- Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) held a big event at its Cupertino headquarters on Monday, and much of the focus was on Apple’s new TV service, Apple TV Plus.
- Apple invited Hollywood A-listers like Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and even the iconic Oprah Winfrey to help celebrate the impending launch of Apple TV Plus, which will feature Apple's own original programming when it arrives this fall.
- But the biggest announcement Apple made on Monday wasn’t about original TV shows, or even its new subscription services for magazines or video games. It was a credit card, called the Apple Card.
Forget Apple's new TV service coming this fall. The biggest announcement Apple made this week, full stop, is Apple Card, which is an extension of the Apple Pay service that's been around for almost 5 years now.
On September 9, 2014, at the same event where Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the iPhone 6, Apple introduced a new service called Apple Pay.
Apple Pay was created because plastic credit cards felt “outdated and vulnerable,” according to Apple. Credit cards could be stolen, and a card’s important numbers and security codes were exposed by default.
Apple Pay offered a more elegant, secure way to pay for goods. A couple of button presses could summon your favorite payment method (credit card, debit card, gift card, you name it) on your iPhone or Apple Watch, which you’d then touch to a merchant’s NFC panel to pay. That’s it — all of the identifying information on your card is kept private and secure, from merchants but also from Apple.
On Monday, Apple took its vision of Apple Pay one step further: by partnering with a pair of financial institutions (MasterCard and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)) to offer its own credit card, which is unlike any other credit card out there.
The Apple Card brings Apple’s trademark simplicity to the credit card system. Not only did it redesign the card itself, Apple also reimagined what it looks like to pay for goods, get rewards for those goods, and pay off the card itself.
Here are the tenets of the Apple Card, and why it is Apple's biggest announcement of 2019 so far: