[Apple iOS] New iPhone & watch OS - Page 4

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published a report describing the years and events leading up to design chief Jony Ive's recently announced departure. Among other things, it claimed Ive had become increasingly disengaged from the company and its design teams after Steve Jobs' death, in part because of his frustration with a new, emerging Apple leadership that focused more on operations than design.

In the wake of that report, Apple CEO Tim Cook—who had allegedly frustrated Ive with his lack of interest in product design, the story's sources claimed—emailed NBC News and MSNBC Senior Media Reporter Dylan Byers calling the story "absurd." Cook said its "conclusions just don't match with reality" and claimed that it "distorts" the events described. Byers then claimed on Twitter that a Wall Street Journal spokesperson told him "the paper stands by its report."

The story "is based on conversations over more than a year with people who worked with Mr. Ive, as well as people close to Apple’s leadership," the Journal says. It claims that Ive clashed with other members of the company's leadership over the positioning of the Apple Watch, which he saw as a fashion-focused product. Meanwhile, unnamed leaders saw it as an extension of the iPhone, and they came to feel that the company had lost its focus on design as key senior roles were stacked with operations and business-focused personnel.

According to the report, Ive was promoted in 2015 to Chief Design Officer, not just to recognize his expanded oversight for hardware, software, retail, and more, but also as a way to allow him to take more time to work from home to have space from the company to think after a frustrating year that saw the Watch, a product he was heavily invested in, fail to meet initial expectations in the market. The Journal's sources claim Ive sometimes failed to show up for meetings and seemed disengaged in some that he did attend, dispiriting the design team that admired him.

Ive was given a more involved role again in 2017, the piece says, but he again became less engaged over time, at least in part because he was traveling frequently to the UK to spend time with his ailing father.

Titled "Jony Ive Is Leaving Apple, but His Departure Started Long Ago," the article draws all this together to paint a picture of a company struggling to introduce new products because of the current leadership's emphasis on operational and engineering matters over design ones—supporting many observers' theories about the company's struggles to adapt to a post-Steve Jobs reality.

While strongly worded, the email does not clarify exactly what about the story Cook believes to be absurd, out of touch with reality, or distorted—a strategy that casts doubt on the report while making it difficult to productively assess the rebuttal.

Apple's current leadership does have a very different focus than the company once had. In the wake of slowing iPhone sales, Apple has begun to emphasize ways of monetizing users over the long run by offering what it hopes will be valuable services and content rather than leaning entirely on high margins and volumes for hardware sales to keep returns to investors strong.

Whether that will have been the right emphasis for Apple, its shareholders, and its users in the long run remains to be seen. In the meantime, Ive's new design firm will count Apple as a customer in 2020 after the transition concludes. So he has not yet completely parted ways with the company.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the Apple Card would arrive in August on the company’s last earnings call, and here it is: Apple’s new credit card, issued in partnership with Goldman Sachs, will begin a “preview rollout” today, and then become broadly available to all iPhone owners in the US later this month.

Apple says a random selection of people who signed up to be notified about the Apple Card will be invited to sign up today, although the company won’t disclose exactly how many people will be in the preview group. The signup process, which requires iOS 12.4, involves entering your address, birthday, income level, and last four digits of your Social Security number. That information is sent to Goldman Sachs, which will approve or decline your application in real time — Apple says it should take less than a minute. (There’s a TransUnion credit check involved, so if you’ve locked that info you’ll have to unlock it.)

Apple says the Apple Card is not meant to directly compete with premium cards like the Chase Sapphire or American Express Platinum cards — the goal is to be broadly accessible to every iPhone owner, so the signup requirements will not be as strict as those cards.

Once you’ve been approved, your new card will show up in your Apple Wallet immediately and be available for use — you can request Apple’s fancy titanium card for free during setup and it will arrive in the mail later. Setting that card up is neat: the envelope it’s in has an NFC tag, so you just tap the phone to it and it activates automatically, no phone call or sticker required.

I got to hold the card itself and it is very nice, although it is fairly thick and felt a little bit heavier than the typical metal credit card. You can use the card without your phone nearby like any other card, but it doesn’t support contactless payments — Apple obviously wants you to use your phone or watch for that.

Once you’re all set up, you will actually have three credit card numbers associated with your Apple Card: the number assigned to your phone, the number assigned to the physical card, and a virtual number you can access in the app for online merchants that don’t take Apple Pay. You can request a new virtual number at any time. The card itself doesn’t have a expiration date or security code, and it doesn’t have a number printed on it, but you can lock the card if you misplace it or deactivate it entirely from the Wallet app with a single tap.

The Apple Card interface in the Wallet app is extremely nice: it provides detailed information about all your purchases, using machine learning to clean up merchant names and categorize your spending over time. You can set payment schedules in a variety of ways, play with a circular slider to see exactly how much interest you’ll be charged at various, and see how much you’re spending weekly and monthly.

Compared to something like Intuit’s Mint, it’s definitely smarter and simpler, but it’s also limited to just one card, so its overall utility is a little limited if you have any other cards or payments in your life to manage.

Apple isn’t charging any late fees, annual fees, or international fees on this card, and it says that it doesn’t see any of your purchase data at all — all that transaction data cleanup and categorization happens locally on your phone. Goldman Sachs can obviously see that data since it has to approve or decline purchases, but Apple says it’s entered into a special privacy agreement with Goldman that restricts Apple Card purchase data from being used for anything other than operating the card itself — it can’t be used for advertising, sold to third parties, or anything else.

Apple’s rewards program is much simpler than any other major card: the company offers 3 percent cash back on any Apple transaction, from the Apple Store to the App Store to even iCloud storage, 2 percent on any Apple Pay transactions, and 1 percent on purchases made with the physical card or virtual card number. That cash hits your Apple Pay Cash account every day, and you can use it to pay off your balance, send it to friends, or transfer it a bank.

It’s a little skimpier than other premium card perks like access to airline lounges, concierge services, and so on, but Apple believes the simplicity and speed of just getting cash back will entice premium card customers who are frustrated with complicated points schemes to switch, while the payment and financial health features will appeal to everyone else. (Basically: people with less money.)

There has been some fierce criticism of Apple’s fairly standard APR, which starts at 12.99 percent and goes up to 24.24 percent, but Apple says its goal is to be among the lowest possible rates you can qualify for. This is impossible to know until people start signing up, but it’s fair to say that this is still a credit card, and you should definitely treat it like one, regardless of how good the software looks.

And just like any other credit card, while it’s easy to sign up for an Apple Card and easy to spend money with it, it’s not necessarily easy to get rid of it: canceling an Apple Card requires messaging or calling Goldman Sachs.

That’s actually the most interesting thing about the Apple Card, and the thing we’ll see shake out as people get them: Apple is providing a lot of the user experience of the card, but the card itself is still a credit card issued by Goldman Sachs, and when you click the support button in Apple Wallet, you’ll be chatting with Goldman Sachs reps. Apple says the two companies are working very closely together, and that Goldman Sachs employees are being trained using Apple tools and technologies, including specific language around helping people understand credit issues. Basically, Apple says this is much more than just a very nice front-end to a Goldman Sachs card — it’s a product Apple has designed like any other.

But the end of the day, Apple can’t issue a credit card without a bank, and Goldman Sachs is that bank. We’ll just have to see how the experience of the Apple Card matches up with the high expectations of Apple customers.