll actually carry it day to day once the initial curiosity wears off. Apple Pay already covers most of what I buy, and the titanium thing is genuinely awkward in a standard wallet slot, it's stiffer than a normal card and doesn't want to bend with the leather the way everything else does. But it's sitting on my desk right now, next to my keyboard, mostly because I like looking at it, which is a ridiculous reason to like a piece of consumer finance and I'm aware of that.