I cancelled my Apple/Goldman card after they were totally useless on a transaction dispute. Frontier Airlines gave me a "refund", and printed me a "receipt" for it, and then later refused to give me the refund. When I showed the "receipt" to Goldman/Apple support they would chew on it for 4 weeks and then come back with. "Judgement for merchant. Reason: no evidence." I'd say: what was that "receipt" they printed, just a lie? And they would say "sorry" and reopen the investigation, repeat the same result. Lame. And I will try to avoid Frontier for the rest of my life.
Isn’t that what Goldman wants? IIRC they’re losing money on the card so they’d prefer to bleed off customers - just like the forced attrition so many tech companies are currently doing.
“ The regulator also said Apple and Goldman misled many consumers into believing they would automatically get interest-free monthly payments when buying Apple devices. Instead, those same customers were charged interest.”
Probably payment on GS backend was processed late even if customer initiated payment on the due date. So customer was charged interest.
I was an early adopter of the AC during my Apple glazing days. Everybody has the same due date (end of month) and GS systems just could not handle the volume.
I remember an auto payment taking a week to withdraw from my bank account and applied to account. I wasn’t charged interest and didn’t have an installment at the time though. I believe installments were introduced a year later after AC was generally available.
> an auto payment taking a week to withdraw from my bank account
As an aside, for anyone using an Apple Card today, a handy way around this is to not make payments via ACH. Use your debit card with Apple Pay to pull money instantly into Apple Cash, then use that to instantly pay your credit card bill. An extra step, sure, but it's instant.
Related: Most banks let you pay credit cards over the phone using a debit card. This is usually intended for debt collection though, so you may have to have to call the debt collection phone number to do it. Of course the main use case for tech people is maxing debit card rewards until they close your account :)
Why would you even use a credit card if you have the money? You don't have to bother with the loan aspects of the card then (and the paying off). You could just use a debit card.
This is what keeps me from even considering an apple card, I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
Couple reasons I rarely use debit cards, I use a credit card and pay it off every month:
If it gets stolen/someone else uses it, all I need to do is tell my bank, and since I have not paid the debt, I am not out any money. It is on the bank. If I was using a debit card, it may take a month+ to be investigated/money returned.
Emergencies/availability having available credit is useful, most of my money is in investment accounts, even if only to get higher money market interest rates. I can transfer to my bank account, but that takes time. Having ~10k in credit available for if I need a last minute plane/hotel/hospital is good in an emergency. Once I'm safe I can move the money around as needed.
Cash back, coming from the USA credit cards give me 2-3% cash back. That is significant considering I use them for all purchases.
I do not believe that credit card accounts have a negative affect on mortgages. They are different types, with credit cards being revolving. As long as you are paying it off and not maintaining a valence, then it should only be a net positive (shows credit history of paying debts).
> If it gets stolen/someone else uses it, all I need to do is tell my bank, and since I have not paid the debt, I am not out any money. It is on the bank. If I was using a debit card, it may take a month+ to be investigated/money returned.
But if the bank still claims it was you it is still in question and they still want their money back, with interest.
> I do not believe that credit card accounts have a negative affect on mortgages. They are different types, with credit cards being revolving. As long as you are paying it off and not maintaining a valence, then it should only be a net positive (shows credit history of paying debts).
Ah I see, this does definitely not apply here in Europe. The amount you can borrow for a mortgage is reduced by the amount of loans you have, including the maximum spending limit on credit cards (even if you never use said card at all!). This is why I have a card with only 1000 euro spending limit, just for some backwards sites that don't support debit cards (there are still some unfortunately.
Credit cards have strict laws regarding handling of fraudulent transactions. As long as you report it in a timely manner, your liability is limited to $50. The burden of proof is on the bank.
Debit cards are the worst of all options. Any fraud means the money is immediately gone from your account. Yes you can often get it back eventually, but eventually takes time.
> I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
If you're planning on getting a mortgage I suggest studying up on this, because reality is the opposite of what you say. An important factor in your credit score is how much credit you have that you don't use. So what you want is lots of credit cards with very high limits to maximize your credit score.
>This is what keeps me from even considering an apple card, I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
This is not, generally, a correct statement. Having a history of 1) paying off debt or 2) not using a credit line available to you actually makes it MUCH easier to get a mortgage.
Might be different in other countries but in the US the only way credit lines harm your chances of getting a mortgage is if you don't pay the bill in full every month or take out new lines of credit within a few months of taking out the mortgage.
I, personally, had more than 20 lines of credit open when I was approved for my mortgage at their lowest interest rate. My mortgage was/is actually lower than my available credit on my all my revolving accounts, combined.
> Why would you even use a credit card if you have the money?
I get ten percent cash back on groceries right now. It is subsidized in a sense, and builds out an advertising portfolio on me - those are questionable - but it is money in my pocket.
Oh really? I never get any on my cards. Definitely not for things like groceries. Once in a blue moon they have some discounts in the credit card app but they are always discounts based on the RRP price which are totally useless because the same article is cheaper on amazon at street price.
I do have a "credit card" because some sites refuse to accept debit ones. But no cashbacks or anything. Maybe it differs by bank (I use caixabank in Spain)
The one thing I do like as a reward is that caixa funds several museums and you can get in for free if you have an account with them. But it doesn't have to be a credit card, a normal account is enough.
The us is different between the us and Europe, everytime someone uses a credit card there are fees that go to the bank and the credit card processor.
In Europe these are legally capped, in the us they are not. So the 2% cash back on US cards is the cards and banks competing for market share by providing kickbacks from these fees to customers.
My bank told me they definitely favour those who can live their lives without having to take loans at all. Any loans get subtracted from the maximum possible mortgage, this includes credit cards at their maximum authorised credit level(!). Also, we have to pay 20% of a house in hard cash here so anyone looking to buy one is saving substantial money. So you have a decent buffer. There's no point in taking out credit if you can supply your own.
Its a term common amongst sussy sigma zoomers paying Fanum Tax to Baby Gronk in Ohio (blud thinks he's edging a goofy ahh Kai Cenat, we ain't rizzing outta the goon cave with this one) that Grimace Shake Skibidi glaze was craaaazy bro frfr no cap on bussin
It actually sounds like some customers thought any Apple purchase would be eligible if they paid with their Apple Card, but that is not how it works – you actually need to choose the interest-free monthly installment option when buying the device.
A case of potentially misleading advertising, but also customers being dumb. I personally found the whole process quite clear with regards to how the interest-free installment plans work.
For example, that is not even an option if you try to buy an Apple device from an Apple Store outside of the US, even if you already have the Apple Card. You just get the max 3% cashback.
I've used the service plenty of times now, and was never charged interest. I wonder what situations lead this to happen? I know one has to select the payment option when purchasing through Apple and not all items are eligible. Maybe people just assumed the payment plans would be automatically and didn't require selecting the option during checkout?
Also, you do need to explicitly specify you want to use the interest-free installment option when making the purchase. It's not automatic, even when buy an Apple product at an Apple Store.
Yes. I found this out after purchasing a new laptop for my wife. One call to the Apple store that I bought the device at fixed it though. It really was (mostly) painless.
Oh, now that's interesting news. I never would have thought of that! The one time I did it wrong was on a small enough item I was able to pay it quickly via savings.
Yeah, I don't think I was ever charged interest on Apple products either, but I wasn't paying that close of attention. I'll have to go back and check to see if I can get a sweet class action payout.
But you have to click the payments option (and pay the billed amounts). If you put the full balance on your card, you can't ignore it for 12 months and then pay.
So it's only no interest as long as you make payments on time. I guess this is technically misleading advertising?
It might also be that it only applied during specific circumstances (buying directly from Apple) instead of as a blanket offer. I've bought a few devices through this deal and personally am a happy customer, so I hope this doesn't kill it.
No, it was a separate payment method called “Apple Card Monthly Installments.” If you just charged a purchase to your Apple Card, it was not an installment payment. That’s probably the confusion the regulators were complaining about.
You don't have to pay the Apple card balance in full to pay no interest. You just have to make the payments on the agreed-upon schedule. You're effectively doing something like splitting a $1200 purchase into 12 $100 payments or whatever, rather than that plus interest. No credit card I'm aware of will do that for purchases in general, but presumably it's worth it for a card issued by the actual product vendor if it increases sales. They have enough cash on hand that it hurts them none to receive most of the payment in the future.
PayPal has an interest-free credit option, usually spread out over six months, as well. You don't always have to make a specific payment on the due date, but if you don't pay it off in six months then the whole amount of accrued interest is due.
No. The financing Apple is offering is typically 12 months split into 12 separate payments. That is 0% financing and not a 'charge card' style. You're still getting 11 months of delayed payments, unlike a charge card where everything is due once a month from the previous month of the card.
IIRC, the installment each month hits your card like any other charge. So maybe if you let it become part of your revolving balance at that point, you'll pay interest.
It's been a while since I bought an Apple device that way, but I do think that's how it showed up. I always pay my card off each month so I never got to find out if the installment would be subject to interest if I didn't immediately pay it.
> So maybe if you let it become part of your revolving balance at that point, you'll pay interest.
Another interpretation is that the credit card balance is charged interest but the monthly payments, which are paid using the card, do not have interest applied. Which sounds accurate and not necessarily misleading, though there's an argument to be made given they market the card so heavily. I think the confusion stems from the situation of making monthly payments with a credit line that also expects monthly payments.
> making monthly payments with a credit line that also expects monthly payments
I agree, that is very likely where the confusion comes from. It would probably be better if they kept the billing separate even when it's on the same statement.
I hate to jump directly to assuming nefarious greedy corporation, but obscuring the monthly installment by paying it with the credit card does strike me as a deliberate choice. I guess CFPB agrees.
That's quite generous. I'd assume that of the $19.8 million going back to customers would see at least 60% used as legal fees before seeing distribution resulting in a similar payout to most class action suits
The article says they're banned from launching any more credit cards unless they can 'demonstrate they are going to follow the law' (whatever that means).
This is really funny, because Goldman has been very public about how much they hate the Apple Card deal, and they have been and still are looking to unwind the deal or sell the portfolio, so something tells me this experiment in retail consumer finance is not something they're looking to replicate any time soon.
News to me, since I still have a Marcus account that is fully functional and the website says "Goldman Sachs" all over it. I've been expecting it to split off or shut down at some point, but no signs of it so far from my perspective.
For some reason I think it will have been even more mundane. It is quite a long time ago, but Matt Levine wrote at the time that GS was (for whatever reason) desperate to get into consumer finance. They saw the market as an open opportunity, and paired up with Apple to get a foothold reaching well beyond their Marcus brand.
[Still paraphrasing Levine.] As one would expect, that didn't go well. Goldman Sachs as a company is geared to do complex low-volume, high-margin deals. Consumer banking by its very nature is high-volume, low-margin. To make things "worse", consumer finance is also very heavily regulated to discourage routinely fleecing your customers.
Which is how you get a vampire squid squad trying to feed off of a decaffeinated strawberry juice carton. Someone is going to be disappointed, and it's not the juice carton.
GS were probably willing (initially) to pay a hefty sum to get into that market, so then the question becomes: why Apple? At the time Apple had a net float of >$200B. When you have that much cash and assets to deal with, you no longer seek the help of a bank. You are a bank.
In a funny twist, their Marcus brand is still alive at least in the UK, and they are offering some of the (supposedly)[ß] best front line savings rates to attract customers. I've never seen anyone with their brand of card, though, so clearly their offered rates are not attractive enough.
ß: few other UK high street banks are offering even better rates, but every single one of them has set a ludicrously low cap on the amount they pay good rates on before dropping to just-about-tolerable rates for whatever goes above the threshold.
> Goldman Sachs as a company is geared to do complex low-volume, high-margin deals.
They trade billions of dollars of equities on exchange per day globally. Usually, each fill is tiny. Then do plenty of simple, high volume, low margin business. Same for spot FX, FX/equity options, all types of futures. Tiny margin, and Goldman is big in all of them.
It is funny that you think Goldman is so monolithic. They have 45,000 employees, and a vast array of businesses. As a related point, JPMorgan is both a mega commercial/retail bank plus ibank. They do both types of transactions.
Marcus still exists in the US. I use them for my savings account. They don't have anything besides that that I know of (checking, brokerage). Current APY 4.1% so as good as you can find in a savings account here.
Fidelity Cash Management has a 4.5% yield (which is also state-tax free for those in states with income tax, which could be a boost of up to 0.5% for some).
My American Express savings account gets me an APY of 4.1%, so there's other options, but agree that it seems like either are the best rate I've found in the US.
Saying "good job Apple" in the context of payment processing deals is like cheering on a slightly more buff gladiator bashing in the face of his opponent. Both of them intend to fleece the users, they just disagree over who gets priority access.
I'm not saying you can't have a favorite gladiator, I'm saying you can't pretend this isn't pugilism.
My Apple Card gives me an entire month to pay off the balance, and I am actively encouraged to keep paying it off throughout the month. The cash back rewards are simple and quickly paid out. There are no late fees. The UI for the software side of it is exceptional.
It's also nice that the cash back is actually cash which can be automatically directed into the accompanying savings account, where it accrues 4.10% APY interest. None of the usual funny business with points with shifting valuations, restrictions on how they can be spent, etc.
Not that I mind anyone's preference for cash, but there are a ton of people in the credit card rewards 'game' who vastly prefer points (especially the top tier of 'transferable' points). In general, you can usually get more value out of points. My main point (no pun intended) is that the implication that paying rewards in something like points or miles is done mainly as a scam, is inaccurate. On the good credit cards, at least.
The cash back rewards is not, as far as I know, actually all that good in comparison to its competitors like American Express. Giving a month to pay off a balance I believe is referred to as a "grace period" which is pretty common place in credit cards. A month is nice, but I believe most cards are usually around 4 weeks. But the UI for the card's online banking is fairly attractive, especially if you're already an iPhone user, which I imagine most Apple card holders would be.
> The cash back rewards is not, as far as I know, actually all that good in comparison to its competitors like American Express.
There are definitely cards with better rewards, but few with such a straightforward and simple cash back program. Also, the rewards are not bad by any means. I also like the tight integration with the high yield savings account, which again is not the best rate possible, but makes up for it with the UI of its software and overall simplicity and ease of use.
> Giving a month to pay off a balance I believe is referred to as a "grace period" which is pretty common place in credit cards. A month is nice, but I believe most cards are usually around 4 weeks.
I'm talking about the actual due date, not the grace period which is a different thing entirely. You have until the last day of the following month to pay off the balance to avoid incurring interest, which is different than any other credit card I've ever used. Usually the due dates are a specific day of the month which often changes every month.
Most credit cards have the due date on the same day every month. You can also change it online to to another day of the month if that's something you care about. Personally I just set up autopay from a brokerage account and never think about when anything is due. Why would it matter?
It’s not a huge deal on its own but it’s part of the overall “user friendly” nature of the card as a whole. Having the whole balance be due at the end of the month just makes it easier for me to use it as my “daily driver” rewards credit card.
More details in the press release. The complaint against Apple is the the UI led some people to think they had competed a dispute, when there was an additional step. The complaint against Goldman is that their backend systems were broken and they failed to act on the disputes.
Failing to process or share consumer disputes: Apple Card users were directed to dispute transactions through a “Report an Issue” feature in the Wallet app. For some disputes, Apple sent consumers a separate link in the Messages app asking for more information. Apple failed to send these disputes to Goldman Sachs if the second form was incomplete. Even after Goldman Sachs alerted Apple to this issue, the problem persisted. As a result, neither Apple nor Goldman Sachs investigated tens of thousands of such disputes and cardholders were unfairly held responsible for disputed transactions.
Failing to investigate cardholder disputes: For the disputes that Apple did send to Goldman Sachs, the bank failed to consistently send acknowledgment notices within 30 days, conduct reasonable investigations, or send resolution letters explaining the determinations of its investigations within 90 days. These failures led to Goldman Sachs illegally placing damaging information on consumers’ credit reports and holding cardholders responsible for potentially fraudulent or unauthorized purchases.
- Moves into finance have been a failure, cancelling their BNPL as well.
- Vision Pro basically dead at this point.
- A large number of senior execs getting reshuffled/moving on from the company.
- Apple Intelligence, still no where to be seen.
This is most likely a Goldman Sachs issue, but still, who at Apple decided to partner with the bank that hasn't got any track record in consumer banking?
The only advantage GS would have had over competitors is that they would have offered Apple very generous terms because they wanted to leverage Apple to get into a new market. Choosing GS was not very customer centric.
There’s actually some nuance to this. One of Apple’s big requirements was to have quite lax acceptance criteria. They didn’t want lots of their customers being denied for cards and creating a negative brand association.
Apparently GS was up for that. Possibly because they didn’t actually know what they are doing. My understanding is the loss rate was way too high for them to be profitable.
Without simply citing greed, I find this difficult to justify or explain. Apple is a premium, luxury brand. They make opinionated hardware and software that has offended many. They’ve certainly never given a phone away, but they’re afraid of offending someone by turning them down if they have bad credit? Rubbish.
Forgive me, I’m not trying to shoot the messenger. Nuance or not, I think GP is right. It wasn’t very customer centric.
Is GS though a good luxury "brand"? I don't know much about them but they seem like a Big Name. Maybe that's all they wanted? The prestige of being tied to GS
I can understand the surface appeal beyond greed. Goldman Sachs offers good terms, is willing to have higher acceptance rates, has a strong 'luxury'/'high net worth' feel about the brand etc.
Even with the benefit of the doubt it was naive. Did no one think, he maybe there's a reason all these companies with a lot more experience than GS aren't giving credit cards to everyone?
The real brand risk was never denying people cards – that still happened anyway, the risk was exactly what's happening now.
Also I've been working with their latest Swift & SwiftUI and I think they've made some fundamental missteps with the language and the APIs. Nothing that a company of Apple's size can't correct with enough effort I suppose but it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their software engineering chops.
Keep in mind what you're using isn't much of what they're launching. 18.1 only has a couple of features, the three releases after that have the bulk of what they demonstrated.
Checks out. I never carry a balance on my Apple Card and always make sure to pay it off every month. Yet, I’ve noticed discrepancies between the transactions shown in the Apple Wallet UI and my PDF statements. The two times I’ve called customer service, they just put me on hold and say they’ll look into it.
This has never happened with any of my AMEX cards, so I can only conclude that either the whole division is incompetent or there’s something more troubling going on
I’ve spent over a…lot of money…on the Apple Card. It’s my wife and I’s primary card ever since it came out. Never paid any interest, and made lots of Daily Cash. More than anything I just find the wallet app so much more pleasant than other banking apps.
Comparisons like this are absurd. Why should fines associated with a small segment of apple's business be compared to their global revenue? Is the implication that all offenses should be fined based on global revenue, such that if they broke some law in Liechtenstein that the government there should be able to demand 5% (or whatever) of apple's worldwide revenue?
What you are implying is that it is a cost of doing business. That is the only conclusion from making the fine relative to the product in question. If it is intended to be a deterrent from future abuse, as I believe fines are intended to be, then the company as a whole needs to see the fine as a viable threat to their profitability.
That's a reasonable position to hold, but crappy comparisons like in the OP doesn't contribute little to the discussion. The fine might be tiny part of worldwide revenue, but how much money are they making off apple cards? If that's tiny as well then the argument is moot.
The tight integration of the Apple Card with their hardware also means it makes their hardware (iPhones) better. They can lose money on the Apple Card and make money if it means some people like the integration enough to buy into the iPhone ecosystem (sign up for an Apple Card and get an interest free loan to buy an iPhone? I can see that getting new customers)
> The fine might be tiny part of worldwide revenue, but how much money are they making off apple cards? If that's tiny as well then the argument is moot.
I disagree. I don’t think the fine should be relative to money gained by breaking a rule.
Then it’s not a deterrent for large companies.
You end up in a situation where very large companies can act in illegal ways and just absorb the fine.
A company doing anything worth fining should be fined relative to the size of that company (by some metric)
So going back to the Liechtenstein example, if Apple did a bad there what would be the appropriate punishment? Based on what you're saying you'd want them to be fined a significant portion of their worldwide revenue, which seems absurd. It would basically deprive people living in small countries access to products from multinational companies, because nobody would want to risk 5% (or whatever) of their worldwide revenue to get 1% more market share.
> It would basically deprive people living in small countries access to products from multinational companies, because nobody would want to risk 5% (or whatever) of their worldwide revenue to get 1% more market share.
Sorry, I’m not sure I follow.
How would selling products to smaller countries automatically incur fines for illegal activity?
Apple wants to operate in Liechtenstein. Under your proposed regime of a "deterrent", that would put them at risk of fines worth 5% (or whatever) of their global revenue. Of course, they're not going to intentionally break laws, but shit happens and despite their best efforts they might still get fined. Faced with that prospect, they go "nah" and stay out of the market entirely, because the extra 0.1% profit is massively outweighed by the potential 5% revenue in fines. All 40k Liechtensteiners are worse off as a result. This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening in EU right now, as Apple doesn't want to deal with the legal headaches associated with Apple Intelligence and therefore opts out of the EU market entirely.
> Of course, they're not going to intentionally break laws
I wish I lived in your world.
> but shit happens and despite their best efforts they might still get fined.
You’re telling me that it’s okay that laws are sometimes broken with no real consequence because the company in question may mistakenly break laws?
Yikes…
> Under your proposed regime of a "deterrent", that would put them at risk of fines worth 5% (or whatever) of their global revenue
I don’t know if revenue is the exact metric to use to making a deterring fine.
It very well may not be.
But the fine should act as some real deterrent
> All 40k Liechtensteiners are worse off as a result. This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening in EU right now, as Apple doesn't want to deal with the legal headaches associated with Apple Intelligence and therefore opts out of the EU market entirely.
This is a very complex topic and I don’t feel well equipped to discuss it with any real nuance.
But here I go anyway…
I’m not convinced that not having access to Apple intelligence makes a country worse off.
Not all countries need to be supported by a large corporation. That’s not strictly a good thing.
If they (the EU) wanted that, they’d lax their regulations…
I don’t think anyone’s saying it would be automatic. But the risk of running afoul of laws and regulations is non-zero, and if the penalties are too steep, then it may be a wiser choice to stay out of small markets entirely.
If a company with $1B in revenue, rolls something out to make $10M, then anything over $10M is suitable punishment - you turned a profitable venture into a money losing venture.
Yeah that works fine if the company in question is $1B. $10M is 1% of that company.
That’s a deterrent.
But if that company was $1T then that fine is effectively the cost of legal research.
It won’t deter that company from trying to weasel their way around regulations in the future as the cost of trying justifies the potential upside.
> It doesn’t matter if it’s a $1T company, the fine effectively turned their profitable decision into a loss.
Sure, but I don’t think just causing any amount of loss acts as a deterrent. Especially if the company is large enough to absorb the loss with no real consequences.
> By your logic, if a company is running at a loss should the fine be negative?
No, that’s a dumb question. A negative fine isn’t a fine and isn’t a deterrent…
I don’t know what metric one should use to determine how to make a fine a deterrent. Maybe market cap?
Can they go after Apple next for aggressively locking your entire account and library of past purchases because they couldn't bill you $10 for an iCloud subscription?
I don’t want to diminish others experiences, because I’m sure they’re just as important as mine.
All I can say is anecdotally I haven’t had any issues with disputes…in fact the dispute experience for me has been better than other cards. The app makes it quite simple.
The stupidest thing about the Apple Card is how broken their customer service systems are due to a combo of Goldman never issuing a card before, and the tight integration with Apple for account management.
Primary example of this is there is no way to update your email address with the bank. It's your Apple ID and can't change. How do I know this? I changed my Apple ID several years ago, but my credit card comms still come to the old address, and no matter how many times I contact either bank or Apple support, they have no power to fix this. The bank has zero access to edit my information at all, and Apple just sends me in idiotic circles like logging out and into my devices, deleting all other contact emails from my Apple account, etc.
That's just the thing: I changed my Apple Account primary email following the instructions in your second link (which is where your first link links to for "email"). I even purged the old email completely so that it's not even an 'alternate' email anymore (which I shouldn't have had to do, and which made things difficult for me in other areas, but was Apple's only idea).
Only Apple Card didn't get the memo and there's no way to poke them to make them update.
Edit: no discussion == no dupe, it isn't useful to link threads with no/few comments.
Them's the breaks. I don't love it either, but submission spam doesn't move the needle for our community regardless of timestamps, especially when one randomly didn't gain traction first. If you have a better solution, feel free to email hn@ycombinator.com, maybe the staff will take it up!
Don't sweat the small stuff. This story made it to the front page, isn't that cool? Someone was on to something.
I'm struggling a little bit with the "misleading consumers into getting interest-free monthly payments" part. I never found the checkout flow particularly unclear or obtuse. It kind of sounds like consumers assumed that making a purchase with the apple card automatically enrolled you in the payment plan, versus having to go through a different checkout flow. I do kind of recall that when I used that feature once, it might have been implemented through Apple Pay? That would be supported by the fact that it was only available through Safari if the purchase was made online. I'm probably an outlier in being likely to experience that as I've just used Safari for a while, and so I'm getting their first-class experience. I am no stranger to how utterly awful Apple's products are outside its own ecosystem (like any Apple software designed to run on Windows.)
All of these issues would be infuriating if I encountered them, but it's interesting how the breakdown of failures seems to be 50/50 "Apple doing a terrible job designing a clear and consistent UI or process" and "being bit by their attempts at locking people into their ecosystem, independent of the card" and the Goldman Sachs portion seems just outright malicious.
Incompetence and malice combined are a really powerful force.
So I can kind of understand where the confusion comes from. I used this to buy my wife and I MacBooks last year. When I started the checkout flow I didn’t initially realize I was just applying for an Apple Card, rather than just being a loan with a fixed payment. I could see people that don’t understand how zero interest offers interact with revolving credit accounts might not have understood.
But the UI is pretty clear when you make a payment, if you drop the amount under the recommended payment how much interest it’s going to cost you.
I surprised with Apple switching from their loan plans to open credit accounts. The loan plans were setup like student loans where the debt could not be wiped out with bankruptcy where open credit can.
> I'm struggling a little bit with the "misleading consumers into getting interest-free monthly payments" part. I never found the checkout flow particularly unclear or obtuse
I really wish everybody who makes claims like these would go to the local library and do volunteer tech support for the elderly, poorly educated and cognitively challenged for a day.
The bar for these things is not "would the average HN reader find this confusing" it is "would the average customer find this confusing". The average IQ is 100, more than half of the US population reads below the grade 6 level.
There have been several public-interest reports and scorecardings of the readability/unreadability of the language in various consumer/financial contracts (the grade-level required to understand it x the number of minutes/hours to read it).
Yes and ARMs got a simple one-pager treatment post-GFC thanks to the CFPB.
I'm just saying that "6th grade reading level" is extremely basic level of literacy that a lot of contracts probably couldn't be easily communicated to that level.
Agreed. Lots of people/bodies/academics have measured contract readability; I didn't say the US CFPB was the only arbiter.
Lina Khan seems to be one of the bigger contributors to curbing excesses, at least in the domains she's authorized to, and she may not keep her job in the next admin.
(As to ARMs, from the regulator point of view, much of the economic damage done is in the rear-view mirror; the next big thing is presumably student loans.)
That's usually not an issue if your contract and marketing claims are aligned.
Even if the customers didn't you read the contract, they still got the gist of it through the marketing copy and probably won't hit a point where they're really mad about you. Actual trials will also be easier to deal with as you're in good faith.
For all the press we get on "frivolous" lawsuits, no average Joe are winning actual stupid suits.
Here it's an issue because what the credit card is fundamentally made for (make you pay fees on additional services) and the marketing hook (no additional fee) are at odds and is only true for very specific conditions someone can easily fall out of.
Absolutely there are bad actors, and consumers getting taken advantage of.
However as you point out - credit cards essentially make money from the less financially savvy by design. It's not entirely a bad thing, in a sense.. some people just run out of money between paychecks and need some liquidity.
Credit access vs predatory debt are sometimes in the eye of the beholder and a very fine line.
It also reminds me of some of the "I've been paying my student debt for 10 years and the balance went up!" like.. yeah, but it means you paid less than the interest. Would you have been happier paying more for the last 10 years? Like what outcome were you expecting and what college education did you go into debt for that didn't prepare you to have reviewed your monthly statements even once in 10 years to realize this?
Good! This idea that businesses should be free to fleece the stupid and under educated with obtuse contract phraseology and walls of text that have managed to include things like "the soul of your first born" because nobody can reasonably be expected read and understand the full thing is just asinine, naked failure of the government to protect people from predatory business practices.
Caveat Emptor should not mean "They can make the contract literally inscrutable and then you just have to go get fucked".
There's nothing wrong with reasonable consumer protections and required default warranties that CANNOT be discharged by a TOS. You shouldn't have to take a second job to understand whether you are signing away your soul when signing up for a damn credit card.
Legalese is about specificity.
How does being less precise assist understanding with specificity?
I cannot, in a contract, just refer to a street address. For reasons of specificity, I must state where the survey marker corner is located -exactly- and then detail how many feet from that in a direction, etc. These long descriptions ensure that there are no misunderstandings later.
The verbiage of these contracts have grown more specific through use. People, or companies, wiggle out of things and new contract language is invented to prevent such wiggle-room in the future.
How would one go about accomplishing a 'dumbing down' of a contract, without losing the anti-wiggle specificity?
Also, I really like that word. Say it with me, please: 'specificity.' Neat.
My recent experience with Apple has been anti-user .. juice their bottom line....
- iCloud storage notifications saying have to upgrade to $9.99 plan to continue to store my photos, videos and even worse if I wanted to continue getting my iCloud emails. What(?), as my Google Photos is still sucking/backing up all the same media (goes back to 2016) for free. LAME Apple especially threat of not getting my iCloud emails!!!!
- Apple Intelligence is so LAME compared to chatGPT app that runs on my iPhone. ChatGPT's iPhone app, it's assistant is almost sentient while Siri is still HORRID as it still at times doesnt understand you, you cant have a conversation with it or have it recall previous conversation/info you previously discussed as you can with GPT on iPhone. Again very LAME Apple!
If Microsoft and Open AI made a ChatGPT AI phone I'd drop Apple quickly especially after my first point above ...threatening me that i wont receive my emails if I didnt give them more money!
> iCloud storage notifications saying have to upgrade to $9.99 plan to continue to store my photos, videos and even worse if I wanted to continue getting my iCloud emails. What(?), as my Google Photos is still sucking/backing up all the same media (goes back to 2016) for free. LAME Apple especially threat of not getting my iCloud emails!!!!
To my knowledge Google will do the same thing if you are running out of space. I believe it is shared also but I could be wrong. I have been out of Google's ecosystem for a while.
Apple should increase the base amount of storage with iCloud for free. What you mentioned itself is not an Apple thing to my knowledge.
> Apple Intelligence is so LAME compared to chatGPT app that runs on my iPhone. ChatGPT's iPhone app, it's assistant is almost sentient while Siri is still HORRID as it still at times doesnt understand you, you cant have a conversation with it or have it recall previous conversation/info you previously discussed as you can with GPT on iPhone. Again very LAME Apple!
Unless you are on the beta, you are not actually using Apple Intelligence. Even if you are on the 18.1 beta, they have made it clear that they there are multiple updates for everything to come out.
THanks, just always have had good user experience in every way with Apple, so getting email notifications one after the other where they said you need to upgrade if you want us to continue backing your stuff up was mildly odd. Yet, in their first communication they didnt mention anything about not getting email yet they did in the third or so email which felt very anti-user to me.
As for Apple Intelligence Ive been using it since late September/early October. Been using ChatGPT app on iPhone for months to more so I expected Siri to be comparable to GPT but its not even close at all. Siri still doesnt understand you always like GPT does, points you to a Google search (maybe that's due to a built agreement with Google) for most things and can not recall how many calories i ate a few days ago (example of recall memory). Using GPT while driving is awesome/handy/i find it very useful (to get info for various chores & count my daily calories). Yet Siri to have the same experience would cause me to have accident.
Yeah, all of that Siri stuff you're trying isn't there yet.
18.1 (the current beta) has minor improvements to Siri for immediate follow up requests and parsing requests where you stumble over words. 18.2 is supposed to be picking up ChatGPT integration so Siri can ask it about things. The "personal context" recall is apparently in 18.4, so we won't see it until next year.
Honestly, 18.1 launching the new Siri UI (the glowy look) feels like a bad idea -- I'd have kept it until 18.4 when the real intelligence improvements actually land.
On the flip side, if Apple can keep most/all the processing on device, I'll accept a modest reduction in quality compared to ChatGPT. Admittedly I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet so I don't know just how big the reduction in quality is.
Agreed, but the kind of stuff I want it to be capable of is way more limited than I'd ask of ChatGPT. I've tried a little model on my iPhone (Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct) that was better than I expected, both in capability and in responsiveness. Gives me hope for the future of on-device processing.
Many of us however would strongly prefer that our photos, documents, emails, contacts etc not be stored unencrypted on a server.
And the capabilities of this model would still be limited as well given that Apple is not going to be able to host a large parameter one for each user.
yeah everyone is different ... im either an innovator (of go nowhere technology lol) or an early adopter. Like Im enjoying my Ray Ban Metas since last October (use them daily). Yet for many they are a privacy nightmare.
Apples constant push for subscription icloud data storage is predatory at best. The amount of users/clients I come across with devices way out of date re software/security patches because their iphones not got enough space on it to download its own update and it doesn't provide a easy way to transfer large chunks of data off it like photos/videos is ridiculous. Something like 50% of users easily. Sample size probably upwards of 50. They get constantly harassed by crap asking them to buy icloud storage.
>and it doesn't provide a easy way to transfer large chunks of data off it like photos/videos is ridiculous
Using the web interface of another cloud provider to upload files there, and downloading it on your other device? Most cloud providers give you around 10GB for free, which should be more than enough room to install ios updates.
yeah the whole Apple Intelligence only available to 15 and 16 iPhone users is anti-user / juice profits move.
The horrid thing is Apple Intelligence is not worth upgrading your device for and yet that's their marketing to get people to upgrade lol. As another commenter in this thread commented a comparable ChatGPT Siri is coming yet not for some months.
Definitely would jump to another platform if the phone is an AI sentient like driven phone (new paradigm in phone design / layout where there's not as much UI). So far ChatGPT is my best experience with such an AI and Microsoft who owns what half of Open AI did create pretty good Windows phone back in the day. Maybe it will happen... been wanting such since I first used ChatGPT.
Uh, Gmail also has usage limits for each tier. I know before I’ve painstakingly removed emails with large attachments just so I can keep receiving my email.
15gb on the free tier...empty your emails folks. This madness of keeping every email is insane. I had a user with 60000 unopened emails on one account just 2 weeks ago. It's like some folks refuse to do basic data/comms house keeping.
I have junk gmail address that gets filtered into my real gmail account (Zunk label instead of Junk) which keeps my real gmail account clean (few to handful of emails a day of things that are meaningful). Ive always have given out my junk gmail address to anyone i dont know personally or do business with.
18.1 has not been released, it will be released on Monday, October 28th and it will still not contain all the features they previewed (nor did the beta).
Ah my bad i just updated to 18.1 per a system settings notification i received today. I was running 18.1 betas the last few weeks so I guess for beta users they were updated today to regular 18.1.
I cancelled my Apple/Goldman card after they were totally useless on a transaction dispute. Frontier Airlines gave me a "refund", and printed me a "receipt" for it, and then later refused to give me the refund. When I showed the "receipt" to Goldman/Apple support they would chew on it for 4 weeks and then come back with. "Judgement for merchant. Reason: no evidence." I'd say: what was that "receipt" they printed, just a lie? And they would say "sorry" and reopen the investigation, repeat the same result. Lame. And I will try to avoid Frontier for the rest of my life.
Isn’t that what Goldman wants? IIRC they’re losing money on the card so they’d prefer to bleed off customers - just like the forced attrition so many tech companies are currently doing.
Their intent isn't really salient, the act is illegal regardless of why they did it
Only if the fine is more then the profit
“ The regulator also said Apple and Goldman misled many consumers into believing they would automatically get interest-free monthly payments when buying Apple devices. Instead, those same customers were charged interest.”
Interesting!
Will they notify those charged interest?
Probably payment on GS backend was processed late even if customer initiated payment on the due date. So customer was charged interest.
I was an early adopter of the AC during my Apple glazing days. Everybody has the same due date (end of month) and GS systems just could not handle the volume.
I remember an auto payment taking a week to withdraw from my bank account and applied to account. I wasn’t charged interest and didn’t have an installment at the time though. I believe installments were introduced a year later after AC was generally available.
> an auto payment taking a week to withdraw from my bank account
As an aside, for anyone using an Apple Card today, a handy way around this is to not make payments via ACH. Use your debit card with Apple Pay to pull money instantly into Apple Cash, then use that to instantly pay your credit card bill. An extra step, sure, but it's instant.
Related: Most banks let you pay credit cards over the phone using a debit card. This is usually intended for debt collection though, so you may have to have to call the debt collection phone number to do it. Of course the main use case for tech people is maxing debit card rewards until they close your account :)
Churning? Can u tell me more abt that please in the process of doing a few but dont want to mess up.
Any tips?
This isn’t needed anymore. Credit is applied to account if autopay is setup. I guess it’s only reversed if ach fails due to insufficient funds.
Personally I have a bank account that I use solely for the purpose of auto pay/ach. It’s only funded with enough money to pay creditors.
Why would you even use a credit card if you have the money? You don't have to bother with the loan aspects of the card then (and the paying off). You could just use a debit card.
This is what keeps me from even considering an apple card, I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
Couple reasons I rarely use debit cards, I use a credit card and pay it off every month:
If it gets stolen/someone else uses it, all I need to do is tell my bank, and since I have not paid the debt, I am not out any money. It is on the bank. If I was using a debit card, it may take a month+ to be investigated/money returned.
Emergencies/availability having available credit is useful, most of my money is in investment accounts, even if only to get higher money market interest rates. I can transfer to my bank account, but that takes time. Having ~10k in credit available for if I need a last minute plane/hotel/hospital is good in an emergency. Once I'm safe I can move the money around as needed.
Cash back, coming from the USA credit cards give me 2-3% cash back. That is significant considering I use them for all purchases.
I do not believe that credit card accounts have a negative affect on mortgages. They are different types, with credit cards being revolving. As long as you are paying it off and not maintaining a valence, then it should only be a net positive (shows credit history of paying debts).
> If it gets stolen/someone else uses it, all I need to do is tell my bank, and since I have not paid the debt, I am not out any money. It is on the bank. If I was using a debit card, it may take a month+ to be investigated/money returned.
But if the bank still claims it was you it is still in question and they still want their money back, with interest.
> I do not believe that credit card accounts have a negative affect on mortgages. They are different types, with credit cards being revolving. As long as you are paying it off and not maintaining a valence, then it should only be a net positive (shows credit history of paying debts).
Ah I see, this does definitely not apply here in Europe. The amount you can borrow for a mortgage is reduced by the amount of loans you have, including the maximum spending limit on credit cards (even if you never use said card at all!). This is why I have a card with only 1000 euro spending limit, just for some backwards sites that don't support debit cards (there are still some unfortunately.
Credit cards have strict laws regarding handling of fraudulent transactions. As long as you report it in a timely manner, your liability is limited to $50. The burden of proof is on the bank.
> You could just use a debit card.
Debit cards are the worst of all options. Any fraud means the money is immediately gone from your account. Yes you can often get it back eventually, but eventually takes time.
> I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
If you're planning on getting a mortgage I suggest studying up on this, because reality is the opposite of what you say. An important factor in your credit score is how much credit you have that you don't use. So what you want is lots of credit cards with very high limits to maximize your credit score.
> I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage
A mortgage is credit. And as far as FICO scores go, having high available credit would make it easier to get a loan, not harder.
>This is what keeps me from even considering an apple card, I don't need any credit and getting credit registered against my name will make it more difficult to get a mortgage.
This is not, generally, a correct statement. Having a history of 1) paying off debt or 2) not using a credit line available to you actually makes it MUCH easier to get a mortgage.
Might be different in other countries but in the US the only way credit lines harm your chances of getting a mortgage is if you don't pay the bill in full every month or take out new lines of credit within a few months of taking out the mortgage.
I, personally, had more than 20 lines of credit open when I was approved for my mortgage at their lowest interest rate. My mortgage was/is actually lower than my available credit on my all my revolving accounts, combined.
Credit cards provide kickbacks (ahem, cashback) to customers while virtually all products cost the same for debit or credit.
If you use debit, you might be leaving 2% of the deal on the table. (But you are helping the merchant, which could be a good reason)
> Why would you even use a credit card if you have the money?
I get ten percent cash back on groceries right now. It is subsidized in a sense, and builds out an advertising portfolio on me - those are questionable - but it is money in my pocket.
> ten percent cash back on groceries
You must share which card is this, I will get one immediately. 10%?
Oh really? I never get any on my cards. Definitely not for things like groceries. Once in a blue moon they have some discounts in the credit card app but they are always discounts based on the RRP price which are totally useless because the same article is cheaper on amazon at street price.
I do have a "credit card" because some sites refuse to accept debit ones. But no cashbacks or anything. Maybe it differs by bank (I use caixabank in Spain)
The one thing I do like as a reward is that caixa funds several museums and you can get in for free if you have an account with them. But it doesn't have to be a credit card, a normal account is enough.
The us is different between the us and Europe, everytime someone uses a credit card there are fees that go to the bank and the credit card processor.
In Europe these are legally capped, in the us they are not. So the 2% cash back on US cards is the cards and banks competing for market share by providing kickbacks from these fees to customers.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-credit-cards-make...
Ah I see, yes here it only costs money (I think it's 25 euro per year or so). And reduces maximum available mortgage so I try to avoid them.
Having established credit with a long term payment history is one of the best ways to build credit that sets a foundation for a mortgage in place.
The american credit system favours those who pay by credit card and pay it back on time. Something something credit scores.
Seems crazy for end users but I understand it from the banks' perspective
Aha I see, I'm in Spain.
My bank told me they definitely favour those who can live their lives without having to take loans at all. Any loans get subtracted from the maximum possible mortgage, this includes credit cards at their maximum authorised credit level(!). Also, we have to pay 20% of a house in hard cash here so anyone looking to buy one is saving substantial money. So you have a decent buffer. There's no point in taking out credit if you can supply your own.
Not having credit registered against my name made it more difficult to get a mortgage. No credit history, no credit.
> Apple glazing
What is "Apple glazing"?
No idea, and there's nothing on Urban Dictionary https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=apple%20glaz...
http://glazing.urbanup.com/17626225
Its a term common amongst sussy sigma zoomers paying Fanum Tax to Baby Gronk in Ohio (blud thinks he's edging a goofy ahh Kai Cenat, we ain't rizzing outta the goon cave with this one) that Grimace Shake Skibidi glaze was craaaazy bro frfr no cap on bussin
apple glazing:apple::navel gazing:orange
It actually sounds like some customers thought any Apple purchase would be eligible if they paid with their Apple Card, but that is not how it works – you actually need to choose the interest-free monthly installment option when buying the device.
A case of potentially misleading advertising, but also customers being dumb. I personally found the whole process quite clear with regards to how the interest-free installment plans work.
For example, that is not even an option if you try to buy an Apple device from an Apple Store outside of the US, even if you already have the Apple Card. You just get the max 3% cashback.
> I personally found the whole process quite clear ...
Maybe there were earlier versions of the advertising/process that weren't as clear, and it was made clearer over time?
Possibly, but I got my Apple Card in early 2020, so fairly soon into the program.
I've used the service plenty of times now, and was never charged interest. I wonder what situations lead this to happen? I know one has to select the payment option when purchasing through Apple and not all items are eligible. Maybe people just assumed the payment plans would be automatically and didn't require selecting the option during checkout?
I believe if you fail to make the entire monthly payment by the end of the month you will be charged interest.
Also, you do need to explicitly specify you want to use the interest-free installment option when making the purchase. It's not automatic, even when buy an Apple product at an Apple Store.
Yes. I found this out after purchasing a new laptop for my wife. One call to the Apple store that I bought the device at fixed it though. It really was (mostly) painless.
Oh, now that's interesting news. I never would have thought of that! The one time I did it wrong was on a small enough item I was able to pay it quickly via savings.
I mean... isn't that how most interest-free cards work?
Yeah, I don't think I was ever charged interest on Apple products either, but I wasn't paying that close of attention. I'll have to go back and check to see if I can get a sweet class action payout.
I'm curious what the issue is, since most Apple Devices DO have interest free payments for 12 months
But you have to click the payments option (and pay the billed amounts). If you put the full balance on your card, you can't ignore it for 12 months and then pay.
So it's only no interest as long as you make payments on time. I guess this is technically misleading advertising?
It might also be that it only applied during specific circumstances (buying directly from Apple) instead of as a blanket offer. I've bought a few devices through this deal and personally am a happy customer, so I hope this doesn't kill it.
No, it was a separate payment method called “Apple Card Monthly Installments.” If you just charged a purchase to your Apple Card, it was not an installment payment. That’s probably the confusion the regulators were complaining about.
I think this is it as well. I have a card, and do 0% payments. It’s not that bad, but I see how it could be confusing.
Isn't that every credit card? You pay your full balance on time it's essentially a delayed debit card because no interest is paid.
You don't have to pay the Apple card balance in full to pay no interest. You just have to make the payments on the agreed-upon schedule. You're effectively doing something like splitting a $1200 purchase into 12 $100 payments or whatever, rather than that plus interest. No credit card I'm aware of will do that for purchases in general, but presumably it's worth it for a card issued by the actual product vendor if it increases sales. They have enough cash on hand that it hurts them none to receive most of the payment in the future.
PayPal has an interest-free credit option, usually spread out over six months, as well. You don't always have to make a specific payment on the due date, but if you don't pay it off in six months then the whole amount of accrued interest is due.
There's actually a term for this: charge card. Some American Express cards still work this way (i.e., you must always pay in full on time).
No. The financing Apple is offering is typically 12 months split into 12 separate payments. That is 0% financing and not a 'charge card' style. You're still getting 11 months of delayed payments, unlike a charge card where everything is due once a month from the previous month of the card.
Fair enough, I was just noting that "delayed debit card" has a proper name.
IIRC, the installment each month hits your card like any other charge. So maybe if you let it become part of your revolving balance at that point, you'll pay interest.
It's been a while since I bought an Apple device that way, but I do think that's how it showed up. I always pay my card off each month so I never got to find out if the installment would be subject to interest if I didn't immediately pay it.
> So maybe if you let it become part of your revolving balance at that point, you'll pay interest.
Another interpretation is that the credit card balance is charged interest but the monthly payments, which are paid using the card, do not have interest applied. Which sounds accurate and not necessarily misleading, though there's an argument to be made given they market the card so heavily. I think the confusion stems from the situation of making monthly payments with a credit line that also expects monthly payments.
> making monthly payments with a credit line that also expects monthly payments
I agree, that is very likely where the confusion comes from. It would probably be better if they kept the billing separate even when it's on the same statement.
I hate to jump directly to assuming nefarious greedy corporation, but obscuring the monthly installment by paying it with the credit card does strike me as a deliberate choice. I guess CFPB agrees.
They'll probably get 3 months of Apple Arcade free.
Or a $100 off coupon for spending over $500?
That's quite generous. I'd assume that of the $19.8 million going back to customers would see at least 60% used as legal fees before seeing distribution resulting in a similar payout to most class action suits
That's one advantage of this being a CFPB action and not the result of a class-action suit.
Isn't CFPB one of the agencies on the chopping block of Project2025?
Anything that helps consumers is on that chopping block, and CFPB is at the head of the list.
On a select items that they mark up 20%.
> Will they notify those charged interest?
Yes? Where do you think this money is going?
> Goldman will pay $64.8 million. Of that total, $19.8 million will go back to consumers.
The article says they're banned from launching any more credit cards unless they can 'demonstrate they are going to follow the law' (whatever that means).
This is really funny, because Goldman has been very public about how much they hate the Apple Card deal, and they have been and still are looking to unwind the deal or sell the portfolio, so something tells me this experiment in retail consumer finance is not something they're looking to replicate any time soon.
Goldman has been winding down consumer bank operations for awhile. Checking/savings account division (Marcus?) was sold off or dissolved
News to me, since I still have a Marcus account that is fully functional and the website says "Goldman Sachs" all over it. I've been expecting it to split off or shut down at some point, but no signs of it so far from my perspective.
Supposedly the handover isn't actually until "next Summer" though the deal to sell it to Barclay's seems "done" as of October (which the parent article also mentions): https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/10/gm-and-barclays-announc...
They sold off Marcus? Lul.
They were begging for (below market wage) devs to pack those seats pre2020
Looking back. They sold off consumer investment division in April 2024 to Betterment [1]
GS offloaded $1B in consumer loans to Varde the year prior [2]. Marcus website doesn’t even have a way to apply for personal loans.
Then of course the widely discussed bad terms of the Apple and GS partnership and rumors of GS trying to sell this to another bank. [3]
Not quite sold off but consumer division is circling the drain.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/betterment-acquire-digital-in...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/goldman-sachs-offlo...
[3] https://www.aol.com/news/apple-talks-jpmorgan-bank-over-2016...
That explains why they have been unable to implement CSV export of transactions all these years.
That does give rise to the question: did Goldman intentionally do this with the idea they'd be shut down by the government?
> did Goldman intentionally do this with the idea they'd be shut down by the government?
No. For starters, because it doesn’t get them out of the deal.
Goldman thought they were going to be able to fleece Apple's customers, but they can't. Good job Apple!
For some reason I think it will have been even more mundane. It is quite a long time ago, but Matt Levine wrote at the time that GS was (for whatever reason) desperate to get into consumer finance. They saw the market as an open opportunity, and paired up with Apple to get a foothold reaching well beyond their Marcus brand.
[Still paraphrasing Levine.] As one would expect, that didn't go well. Goldman Sachs as a company is geared to do complex low-volume, high-margin deals. Consumer banking by its very nature is high-volume, low-margin. To make things "worse", consumer finance is also very heavily regulated to discourage routinely fleecing your customers.
Which is how you get a vampire squid squad trying to feed off of a decaffeinated strawberry juice carton. Someone is going to be disappointed, and it's not the juice carton.
GS were probably willing (initially) to pay a hefty sum to get into that market, so then the question becomes: why Apple? At the time Apple had a net float of >$200B. When you have that much cash and assets to deal with, you no longer seek the help of a bank. You are a bank.
In a funny twist, their Marcus brand is still alive at least in the UK, and they are offering some of the (supposedly)[ß] best front line savings rates to attract customers. I've never seen anyone with their brand of card, though, so clearly their offered rates are not attractive enough.
ß: few other UK high street banks are offering even better rates, but every single one of them has set a ludicrously low cap on the amount they pay good rates on before dropping to just-about-tolerable rates for whatever goes above the threshold.
It is funny that you think Goldman is so monolithic. They have 45,000 employees, and a vast array of businesses. As a related point, JPMorgan is both a mega commercial/retail bank plus ibank. They do both types of transactions.
Marcus still exists in the US. I use them for my savings account. They don't have anything besides that that I know of (checking, brokerage). Current APY 4.1% so as good as you can find in a savings account here.
Fidelity Cash Management has a 4.5% yield (which is also state-tax free for those in states with income tax, which could be a boost of up to 0.5% for some).
My American Express savings account gets me an APY of 4.1%, so there's other options, but agree that it seems like either are the best rate I've found in the US.
CIBC Agility savings has always been better than Amex savings has (though I agree Amex has always been among the highest too)
CIBC is currently at 4.61%!
Note: I'm aware it's a Canadian bank, but this particular branch of it does business in the US and this is a normal USD account.
Apple Savings is 4.1% as well
I assume Apple Savings is just provided by Goldman, right? So same savings account, different UI.
Yes the money market is GS, which by the way that rate has been dropping by roughly 0.1% roughly every quarter
I have both that and Marcus and I can remember a week or two where they were different. Odd, right?
Why would you decaffeinate strawberry juice
It's a bit ambiguous but I think they may have been suggesting that the carton is decaffeinated.
The vampires receive bonuses for caffeine ingestion.
And who could afford to give out bonuses in this economy?
Saying "good job Apple" in the context of payment processing deals is like cheering on a slightly more buff gladiator bashing in the face of his opponent. Both of them intend to fleece the users, they just disagree over who gets priority access.
I'm not saying you can't have a favorite gladiator, I'm saying you can't pretend this isn't pugilism.
My Apple Card gives me an entire month to pay off the balance, and I am actively encouraged to keep paying it off throughout the month. The cash back rewards are simple and quickly paid out. There are no late fees. The UI for the software side of it is exceptional.
It is by far my favorite credit card.
It's also nice that the cash back is actually cash which can be automatically directed into the accompanying savings account, where it accrues 4.10% APY interest. None of the usual funny business with points with shifting valuations, restrictions on how they can be spent, etc.
Not that I mind anyone's preference for cash, but there are a ton of people in the credit card rewards 'game' who vastly prefer points (especially the top tier of 'transferable' points). In general, you can usually get more value out of points. My main point (no pun intended) is that the implication that paying rewards in something like points or miles is done mainly as a scam, is inaccurate. On the good credit cards, at least.
The cash back rewards is not, as far as I know, actually all that good in comparison to its competitors like American Express. Giving a month to pay off a balance I believe is referred to as a "grace period" which is pretty common place in credit cards. A month is nice, but I believe most cards are usually around 4 weeks. But the UI for the card's online banking is fairly attractive, especially if you're already an iPhone user, which I imagine most Apple card holders would be.
> The cash back rewards is not, as far as I know, actually all that good in comparison to its competitors like American Express.
There are definitely cards with better rewards, but few with such a straightforward and simple cash back program. Also, the rewards are not bad by any means. I also like the tight integration with the high yield savings account, which again is not the best rate possible, but makes up for it with the UI of its software and overall simplicity and ease of use.
> Giving a month to pay off a balance I believe is referred to as a "grace period" which is pretty common place in credit cards. A month is nice, but I believe most cards are usually around 4 weeks.
I'm talking about the actual due date, not the grace period which is a different thing entirely. You have until the last day of the following month to pay off the balance to avoid incurring interest, which is different than any other credit card I've ever used. Usually the due dates are a specific day of the month which often changes every month.
Most credit cards have the due date on the same day every month. You can also change it online to to another day of the month if that's something you care about. Personally I just set up autopay from a brokerage account and never think about when anything is due. Why would it matter?
It’s not a huge deal on its own but it’s part of the overall “user friendly” nature of the card as a whole. Having the whole balance be due at the end of the month just makes it easier for me to use it as my “daily driver” rewards credit card.
I think the due date can be different than the closing date, which is when the interest is calculated, and they are not the same on every card.
The app is such a killer feature for me that I’m more than willing to accept somewhat lower rewards compared to other cards.
> you can't pretend this isn't pugilism.
What's wrong with pugilism?
what am I missing? The article talks about apple failing to send consumer disputes, how is that on GS?
More details in the press release. The complaint against Apple is the the UI led some people to think they had competed a dispute, when there was an additional step. The complaint against Goldman is that their backend systems were broken and they failed to act on the disputes.
Failing to process or share consumer disputes: Apple Card users were directed to dispute transactions through a “Report an Issue” feature in the Wallet app. For some disputes, Apple sent consumers a separate link in the Messages app asking for more information. Apple failed to send these disputes to Goldman Sachs if the second form was incomplete. Even after Goldman Sachs alerted Apple to this issue, the problem persisted. As a result, neither Apple nor Goldman Sachs investigated tens of thousands of such disputes and cardholders were unfairly held responsible for disputed transactions.
Failing to investigate cardholder disputes: For the disputes that Apple did send to Goldman Sachs, the bank failed to consistently send acknowledgment notices within 30 days, conduct reasonable investigations, or send resolution letters explaining the determinations of its investigations within 90 days. These failures led to Goldman Sachs illegally placing damaging information on consumers’ credit reports and holding cardholders responsible for potentially fraudulent or unauthorized purchases.
Awkward time for Apple.
- Moves into finance have been a failure, cancelling their BNPL as well.
- Vision Pro basically dead at this point.
- A large number of senior execs getting reshuffled/moving on from the company.
- Apple Intelligence, still no where to be seen.
This is most likely a Goldman Sachs issue, but still, who at Apple decided to partner with the bank that hasn't got any track record in consumer banking?
The only advantage GS would have had over competitors is that they would have offered Apple very generous terms because they wanted to leverage Apple to get into a new market. Choosing GS was not very customer centric.
There’s actually some nuance to this. One of Apple’s big requirements was to have quite lax acceptance criteria. They didn’t want lots of their customers being denied for cards and creating a negative brand association.
Apparently GS was up for that. Possibly because they didn’t actually know what they are doing. My understanding is the loss rate was way too high for them to be profitable.
It was well covered at the time, here’s the first example to come up in a quick search: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/12/goldmans-gs-apple-card-busin...
Without simply citing greed, I find this difficult to justify or explain. Apple is a premium, luxury brand. They make opinionated hardware and software that has offended many. They’ve certainly never given a phone away, but they’re afraid of offending someone by turning them down if they have bad credit? Rubbish.
Forgive me, I’m not trying to shoot the messenger. Nuance or not, I think GP is right. It wasn’t very customer centric.
> Apple is a premium, luxury brand.
People all across the income/wealth spectrum use Apple products, in huge proportions.
Apple is worth $3t because both of those things are true.
Apple and Huawei both sell smartphones, which one has the margins of Ferrari and which one has the margins of Toyota?
Is GS though a good luxury "brand"? I don't know much about them but they seem like a Big Name. Maybe that's all they wanted? The prestige of being tied to GS
I can understand the surface appeal beyond greed. Goldman Sachs offers good terms, is willing to have higher acceptance rates, has a strong 'luxury'/'high net worth' feel about the brand etc.
Even with the benefit of the doubt it was naive. Did no one think, he maybe there's a reason all these companies with a lot more experience than GS aren't giving credit cards to everyone?
The real brand risk was never denying people cards – that still happened anyway, the risk was exactly what's happening now.
Also I've been working with their latest Swift & SwiftUI and I think they've made some fundamental missteps with the language and the APIs. Nothing that a company of Apple's size can't correct with enough effort I suppose but it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their software engineering chops.
Apple Intelligence is on the eligible devices in beta, I've had it for a little bit now. It's nothing exciting but I've been using it.
Keep in mind what you're using isn't much of what they're launching. 18.1 only has a couple of features, the three releases after that have the bulk of what they demonstrated.
This is fair, it's not vaporware at least.
The press release from CFPB the article is about: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
Checks out. I never carry a balance on my Apple Card and always make sure to pay it off every month. Yet, I’ve noticed discrepancies between the transactions shown in the Apple Wallet UI and my PDF statements. The two times I’ve called customer service, they just put me on hold and say they’ll look into it.
This has never happened with any of my AMEX cards, so I can only conclude that either the whole division is incompetent or there’s something more troubling going on
I’ve spent over a…lot of money…on the Apple Card. It’s my wife and I’s primary card ever since it came out. Never paid any interest, and made lots of Daily Cash. More than anything I just find the wallet app so much more pleasant than other banking apps.
Source:
CFPB Orders Apple and Goldman Sachs to Pay Over $89 Million for Apple Card Failures
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41926162)
Cost of doing business.
A very tiny one at that. $25M to Apple is a little over two hours of revenue, if my math is roughly correct.
Comparisons like this are absurd. Why should fines associated with a small segment of apple's business be compared to their global revenue? Is the implication that all offenses should be fined based on global revenue, such that if they broke some law in Liechtenstein that the government there should be able to demand 5% (or whatever) of apple's worldwide revenue?
What you are implying is that it is a cost of doing business. That is the only conclusion from making the fine relative to the product in question. If it is intended to be a deterrent from future abuse, as I believe fines are intended to be, then the company as a whole needs to see the fine as a viable threat to their profitability.
The fine should be a deterrent.
If the fine is too low, it’s just absorbed as a “cost of doing business” and ceases to be a deterrent.
>The fine should be a deterrent.
That's a reasonable position to hold, but crappy comparisons like in the OP doesn't contribute little to the discussion. The fine might be tiny part of worldwide revenue, but how much money are they making off apple cards? If that's tiny as well then the argument is moot.
The tight integration of the Apple Card with their hardware also means it makes their hardware (iPhones) better. They can lose money on the Apple Card and make money if it means some people like the integration enough to buy into the iPhone ecosystem (sign up for an Apple Card and get an interest free loan to buy an iPhone? I can see that getting new customers)
> The fine might be tiny part of worldwide revenue, but how much money are they making off apple cards? If that's tiny as well then the argument is moot.
I disagree. I don’t think the fine should be relative to money gained by breaking a rule. Then it’s not a deterrent for large companies.
You end up in a situation where very large companies can act in illegal ways and just absorb the fine.
A company doing anything worth fining should be fined relative to the size of that company (by some metric)
So going back to the Liechtenstein example, if Apple did a bad there what would be the appropriate punishment? Based on what you're saying you'd want them to be fined a significant portion of their worldwide revenue, which seems absurd. It would basically deprive people living in small countries access to products from multinational companies, because nobody would want to risk 5% (or whatever) of their worldwide revenue to get 1% more market share.
> It would basically deprive people living in small countries access to products from multinational companies, because nobody would want to risk 5% (or whatever) of their worldwide revenue to get 1% more market share.
Sorry, I’m not sure I follow. How would selling products to smaller countries automatically incur fines for illegal activity?
Apple wants to operate in Liechtenstein. Under your proposed regime of a "deterrent", that would put them at risk of fines worth 5% (or whatever) of their global revenue. Of course, they're not going to intentionally break laws, but shit happens and despite their best efforts they might still get fined. Faced with that prospect, they go "nah" and stay out of the market entirely, because the extra 0.1% profit is massively outweighed by the potential 5% revenue in fines. All 40k Liechtensteiners are worse off as a result. This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening in EU right now, as Apple doesn't want to deal with the legal headaches associated with Apple Intelligence and therefore opts out of the EU market entirely.
> Of course, they're not going to intentionally break laws
I wish I lived in your world.
> but shit happens and despite their best efforts they might still get fined.
You’re telling me that it’s okay that laws are sometimes broken with no real consequence because the company in question may mistakenly break laws?
Yikes…
> Under your proposed regime of a "deterrent", that would put them at risk of fines worth 5% (or whatever) of their global revenue
I don’t know if revenue is the exact metric to use to making a deterring fine. It very well may not be.
But the fine should act as some real deterrent
> All 40k Liechtensteiners are worse off as a result. This isn't a hypothetical. It's happening in EU right now, as Apple doesn't want to deal with the legal headaches associated with Apple Intelligence and therefore opts out of the EU market entirely.
This is a very complex topic and I don’t feel well equipped to discuss it with any real nuance.
But here I go anyway…
I’m not convinced that not having access to Apple intelligence makes a country worse off.
Not all countries need to be supported by a large corporation. That’s not strictly a good thing.
If they (the EU) wanted that, they’d lax their regulations…
I don’t think anyone’s saying it would be automatic. But the risk of running afoul of laws and regulations is non-zero, and if the penalties are too steep, then it may be a wiser choice to stay out of small markets entirely.
> But the risk of running afoul of laws and regulations is non-zero,
So the solution is to make breaking laws not truly punished?
Seems like companies should be damn sure they’re not breaking laws…
Of course not every fine needs to put the company in danger of bankruptcy.
Fines could start relatively small and grow quickly and exponentially with repeated offenses.
But they should act as a real deterrent.
This still makes no sense.
If a company with $1B in revenue, rolls something out to make $10M, then anything over $10M is suitable punishment - you turned a profitable venture into a money losing venture.
Yeah that works fine if the company in question is $1B. $10M is 1% of that company. That’s a deterrent.
But if that company was $1T then that fine is effectively the cost of legal research. It won’t deter that company from trying to weasel their way around regulations in the future as the cost of trying justifies the potential upside.
I disagree. It doesn’t matter if it’s a $1T company, the fine effectively turned their profitable decision into a loss.
That seems like a reasonable approach.
By your logic, if a company is running at a loss should the fine be negative?
> It doesn’t matter if it’s a $1T company, the fine effectively turned their profitable decision into a loss.
Sure, but I don’t think just causing any amount of loss acts as a deterrent. Especially if the company is large enough to absorb the loss with no real consequences.
> By your logic, if a company is running at a loss should the fine be negative?
No, that’s a dumb question. A negative fine isn’t a fine and isn’t a deterrent…
I don’t know what metric one should use to determine how to make a fine a deterrent. Maybe market cap?
But the point of a fine is to be a deterrent.
> But the point of a fine is to be a deterrent.
Is it? Or is it purely to make the action a net negative?
The purpose of a fine is to deter an action.
Making an action a net negative _can_ act as a deterrent as in the $1B case earlier.
The issue is that, at a certain scale, the risk of simply having an action be a net negative may be worth the potential upside.
I honestly don’t understand what’s so disagreeable about this idea.
What else would a fine be other than a serious deterrent to an illegal action? A mild annoyance?
What else could the point be? I guess social retribution? But that’s just pointless.
> The issue is that, at a certain scale, the risk of simply having an action be a net negative may be worth the potential upside
I agree there, but if you're going to come up with a system of fines to incentivize not breaking the law, it needs to make sense.
Just making it a huge numbers is likely to not even pass muster in the courts.
A $10B company paying a $1B fine for sending out spam mail to 10 customers would be seen as "cruel and unusual punishment".
The total fine is ~3x the apparent consumer loss, which seems reasonable.
If you expect the fine to be more legal retribution for consumer loss, sure.
I’d like to live in a world where fines are deterrents, though.
You can say this about literally any punishment.
Not Apple's fines in Europe. And Tim Cook is vocal about that.
To me that says EU is doing the right thing.
Especially for the first time either is doing a card
Can they go after Apple next for aggressively locking your entire account and library of past purchases because they couldn't bill you $10 for an iCloud subscription?
I don’t want to diminish others experiences, because I’m sure they’re just as important as mine. All I can say is anecdotally I haven’t had any issues with disputes…in fact the dispute experience for me has been better than other cards. The app makes it quite simple.
The stupidest thing about the Apple Card is how broken their customer service systems are due to a combo of Goldman never issuing a card before, and the tight integration with Apple for account management.
Primary example of this is there is no way to update your email address with the bank. It's your Apple ID and can't change. How do I know this? I changed my Apple ID several years ago, but my credit card comms still come to the old address, and no matter how many times I contact either bank or Apple support, they have no power to fix this. The bank has zero access to edit my information at all, and Apple just sends me in idiotic circles like logging out and into my devices, deleting all other contact emails from my Apple account, etc.
> there is no way to update your email address with the bank. It's your Apple ID and can't change.
These articles worked for me?
Update your Apple Card account information (including email address): https://support.apple.com/en-us/102512
Change your Apple Account primary email address: https://support.apple.com/en-us/109353
That's just the thing: I changed my Apple Account primary email following the instructions in your second link (which is where your first link links to for "email"). I even purged the old email completely so that it's not even an 'alternate' email anymore (which I shouldn't have had to do, and which made things difficult for me in other areas, but was Apple's only idea).
Only Apple Card didn't get the memo and there's no way to poke them to make them update.
Slap on the wrist fines won't go a long way to help customers.
Oh, you mean that you actually _have to have_ * actual * support thats not handled by some dimwit AI?
tsk tsk. Almost feel bad.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41926162
Edit: no discussion == no dupe, it isn't useful to link threads with no/few comments.
Them's the breaks. I don't love it either, but submission spam doesn't move the needle for our community regardless of timestamps, especially when one randomly didn't gain traction first. If you have a better solution, feel free to email hn@ycombinator.com, maybe the staff will take it up!
Don't sweat the small stuff. This story made it to the front page, isn't that cool? Someone was on to something.
Best check again, that post was 1h 29m 57s prior.
I'm struggling a little bit with the "misleading consumers into getting interest-free monthly payments" part. I never found the checkout flow particularly unclear or obtuse. It kind of sounds like consumers assumed that making a purchase with the apple card automatically enrolled you in the payment plan, versus having to go through a different checkout flow. I do kind of recall that when I used that feature once, it might have been implemented through Apple Pay? That would be supported by the fact that it was only available through Safari if the purchase was made online. I'm probably an outlier in being likely to experience that as I've just used Safari for a while, and so I'm getting their first-class experience. I am no stranger to how utterly awful Apple's products are outside its own ecosystem (like any Apple software designed to run on Windows.)
All of these issues would be infuriating if I encountered them, but it's interesting how the breakdown of failures seems to be 50/50 "Apple doing a terrible job designing a clear and consistent UI or process" and "being bit by their attempts at locking people into their ecosystem, independent of the card" and the Goldman Sachs portion seems just outright malicious.
Incompetence and malice combined are a really powerful force.
So I can kind of understand where the confusion comes from. I used this to buy my wife and I MacBooks last year. When I started the checkout flow I didn’t initially realize I was just applying for an Apple Card, rather than just being a loan with a fixed payment. I could see people that don’t understand how zero interest offers interact with revolving credit accounts might not have understood.
But the UI is pretty clear when you make a payment, if you drop the amount under the recommended payment how much interest it’s going to cost you.
I surprised with Apple switching from their loan plans to open credit accounts. The loan plans were setup like student loans where the debt could not be wiped out with bankruptcy where open credit can.
As far as I know, Goldman Sachs didn't have previous experience issuing credit cards either, so maybe it was also (partly) incompetence on their part.
> I'm struggling a little bit with the "misleading consumers into getting interest-free monthly payments" part. I never found the checkout flow particularly unclear or obtuse
I really wish everybody who makes claims like these would go to the local library and do volunteer tech support for the elderly, poorly educated and cognitively challenged for a day.
The bar for these things is not "would the average HN reader find this confusing" it is "would the average customer find this confusing". The average IQ is 100, more than half of the US population reads below the grade 6 level.
Agreed though "it needs to be below 6th grade reading level" would essentially invalidate every contract/license/agreement ever entered into..
There have been several public-interest reports and scorecardings of the readability/unreadability of the language in various consumer/financial contracts (the grade-level required to understand it x the number of minutes/hours to read it).
Yes and ARMs got a simple one-pager treatment post-GFC thanks to the CFPB.
I'm just saying that "6th grade reading level" is extremely basic level of literacy that a lot of contracts probably couldn't be easily communicated to that level.
Agreed. Lots of people/bodies/academics have measured contract readability; I didn't say the US CFPB was the only arbiter.
Lina Khan seems to be one of the bigger contributors to curbing excesses, at least in the domains she's authorized to, and she may not keep her job in the next admin.
(As to ARMs, from the regulator point of view, much of the economic damage done is in the rear-view mirror; the next big thing is presumably student loans.)
That's usually not an issue if your contract and marketing claims are aligned.
Even if the customers didn't you read the contract, they still got the gist of it through the marketing copy and probably won't hit a point where they're really mad about you. Actual trials will also be easier to deal with as you're in good faith.
For all the press we get on "frivolous" lawsuits, no average Joe are winning actual stupid suits.
Here it's an issue because what the credit card is fundamentally made for (make you pay fees on additional services) and the marketing hook (no additional fee) are at odds and is only true for very specific conditions someone can easily fall out of.
Absolutely there are bad actors, and consumers getting taken advantage of.
However as you point out - credit cards essentially make money from the less financially savvy by design. It's not entirely a bad thing, in a sense.. some people just run out of money between paychecks and need some liquidity.
Credit access vs predatory debt are sometimes in the eye of the beholder and a very fine line.
It also reminds me of some of the "I've been paying my student debt for 10 years and the balance went up!" like.. yeah, but it means you paid less than the interest. Would you have been happier paying more for the last 10 years? Like what outcome were you expecting and what college education did you go into debt for that didn't prepare you to have reviewed your monthly statements even once in 10 years to realize this?
Good! This idea that businesses should be free to fleece the stupid and under educated with obtuse contract phraseology and walls of text that have managed to include things like "the soul of your first born" because nobody can reasonably be expected read and understand the full thing is just asinine, naked failure of the government to protect people from predatory business practices.
Caveat Emptor should not mean "They can make the contract literally inscrutable and then you just have to go get fucked".
There's nothing wrong with reasonable consumer protections and required default warranties that CANNOT be discharged by a TOS. You shouldn't have to take a second job to understand whether you are signing away your soul when signing up for a damn credit card.
Legalese is about specificity. How does being less precise assist understanding with specificity?
I cannot, in a contract, just refer to a street address. For reasons of specificity, I must state where the survey marker corner is located -exactly- and then detail how many feet from that in a direction, etc. These long descriptions ensure that there are no misunderstandings later.
The verbiage of these contracts have grown more specific through use. People, or companies, wiggle out of things and new contract language is invented to prevent such wiggle-room in the future.
How would one go about accomplishing a 'dumbing down' of a contract, without losing the anti-wiggle specificity?
Also, I really like that word. Say it with me, please: 'specificity.' Neat.
> How would one go about accomplishing a 'dumbing down' of a contract
Perhaps go with the UCC default and not try to have the buyer opt out of every specific consumer right.
The longer the contract, the more one party is probably being screwed with great specificity.
And that’s why people should not trust Apple Intelligence : the partnership with open ai and toward data security is a real risk.
None of your data is sent to OpenAI other than the text you type.
So no different to using their website.
My recent experience with Apple has been anti-user .. juice their bottom line....
- iCloud storage notifications saying have to upgrade to $9.99 plan to continue to store my photos, videos and even worse if I wanted to continue getting my iCloud emails. What(?), as my Google Photos is still sucking/backing up all the same media (goes back to 2016) for free. LAME Apple especially threat of not getting my iCloud emails!!!!
- Apple Intelligence is so LAME compared to chatGPT app that runs on my iPhone. ChatGPT's iPhone app, it's assistant is almost sentient while Siri is still HORRID as it still at times doesnt understand you, you cant have a conversation with it or have it recall previous conversation/info you previously discussed as you can with GPT on iPhone. Again very LAME Apple!
If Microsoft and Open AI made a ChatGPT AI phone I'd drop Apple quickly especially after my first point above ...threatening me that i wont receive my emails if I didnt give them more money!
> iCloud storage notifications saying have to upgrade to $9.99 plan to continue to store my photos, videos and even worse if I wanted to continue getting my iCloud emails. What(?), as my Google Photos is still sucking/backing up all the same media (goes back to 2016) for free. LAME Apple especially threat of not getting my iCloud emails!!!!
To my knowledge Google will do the same thing if you are running out of space. I believe it is shared also but I could be wrong. I have been out of Google's ecosystem for a while.
Apple should increase the base amount of storage with iCloud for free. What you mentioned itself is not an Apple thing to my knowledge.
> Apple Intelligence is so LAME compared to chatGPT app that runs on my iPhone. ChatGPT's iPhone app, it's assistant is almost sentient while Siri is still HORRID as it still at times doesnt understand you, you cant have a conversation with it or have it recall previous conversation/info you previously discussed as you can with GPT on iPhone. Again very LAME Apple!
Unless you are on the beta, you are not actually using Apple Intelligence. Even if you are on the 18.1 beta, they have made it clear that they there are multiple updates for everything to come out.
THanks, just always have had good user experience in every way with Apple, so getting email notifications one after the other where they said you need to upgrade if you want us to continue backing your stuff up was mildly odd. Yet, in their first communication they didnt mention anything about not getting email yet they did in the third or so email which felt very anti-user to me.
As for Apple Intelligence Ive been using it since late September/early October. Been using ChatGPT app on iPhone for months to more so I expected Siri to be comparable to GPT but its not even close at all. Siri still doesnt understand you always like GPT does, points you to a Google search (maybe that's due to a built agreement with Google) for most things and can not recall how many calories i ate a few days ago (example of recall memory). Using GPT while driving is awesome/handy/i find it very useful (to get info for various chores & count my daily calories). Yet Siri to have the same experience would cause me to have accident.
Yeah, all of that Siri stuff you're trying isn't there yet.
18.1 (the current beta) has minor improvements to Siri for immediate follow up requests and parsing requests where you stumble over words. 18.2 is supposed to be picking up ChatGPT integration so Siri can ask it about things. The "personal context" recall is apparently in 18.4, so we won't see it until next year.
Honestly, 18.1 launching the new Siri UI (the glowy look) feels like a bad idea -- I'd have kept it until 18.4 when the real intelligence improvements actually land.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/22/apple-intelligence-feat...
On the flip side, if Apple can keep most/all the processing on device, I'll accept a modest reduction in quality compared to ChatGPT. Admittedly I haven't tried Apple Intelligence yet so I don't know just how big the reduction in quality is.
> if Apple can keep most/all the processing on device, I'll accept a modest reduction in quality compared to ChatGPT.
Be ready to accept a huge decrease in quality, even compared to chatgpt 3.5
Phones are not computer, they use battery. Whatever apple do, it can't beat the law of physics.
There is no way but send it all on remote computer for ai.
Agreed, but the kind of stuff I want it to be capable of is way more limited than I'd ask of ChatGPT. I've tried a little model on my iPhone (Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct) that was better than I expected, both in capability and in responsiveness. Gives me hope for the future of on-device processing.
That's cool... personally Im most interested in cool tech/innovation over privacy if that's what you mean by keep the processing on the device.
Many of us however would strongly prefer that our photos, documents, emails, contacts etc not be stored unencrypted on a server.
And the capabilities of this model would still be limited as well given that Apple is not going to be able to host a large parameter one for each user.
yeah everyone is different ... im either an innovator (of go nowhere technology lol) or an early adopter. Like Im enjoying my Ray Ban Metas since last October (use them daily). Yet for many they are a privacy nightmare.
Apples constant push for subscription icloud data storage is predatory at best. The amount of users/clients I come across with devices way out of date re software/security patches because their iphones not got enough space on it to download its own update and it doesn't provide a easy way to transfer large chunks of data off it like photos/videos is ridiculous. Something like 50% of users easily. Sample size probably upwards of 50. They get constantly harassed by crap asking them to buy icloud storage.
>and it doesn't provide a easy way to transfer large chunks of data off it like photos/videos is ridiculous
Using the web interface of another cloud provider to upload files there, and downloading it on your other device? Most cloud providers give you around 10GB for free, which should be more than enough room to install ios updates.
yeah the whole Apple Intelligence only available to 15 and 16 iPhone users is anti-user / juice profits move.
The horrid thing is Apple Intelligence is not worth upgrading your device for and yet that's their marketing to get people to upgrade lol. As another commenter in this thread commented a comparable ChatGPT Siri is coming yet not for some months.
Definitely would jump to another platform if the phone is an AI sentient like driven phone (new paradigm in phone design / layout where there's not as much UI). So far ChatGPT is my best experience with such an AI and Microsoft who owns what half of Open AI did create pretty good Windows phone back in the day. Maybe it will happen... been wanting such since I first used ChatGPT.
> yeah the whole Apple Intelligence only available to 15 and 16 iPhone users
iPhone 14 has 6GB RAM. iPhone 15 Pro + 16 have 8GB RAM.
The LORA adapters need to be loaded into memory so seems reasonable they would need extra.
Uh, Gmail also has usage limits for each tier. I know before I’ve painstakingly removed emails with large attachments just so I can keep receiving my email.
15gb on the free tier...empty your emails folks. This madness of keeping every email is insane. I had a user with 60000 unopened emails on one account just 2 weeks ago. It's like some folks refuse to do basic data/comms house keeping.
Bush league. https://i.imgur.com/ic0RJXO.png
(Or, what happens when you get an early GMail invite and erroneously think, "Awesome, I have a four-character email address. How cool is that?")
I have junk gmail address that gets filtered into my real gmail account (Zunk label instead of Junk) which keeps my real gmail account clean (few to handful of emails a day of things that are meaningful). Ive always have given out my junk gmail address to anyone i dont know personally or do business with.
Google no longer offers unlimited photo backup and Apple Intelligence hasn’t been released yet…
As of today 18.1 Apple Intelligence was released. I was running the Apple Intelligence beta for the last month.
18.1 has not been released, it will be released on Monday, October 28th and it will still not contain all the features they previewed (nor did the beta).
Ah my bad i just updated to 18.1 per a system settings notification i received today. I was running 18.1 betas the last few weeks so I guess for beta users they were updated today to regular 18.1.
What does this have to do with the Apple credit card?