larryjw

Apple contracted with GS and vice versa because GS didn't have a consumer credit card system and Apple wanted one. Both companies were not burdened with legacy systems and could look anew at developing a system with unique aspects. 

Mentioned above as a comparison was Apple's partnering with AT&T for their iPhone. But, it wasn't AT&T -- it was Cingular. Unlike other providers, Cingular was willing to design and implement unique cellular features demanded by Apple. Before the Apple/Cingular, cellular providers controlled all the features of the cellular systems -- many capabilities of cell phones pre-iphone had features not supported by the phone companies -- I owned several such cell phones and they were all broken in some form or another by restrictions by the likes of Verizon, etc. 

Because GS did not have a consumer credit card, GS had to develop a system on their end from scratch which supported Apple's concepts. I don't think Apple had a lot of choices of national banks who could or would underwrite the Apple credit card and develop systems to support it. My guess is banks with legacy systems are running their credit card systems on 50 year old Cobol programs -- they can't change. 

Dead_Pool said:

Don’t ever finance anything — even at zero percent — other than real estate or education. If you don’t have the money in the bank, you can’t afford it. Financing will only dig a deeper hole. Merry Christmas 

Ridiculous. If one has a reasonable and steady income, paying off debts before interest accrues is financially smart. You’re paying out of income rather than assets. And, if you can make more money using your assets over the amount of interest incurred on the debt, that is smart. 

This is an issue? Seems like Apple’s privacy statement is perfectly compatible with what is claimed Apple is doing.

lmac said:

One of DED's favorite forms of storytelling is rewriting history to make Apple and Jobs seem to have thought of everything, but let's remember that we don't write articles about flops. You never see DED defending the genius of Ping, the iTunes social network, or the Apple HiFi. Still, there are lots of things in this article that qualify as spin, or that are just plain false. 1) When the iPad came out, people were stunned that it was just a scaled up phone that couldn't make phone calls, and not a more capable device. They were correct about its early limitations. 2) The product name almost sunk the launch, with people comparing it to feminine hygiene products. 3) The predicted dominance of the eBook and magazine industry never came to pass. 4) Jobs totally missed the importance of the App Store and 3rd party apps, which came later, and really had much to do with the success of the device. 5) Job's insistence that a stylus and keyboard were unnecessary have since been reversed, so which is it? Is Apple on the wrong track today, or did Jobs get it wrong in the beginning? 6) The iPad push into the K12 classroom as a textbook replacement is over. Schools are replacing aging iPads with Chromebooks that cost less, are more rugged, easier to manage, and simply do more. 7) The one big thing Apple got right was to make the iPad the best tablet money can buy, and to keep making incremental improvements. Staying above the low-end competition is what Apple always does, but it paid off because the low end Android and Amazon tablets are clunky, sluggish, and non-intuitive in comparison.

It's a rare case when I have an occasion to disagree with every point except #7 made in a long, detailed post. But, here we are.

"..we don't write articles about flops. " If there is one thing DED is good at is writing articles about flops. Even flops by Apple. This article is a great example.

1) I wasn't stunned by the iPad 1 being a not more capable device. I bought the iPad 1 on day one without any preconceived notion that it might be useful to me. I could afford to waste $600 of the then cost if I didn't find it useful. I scarcely used it the first month, but it grew on me as I began to find the newfangled device useful. 

2) I remember the iPad jokes. Almost sink the launch? Too much drama here. The jokes got old fast and petered out quickly. 

3) Dominance of ebook and magazines. No question that might be true as for dominance, but I take my NYT, Forbes, Washington Post, Nature, Science, ACM journals, and hundreds of books with me wherever I go whatever the device, both Kindle and Apple Books. Most of my PDFs sit comfortably in Books: the manuals of every vehicle and appliance I own; many particular important journal articles. 

4) Importance of App Store and 3rd party products? These were already part of iTunes just not a separate name. And 3rd party apps require evolution of a external development system (Xcode), and well-defined publicly accessible libraries, security protocols, OS hooks, Apple support to allow 3rd parties to develop apps. Apple's strength has been its evolution of produce capability and its ability and willingness to put a fix on a development cycle and push it out to customers and developers to use. You can go back to the 1970's and 1980's to Xerox PARC to see the result of failure to freeze and commercialize their inventions incrementally. If it wasn't for Apple, Xerox PARC's ideas and technology would have never seen the light of day. And, SmallTalk was a great language but it's dead; Xerox's idea of commercialization was charging $25,000 per seat. 

5) Stylus and keyboard? Apple's Pencil is a far cry from the Palm Pilot stylus I used, or the drawing pens for Wacom drawing boards. 

6) The K12 use of computers? They're K12 reformers' version of a wet dream. There are no good pedagogical Use Cases for K12. The educational system, public and private, is a master of wasting money on stuff that doesn't meet pedagogical goals (though the goal of turning K12 schools into jails, testing laboratories, and targets for political hacks is going well); forget about school supplies, better curriculum, appropriate class sizes, etc.

The issue I raised to myself as I was requesting the Apple Card:

First, don't know the information credit agencies get. I'm pretty sure they don't get any tax information, or have any idea of our net worth. I'm not sure they have access to investment accounts. 

In any case, except for a few special accounts, my wife and I have joint accounts. 

So, when credit worthiness is determined, they are determining that decision based on our joint financial interests. I got the Apple Card. 

Now, if my wife requests the Apple Card, they cannot determine her credit worthiness independent from the determination of our credit worthiness when I signed up, otherwise they would be, in some sense, doubling the estimate of our credit worthiness. 

Because the Apple Card account is not issued to spouses jointly, it makes sense that the first to get the Apple Card, gets the max, while the second spouse might get denied or a minimal limit. 

The solution for Apple-GS is to tie both cards together into one account by default.