Apple Card: My first day with Apple's new credit card

Apple Card has no fees, rewards from Daily Cash, a fancy titan physical credit card, and account management built into my iPhone directly. It is very much an Apple product: Minimal, easy to set up, well designed and able to put you into debt if carried away.

The registration process took less than a minute after I opened the Wallet app. After pressing a few buttons, a white Apple card appeared in my Apple Pay account, ready to use. I drove over to Starbucks, got some coffee and a breakfast sandwich and drove home.

When I got home, I opened the Wallet app to look at the transaction and noticed that my Apple card had turned partially orange. The color changing effect is by design. Apple wants their card to raise awareness of how and where users spend money. There are seven different expense categories, each with its own color, and after each transaction, the color of your card will be adjusted to account for the last purchase.

At lunchtime, I asked my wife if she would bring me Chipotle while she was running errands. I placed the order through Chipotle's app, so she just needed to run inside, get my food and come home. To my surprise, Chipotle's app uses Apple Pay, so I used my Apple card to complete the transaction.

Now my card is completely orange.

Because I used Apple Pay for both transactions, I want to earn 2% cashback. If I had made a purchase with Apple, be it an app from the App Store or a new iPad on the Apple Store, I would have gotten 3% back. When my physical card arrives next week, all purchases made with it will earn 1%.

Instead of having to wait until the end of my billing cycle to pay out, I should wake up to barely $ 50 on my Apple Cash card tomorrow, assuming I don't make more purchases today. Now that I think about it, I need to get a haircut. Hopefully they have payment terminals that will work with Apple Pay. If so, I wonder what color will add to my card?

As my Daily Cash amount increases, I can transfer the money to my bank account, send it via Apple Pay to another iPhone user, or use it against my Apple Card balance.

Another area Apple wants to attract users to is how much interest they pay by making smaller payments against the balance.

I can't see the account balance yet because my transactions are still pending. But when I do, I plan to use the circular slider to adjust the payment amount and see how much interest I will accrue based on that payment. Visualizing interest charges based on payments against your credit card balance will certainly add some anxiety to having a large balance or continuing to pay the minimum amount.

I'm going to live with the Apple Card, use it whenever I can (and when it makes sense) over the next few days, weeks, and probably months. It is the physical card I need to set up, along with a virtual card number that can be replaced with a button if I am going to make a purchase online and the supplier ends up being involved in some kind of data breach.

For the first six hours, I've left caffeine wondering how long until we start judging people based on the color combination of their Apple card.