The Apple Card is a soft-pull credit score card and Apple wants you to apply for it
If you choose to apply for Apple's fancy titanium credit card, you will have a chance to take a peek into your credit score without actually affecting it as these probes go. Apple has been sending out emails to remind people that it is one of an increasing number of credit card providers that let you preview your credit score without initiating a hard pull on your data with the credit report agencies.
Such an action may temporarily affect your credit score, so Apple is now reminding everybody who'd consider applying for its credit card that they could initiate a soft pull and have their score details sent to the email associated with their Apple ID for a preview.
"We eliminated fees1 and built tools to help you pay less interest, and you can apply in minutes to see if you are approved with no impact to your credit score," says the marketing blurb in the Apple Card section of the website.
What Apple is offering is, in fact, not all that different to what numerous other soft-pull credit card companies do. We just checked our latest credit card application offer by some fairly obscure Synchrony Bank and it basically says the same on the tin: "there is no impact to your credit bureau score if you’re declined and no annual fee."
It's just that Apple now advertises this option front and center as part of a growing list of features and incentives. The servicing of the Apple Card is done by Goldman Sachs, after all, and it was the first foray of both companies into retail banking, with dubious success so far.
While a credit card offering makes sense for Apple, the initial excitement of Goldman Sachs may have cooled off and it may be talking Apple into a step on the gas when it comes to subscriptions and incentives. Goldman's initial outlay to set up a retail credit card business with Apple is still not recouped.
In fact, a recent Bloomberg report showed that it lost $1 billion on the Apple Card alone last year, so we can expect more marketing push around the venerable piece of plastic titanium that the world's richest company offers with the promise to reinvent the world of credit cards that never was.
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