The Tech Company Brief by Hackernoon: Apple Assures Consumers, No Funds? No Issue

Apple made a surprise announcement last week to enter the “buy now, pay later” industry, competing against the likes of Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna which were all the rage during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a nutshell, it’s like having an invisible credit card: you buy something now, and you pay for it later — without actually having to go through the hassle of getting an exhaustive background check, like you normally would when applying for a credit card. If you pay within the stipulated time, that’s great! You don’t get to pay extra. But just like credit card companies, it’s the ones that don’t (or can’t!) pay within the stipulated time that these companies are largely after.

In Apple’s case, users can apply for Apple Pay Later loans of $50 to $1,000 that they then need to pay off over six weeks with no interest and no fees. Oddly enough, Apple did not disclose what would happen or how much interest it would charge if users fail to pay off their loans within that time period. However, there are dozens of articles detailing horror stories of users who learned of the dark side of BNPL the hard way: from being chased by debt collectors to becoming shopaholics.

And what of the BNPL companies themselves? While they were at their peak during the pandemic, companies such as Afterpay are nowhere near the double digit billions they were valued at just a couple of years ago.

Whether Apple has a game plan is yet to be seen. The company ranked #13 in this week’s Tech Company Rankings.

Sam Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty to Bribe Charge

It’s been a while since we checked up on disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried, but it doesn’t look like his troubles are getting any better.

The U.S. recently charged the founder and former CEO of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange with bribing Chinese authorities with $40 million to unfreeze his hedge fund’s accounts.

Predictably, SBF pleaded not guilty to the charge and will go to trial on Oct. 2 in a case that includes charges for misappropriating billions of dollars and violating campaign laws.

In Other News..

• Writer and programmers are the most exposed to the rise of ChatGPT.
• Sonic the Hedgehog has been murdered.
• E3 is dead.
• Uh.. scientists created a giant meatball from the flesh of extinct mammoths.
• TikTok finds an unlikely savior in Republican Senator Rand Paul.

And that’s a wrap! Don’t forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y’all next week. PEACE!

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

Featured image generated using Stable Diffusion 2.1 using the following prompt: “

Tim Cook overseeing dozens of people entering Apple stores while holding bags of money”.

This article was originally published by Sheharyar Khan on Hackernoon.