Roger Fingas
U.S. bank Chase on Tuesday opened the "Apple Ultimate Rewards Store," a site where people with eligible credit cards can knock down the price of Apple devices with points earned through purchases.
People must have a Sapphire, Freedom, or Ink card to gain access through the Ultimate Rewards portal. Each Apple device has a point value — an Apple TV 4K, for example, is 17,900, while an Apple Watch Series 4 is 39,900, and a 64-gigabyte iPhone XS costs 99,900.
Shoppers can still get a product with partial points, but they'll have to make up the difference with another form of payment, through the Chase store. To kickstart the program Chase is temporarily translating one Ultimate Rewards point into 1 cent. Under that arrangement, at least some of the store's prices are comparable to Apple's list costs.
The bank didn't say when the store would switch to its normal point value, or what that might be.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Wesley Hilliard
Marko Zivkovic
6 Comments
I don't see this as relevant considering Chase has always allowed you to redeem your points for cash, which in turn could be applied to Apple hardware purchases (and literally anything else).
When purchasing travel products from chase website, you get a 50% bonus if you use points (e.g., 10,000 points are worth 15,000). They should do something similar for Apple products if they want people to spend points instead of converting to cash.
Most of these programs are pretty worthless -- most translate to 6/10th of a cent for every dollar spent. So spending $1000 gets you a $6 benefit, but the benefit is calculated at list prices, so it's really closer to a $4 or $5 benefit. I have one card with Chase points, but I don't think I've ever gotten anything out of it. With one of my Citibank cards, I can use points to pay off certain purchases (not all qualify), but it only works if you have enough points to pay for the entire charge.