Fairly certain Goldman Sachs, not Apple, is responsible for you being declined.
I tried to use Apple Pay with AppleCard for the first time last night at a restaurant. It wouldnât work via my watch or my phone. The terminal kept saying I needed to insert a chip card even though cashier said it was set to accept wireless payment.
I finally saw a message on my phone that said something like âCanât use this card with Apple Payâ which is bizarre since thatâs the whole point of AppleCard. It reminded me of the message you get when you try to use Apple Pay linked to a credit card at a place that only accepts debit cards. I used the physical card and it went through fine. Iâll have to try it someplace else that accept Apple Pay.
Marc Zeedar
Publisher, xDev Magazine and xDevLibrary
www.xdevmag.com | www.xdevlibrary.com
I agree. Not being able to download my transactions is a non-starter for me
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I wonder how the approval process really is. On all credit card applications I have seen a social security number is required. I never gave Apple my number. I wonder if they have it any way
Why this credit card? Others have cash back too. Cuz itâs âcoolâ?
Any other advantages worth applying and unlocking TransUnion for?
I donât have one yet. I donât care about cool or the cardâs design or the fact that this fancy design apparently wonât do well in leather wallets.
But I do very much like the idea of zero foreign transaction fees and improved privacy. I donât like Goldman Sachs behind it â not that I believe most other banks are much better. I plan on trying it out. The worst that can happen is I decide to close it.
Great find. This was the detail that I wanted to find out. At this point, I see more and more merchants offering discounts to folks who pay in cash - nearly all the local gas stations have a 5-10 cent cash discount and some restaurants have a 5% surcharge for credit. Iâve found many foreign merchants will give an excellent discount for cash also. Many charities ask for a 4% or so surcharge to deal with the processing fees. Even Amazon offers a 2% discount for the ability to route directly to your bank account. So if this card was going to offer something different that would be useful to me, it would be better acceptance by merchants. But that is clearly a big NO. I think that everyone needs to realize that services that only have credit card payment options are certainly adding several percent to each bill in order to pay for the transaction.
I think the improved privacy is a big win. It would be lovely to be able to get a new credit card number with the tap of a button. (Hmm, that raises the question of what happens if youâve set up an auto-pay with that number for a monthly subscription. If itâs not Apple Pay behind the scenes, Iâd think the auto-pay would fail due to the number changing.)
I wonder how the approval process really is. On all credit card applications I have seen a social security number is required. I never gave Apple my number. I wonder if they have it any way
For quite some time the availability of Social Security numbers has been a wide open gateway to identity theft and fraud. Itâs why the US government discontinued the use of Social Security numbers on Medicare and Medicaid cards and as an identification factor.
An interesting aside to the whining/usability thread, I did a search for facial recognition jobs at the Apple site, and there are quite a few facial and handwriting recognition opportunities. Hereâs one for Computer Vision Engineer:
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200090881/computer-vision-engineer?team=MLAI
Security has always been important to Apple, and is becoming an even more important selling point. Facial and handwriting recognition for security purposes can maybe be as important to Apple as it will be to AR/VR, gaming and creative.
Thanks for that, Josh. I stopped reading and flipped into Wallet when I saw that. The experience was, as you said, painless. I suspect that first-line inquiries are handled by an AI-bot that read a lot like Siri. The human customer service seemed to be handled by an off-shore service center. The person was polite, but a few deficits in language construction slipped in.
Nevertheless, easy and quick, and even an implied tone of congratulations that I had been successfully opted out of arbitration. 
Denied, despite a credit score of 840. But expected. Goldman Sachs: âYour monthly debt obligations are too high given your income - examples may include credit card, loan, or housing payments.â [Emphasis added.] Oh, well. 
Both MasterCard and Visa offer a service to merchants that allow them to be notified of customer card number changes. Itâs not perfect as there are a few links in the chain, so doesnât always work (depending on who provides your credit card, who the merchant is, etc.).
https://tamebay.com/2017/02/how-visa-account-updater-mastercard-automatic-billing-updater-works.html
Automatic Update of Credit Card Info for Recurring Billing Merchants
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I applied and was granted a card. Sort of. At this time Goldman-Sachs is unable to send a physical card to a PO Box. The only place I can receive USPS mail is my PO Box, so no card for me. I can still use it via my phone and watch, and supposedly, my complaint about the lack of PO Box support has been registered. Hopefully, that support is added soon.
So, I got my card, activated it, and then did Make Default at Apple. When I then go look at my iTunes account, it shows that my Apple Card is indeed now my default payment method, but the last four displayed digits of the card number do not match the card number displayed in Walletâs Card Information. Whatâs up with that?
One of the features is you get a different number for every online transaction. That number you are seeing only works in the iTunes store and nowhere else. Pretty cool.
What iPhone do you have? Listening to the ATP.fm podcast recently, it sounds like only the latest models have background NFC capability which allows you to simply bring the phone near to the card to activate. Earlier models (e.g. iPhone X) need you to be running Wallet for the activation to work.
For those of us who had Apple Card transactions in August, the first monthly statement is now available.Sure enough, it is only available as a PDF. Tap the Total Balance button and then tap the August 2019 button in the Statements section. The bottom button is âDownload PDF Statementâ. When you access the statement, it is displayed on the iPhone in microscopic type with a share button in the upper right corner. Among the options are Airdropping it to another device, emailing it, printing it and several others.
I chose to Airdrop it my iPad, so that I could easily read the transaction log and enter the transactions in my Personal Finance program. Of course, if a .qfx version had been available, I could have Airdropped it to my Mac and then loaded the file directly into my personal finance program. Hopefully that option will be made available.
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It appears that I was optimistic about a $30 Apple Card case. Third parties are selling them now, from $39 all the way up to $900!
Iâm late to this but:
I got the Apple Card in the public beta phase. I immediately went to Europe, and used it on Apple Pay wherever my preferred card (Amex) was not accepted, and where I didnât need to use a physical card (TMI but my Chase Amazon Prime card also gives 2% in restaurants and gas stations, and does not differentiate on how payment is made).
But, in Italy, I came across my first problem: a PIN. I am very familiar with this, and cannot for the life of me understand why most US card issuers have chosen to conflate a desire to leapfrog current technologies and go to tokenization etc., with a refusal to issue PINs. Chase will issue a PIN on request. Amex will not. And, neither will Goldman Sachs on Apple Card. And thatâs OK: theyâre not alone.
I wanted to mention it here because of what I perceive as the narrative of how easy it is to text and manage the account, using the example of opting out of arbitration. I found myself getting irritated very quickly as I was asking about a circumstance I come across frequently, being the kiosk. In Italy, it was gas pumps. In Germany, it is (maybe was) often train ticket machines. But the idea that the machine can just be âtoldâ that no PIN is required does work some of the time, but not all of the time. I was forced to use my bankâs debit card to buy gas on several occasions.
The rep kept trying to school me in how I might tell someone, in another language, in effect how they might configure their own terminals, with a bald refusal to accept that this circumstance was arrogant if the terminal was staffed at all, and of course impossible where it was not. It was, as I noted with increasing anger, very Apple: a credit card version of âyouâre holding it wrong.â This was Goldman, to be clearâbut there has been a lot of commentary about how simple and clear everything is, and I found if you scratch the surface, people may find that the clarity and simplicity is not deep.
My second experience was a ghost transaction. It was valid and I was actually expecting it, and I was billed properlyâwhich is to say the total owed increasedâand I also got Apple Cash back, at 2%. But the transaction itself refused to appear in the list. Here Goldman Sachs bounced it back to Apple, and Apple Support was patchy. The first person did understand said theyâd need to investigate: fine.
But, I asked how I would pick up the thread, and they said not to worry, using the chat a future person would be able to follow it. 48 hours later, I chased itâand got advice about restoring my iPhone from a backup and other such voodoo that takes literally hours, on something that couldnât have been more obviously at âtheirâ end if it tried. Again expressing displeasure, I was told I had at least done enough to get it escalated, and someone would phone me. They never did, but shortly thereafter the transaction appeared, as expected. Someone had fixed it, which is nice, but I have no insight into why this transaction didnât appear in Wallet to begin with, or whether this was a freak edge case not worth worrying about, or whether the circumstances are eminently repeatable. I have literally never had this with any credit card transaction, ever: and on those, I am not solely reliant on one app.
Whatâs the conclusion? Yes, the UI is better. In fairness, Amex in Apple Pay is hardly awful, and I was never confused by my payees, but this is better.
Support by text is I think not better, at all. Sure, to change your address or do something very mechanical, I am sure itâs fine, but if I need to contact my card issuer itâs usually something that I cannot do on the website and is by definition higher-touch, and my experience over three weeks is that two-for-two I am seeing why I am not cutting up my Amex card. Most concerning is the idea that in some set of transactions that may be narrow (in this case I was in the UK, and it is early in the period of differentiating Apple Pay / tokenized charges from contactless, the latter being capped at ÂŁ30, or about $37, so merchants may be surprised that a âcontactlessâ transaction goes through when using Apple Pay for amounts above that), you might not see it in anything other than the total amount owing.
Apart from the aestheticâand weâre Apple fans, that does matter!âthis could mean that you owe the money, but would have no actual transaction to dispute. While fraud on Apple Card is technically difficult, it means there is some set of transactions where you might not be notified. How big is that set? How do you report it if support defaults to a script assuming you have a software issue and is unwilling to engage further without a nuke-and-pave?
Itâs OK if there are teething problems, but I am torn between acknowledging that this is new, and that there will be issues, to also knowing the this is a very mature industry, and if I have two issues in three weeks, thatâs⌠disappointing?
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Does the card work, and would the texting support work, if you go out of the country and put in a local SIM? Is it based on your phone number or your phone ID?