Apple’s Spring Loaded Appetizers: Apple Card Family, Podcast Subscriptions, and a Purple iPhone

Originally published at: Apple’s Spring Loaded Appetizers: Apple Card Family, Podcast Subscriptions, and a Purple iPhone - TidBITS

It wasn’t all big hardware news at Apple’s Spring Loaded event. As a warmup to the cavalcade of major rollouts, Apple CEO Tim Cook spun through announcements of a new Apple Card Family service, a revamped Podcasts app that includes premium subscriptions, and a snazzy new iPhone color that Prince would have loved—yes, it’s purple.

1 Like

I’d use my Apple Card for more purchases if I could download transactions directly into Quicken. For now I only use it for Apple purchases to get the 3% discount and 0% financing. Like next Friday when I order a new iMac for my wife and iPad Pro for me. :stuck_out_tongue:

You can export a QFX or OFX file of the Apple Card transactions from the Wallet app. Won’t Quicken import those?

We’ve switched to Xero for accounting now (and I’ll write about that at some point), and the OFX export imports nicely into Xero. It’s fussier than its direct connections to other bank accounts, but reasonable enough.

I’ve only ever accessed the Apple Card through the web interface. I’m a dinosaur who does all his finances on a computer, not a phone. The web interface only exports a PDF of the statement. Thanks for pointing me to that feature in the Wallet app. I’ll give that a try for my April statement.

BTW, the Wallet app on the iPad only exports data as .CSV files. Yet another data point in how the iPad software is lacking in regards to its hardware advances (or even compared to the iPhone).

You can also export OFX, QFX, and QBO on iPad. At least I can on my iPad.

Settings / Wallet & Apple Pay. Tap the Apple Card, tap “Card Balance”, go down to the statements section and tap one of them, then tap “Export Transactions”.

1 Like

That’s what I get for believing the documentation without testing for myself.

1 Like

In terms of the podcast subscriptions, here’s a nice rundown of some of the more salient points for those considering making a subscription-based podcast.

1 Like

All kinds of quality content are disappearing behind paywalls at an incredible rate (substacks, patreons etc.) and with podcasts. I guess it had to happen, and is ‘fair’ in a way, except for the fact that the poor listener/reader is gonna be bankrupted pretty quick if she wants to listen to more than a few sources. So some kind of aggregation will have to emerge, you know, sort of like the way newspapers and magazines used to work before they turned to shit. That (rant) said, any other podcast services readers of Tidbits use that we should swap to at this point?

I listen to about 60-120 minutes of podcasts daily, and I am in “podcast debt” - right now I am listening to episodes that I downloaded in late February. This is pretty typical for me. I’m usually a month to two months behind.

Spotify and Stitcher have already taken some shows behind a paywall for just their proprietary player but there still remains so much freely available RSS distributed high-quality content (some ad-supported, some supported by the publisher’s own subscriptions that don’t cost them $20 per year and a 30%/15% fee) that I just don’t think that Apple coming into this will change things appreciably. I don’t think this will change things all that much.