Samsung Pay Card

Hartley Charlton, writing for MacRumors:

"Now, more than ever, people need a secure payment solution they can rely on. We're excited to be able to put the control back into our customers' hands, by launching Samsung Pay Card” […]

Samsung Pay Card offers five percent cashback on purchases from Samsung, and one percent cashback at other retailers. […]

Unlike ‌Apple Card‌, Samsung Pay Card does not offer a physical card. It is a purely digital service available via NFC on Samsung smartphones and smartwatches.

I think we’re past the point of nitpicking over which device or OS had a particular feature first and who copied it — smartphones have matured to the point where virtually any new idea is bound to be iterated upon by a competitor — but credit cards don’t really have anything to do with smartphones.

To me, Apple Card didn’t even seem like a very strong product, and the credit card market didn’t seem like a space that a company like Apple would want to be in. The fact that Samsung (and Verizon, for what it’s worth) has now blindly followed Apple into that thicket a year later is just another indicator that they’ll never be anything more than shameless copycats who happen to have a side gig making household appliances.

Side note: “Samsung Pay Card” is a clunky, unattractive name that sounds like it was poorly translated from another language, and the design of the card itself looks like something you’d apply for in a Best Buy.