Apple is now paying you to have an iPhone! That’s right. Sign up for the savings account now available through Apple Wallet, administered by Goldman Sachs, and you will get an interest rate of 4.15%, Apple announced today. That’s a very good rate—most other digital-only banks aren’t offering terms quite as generous (as for big banks, forget it—their savings rates are still in the 0.01% ballpark). Even Goldman Sachs, which actually operates the account, offers only 3.9% on its own Marcus savings accounts right now. Apple is presumably subsidizing that generous rate given that the account is for users of Apple cards, which means it’s designed mainly for iPhones and iPads. It’s a smart way to entrench the iPhone even more deeply into people’s lives—smart for Apple, that is.
Whether this is smart for consumers depends on whether you’re comfortable having your life ruined if someone steals your iPhone. The Wall Street Journal recently published an excellent report about how iPhone thieves are draining people’s bank accounts. That’s a result of people storing credit cards on Apple Pay and very often keeping photos of sensitive personal documents—passports and drivers’ licenses, for example—on their phones. Some people even write down their passwords in the Notes app on the phone. When you stop to think about it, storing all this stuff on a phone does seem kind of crazy. This isn’t solely Apple’s doing, of course. Most banks and the like now have phone apps, all of which make people vulnerable. But Apple has encouraged it, going so far as to allow people to store their drivers’ licenses on their iPhones and to unlock their front doors with their iPhones. And now there’s this savings account—iPhone thieves must be rubbing their hands in anticipation.
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