apple card
- Apple made changes to my Apple Card.
- They didn’t apply those changes to their own internal system.
- The prompt for me to do it myself didn’t work.
- Neither did the second place I tried.
- Neither did the third.
- …until a random button click took me to the hidden screen I needed in the first place.
- Start with last month’s balance.
- Subtract any money you paid toward that balance.
- Add any new transactions.
- Add any fees and interest.
- Compare the result to what the bank says your new closing balance is, and if it’s not an exact match, go back to the beginning until you find the missing piece.
- Start with last month’s balance, $1000.001.
- Subtract the $500.00 payment I made.
- Add $100.00 in new transactions.
- Add $50 in fees and interest.
- My arithmetic came out to a new balance of $650. Goldman Sachs computed my new balance as $425.
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All numbers are fictional for storytelling purposes. ↩︎
Apple Card's stil broken after Apple broke it
After Apple broke my Apple Card yesterday, I thought I’d found the correct, undocumented, undiscoverable way to update the App Store to use my new card information. Nope. Apple is still declining transactions from their own card after they unilaterally decided to change it.
I’m anticipating the moment they tell me they’ve canceled my account for nonpayment. What an unnecessary mess.
Apple updated my Apple Pay so that I couldn't pay Apple
I got an email this weekend that Apple was updating my Apple Card’s expiration date. The old date would work for purchases through the end of the year.
Today Apple Music said I can’t play songs until I update my payment info. I clicked the offered button and got an unworking form with unlabeled, required fields.
When I guessed the right value for the unlabeled field (which wasn’t asking for my name; it didn’t allow me to type a space character), it told me it already had that card information on file. I closed that and went into System Settings > me > Payment & Shipping. There was no way to update the payment information there. A quick trip to Kagi said I have to update that through the App Store app instead.
So I went into that app and clicked Manage Payments. It prompted me to enter my credit card info there. That didn’t work, once again because that card was already on file. I clicked the Back button on that form and it took me to a different screen I hadn’t seen before that listed my payment methods. The form on the new screen wouldn’t let me edit my Apple Card, but it did allow me to delete that card altogether and add it right back. That seems to have been the right combination of incantations. I can listen to music again.
To recap:
Does anyone at Apple use this themselves? I’m doubtful.
Never doubt that Apple is the master of packaging. My replacement credit card came in the mail today in this unnecessarily beautiful wrapper.
The envelope itself has an NFC chip. You touch your phone to it to activate the card inside.
For Science™ I read the NFC with my Flipper Zero. It didn’t seem to contain any personal information. My guess is it’s a code that the phone interprets as “open the Wallet app and activate that credit card we told you was on the way”.
What's my Apple Card balance?
I spent 1 hour and 25 minutes on a call with Goldman Sachs about their mistakes on my Apple Card statement. It’s not resolved but I think we’re finally making progress.
I’m a stickler about reconciling my monthly account statements. My dad taught me how to balance a checkbook when I was a kid and I’m diligent about that. This was the first time I’ve ever been unable to make sense of a statement. The process normally looks like this:
Last month’s Apple Card statement worked like that. So did the month before that. And the month before that, all the way back 5 years. This month they threw a twist:
However I juggled the numbers, I couldn’t reproduce their result. I gave up and contacted the support chat. That was useless. The conversation went like this:
Me: There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Your balance is $425! Is there anything else I can help you with? disconnect
Me: reconnecting There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Oh no! It looks like that’s $425. Have a nice day! disconnect
I asked them to escalate, which resulted in someone sending me an email like:
Here’s how we resolved your case: Start with $1000.00. Now, the moon weighs more than a duck, so carry the 5 and you get $893. Add the length of the Titanic and subtract purple. That’s $425. Share and enjoy!
Today I called them and repeated “talk to a human” into the phone tree until it connected me to a person. This time I got to explain my situation to a sentient being, who went off to repeat my calculations before uttering those magic tech support words: “huh, that’s strange.” It sure is! The agent was able to reproduce my math and couldn’t figure out how to compute Goldman Sachs’s balance. I can’t exaggerate the relief I felt. I’m not alone. It’s not my imagination or inability to add a few numbers together.
Although we haven’t fixed the problem, a thinking person wrote up my problem and opened an official inquiry for me. I’m optimistic.
And don’t waste your time on Apple Card’s online chat. Nothing good comes from it.