Card-Carrying Apple Fan? You Will Be

Apple is at its best when it's making complicated things simple. More than a hardware or a software company, and certainly much more than a content company, Cupertino is a user experience company, from the smooth lines of the iMac body to the Genius Bar help desks.

Credit cards suck. There's a million of them, they're all confusing, and they universally have pretty awful user interfaces for management—bad apps, complicated websites, and poor integration with other services. Everyone has one, but nobody thinks of theirs as something they love to manage.

Enter the Apple Card, which applies Apple's UI principles to a MasterCard. Because its slick, easy-to-use management interface only works with iPhones, it reinforces that brilliant and dastardly iOS lock-in. Most people hate to change credit cards; now, as long as you stick with this card, you're sticking with iPhone.

With no annual fee, Apple streamlines the adoption process for its cards. You bet they'll be offered in every Apple Store—including, probably, as a highly suggested part of financing the monthly cost of an iPhone.

I'm still skeptical about the penetration level of Apple Pay because of my own experience living in a city where a lot of smaller merchants don't take it. But the Apple Card will be available via a prestige-feeling physical product, a metal credit card, to make ordinary shoppers feel like big shots when they slap it down.

The little bit of cash back makes the card competitive, but this is about user experience, not maximizing the points you get from your card. The Apple Card experience is about being both easy and sticky, and Apple absolutely nailed it.

Apple TV+, on the Other Hand ...

The money Apple raises on its credit card is going to be sunk into a quixotic and unnecessary set of celebrity-heavy TV shows, an area where a lot of other people have expertise and Apple has none.

There is no lack of good TV content right now, no gap that needs to be filled. Nobody's crying out and saying "there aren't enough shows to watch." Our major problem right now is bundling and navigation; good shows are scattered across many services, each with discrete monthly fees, and we're getting to the point where if you want all of them, your bill starts looking like a traditional cable bundle.

The new TV smart app, in traditional Apple fashion, seeks to provide a central portal to your virtual cable bundle. That at least makes sense, although there's a lot of competition (such as Roku's interface), which might be just good enough to prevent Apple from dominating.

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But Apple's TV+ service, with its original shows from J.J. Abrams, Jennifer Aniston, and Oprah is something the world hasn't been asking for and doesn't need. Apple hired a lot of big names here, but the company has a dismal track record of actually creating and curating original content. Beats One Radio and Carpool Karaoke fit firmly into the mediocrity bin with YouTube Originals.

And even more subscription services, from companies that actually know what they're doing, are on the very near-term horizon. The biggest one is Disney+, which will quickly suck money from many American families' wallets when it launches later this year. Apple isn't used to, and doesn't play well, in markets where the established, well-funded competition has even better "design."

Apple's Card will be a money-printing machine; its TV+ service will be a money-burning machine. Hopefully Tim Cook hasn't already spent more with one than he plans to make with the other.

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