New Amex Platinum, Bike Buses and Free TVs
New things to buy, new ways to buy them and a way to get some of them for free?
It’s been a while since a bunch of things seemingly happened at once and gave me the urge to write and share about them. Enjoy the latest things circling in my head below and forward to a friend if you think they'd enjoy as well 😄
New Amex Platinum
The Amex Platinum now comes in a mirror finish—and a higher fee.
For weeks Amex was teasing updates to the Amex Platinum card and it’s finally here. First, you’ll notice the increased annual fee, going from $695 to $895. That may be enough for people to downgrade or leave it all together, but for crazies like me, it’s turning out to be quite the deal.
Here’s what convinced me to keep it:
- $300 annual/$75 quarterly Lululemon credit: finding clothes that fit right is hard and I seem to have found the shirts I like at Lululemon in the Soft Jersey Short-Sleeve Shirt. I basically get a free shirt and then some every quarter.
- $400 annual/$100 quarterly Resy credit. I misunderstood Resy. I thought it was only for fancy restaurants that I would never visit with a 4 year old but there are many family restaurants that we’ve either already been to or have been interested in going to. All you have to do is link your Resy account to your Amex account, make the reservation with Resy and pay with your card at the restaurant. Amex recognizes the reservation and payment and issues the credit. Super easy!
- $200 Oura Ring credit. I‘ve been looking at buying one for a while so this was enough of an incentive to actually make the purchase.
- $300 digital entertainment credit. This already covered our Disney+ membership but they’ve expanded it to include streaming services like YouTube TV and YouTube Premium.
- They’re keeping awesome benefits like the $209 Clear Credit, $200 airline fee credit, and bumping up their hotel credit to $600.
As you can see, those benefits offset the annual fee pretty easily. You can see more details of the enhanced benefits and if I did a great enough job at convincing you to consider the Amex Platinum, you can use my referral link to get some extra points and a sweet sign up bonus!
Bike Buses
Spending time in Copenhagen over the summer opened my eyes at how much better it is to bike around town. It got my looking into bikes when I got back home but each time this happens (it has happened a lot) I'm always bummed out by the lack of biking infrastructure in the US and specifically in Houston.
To add to my disappointment, the PTO Dads group at my son's new school has organized bike drop-offs and bike rides a few times a month. This is a cool way for the kiddos and the dads to interact before school but with the infrastructure on our way to school, it just wouldn't happen unless I load my nonexistent bike to my truck and take it to drop off.
Specifically, I love the idea about a bike bus, which is where you get a bunch of kids and parents together and bike to school. It seems chaotic but it's a good representation of power in numbers, so if you live in a place where you don't feel safe riding your bike alone or with your kids due to safety, getting multiple folks to ride their bikes together addresses that.
This video talks about the popularity of cargo bikes as car alternatives and introduced me to Bike Buses.
I do hope at some point the infrastructure around our family and school gets to the point where we can participate in things like bike drop offs, bike buses and just biking around town as an alternative mobility option to our traditional truck and SUV.
Once I do get a bike, I'm definitely getting an awesome electric cargo bike. 😎
Free TV?
And since I'm not outside riding a bike (what a segue), what if I told you that it's possible to get a very nice, very big TV for free.
Yes, it's a thing! Yes, I have one.
Emma Roth
The Telly is an interesting experiment that hooks people up with a free piece of hardware and instead, makes its money on the ads it shows you while you watch TV.
As someone who pays extra for ad-free streaming services, I was hesitant at first because, let's be honest, the TV Telly is offering you isn't the product; you are. So the real question is the tradeoff: is this nice TV worth the ads and data Telly will collect from me?
The Telly has two screens: the main TV display and a secondary display below that shows you things like weather, stock tickers, sports updates and of course, ads. I will admit, the ads were jarring at first. They're always playing! There's no audio on them, of course, and they don't interrupt what you're watching on the main screen but the fact that you had two simultaneous streams of video at once took a while to get used to. You can't really control what ads are playing (bummer) and a few months in, the only time I really notice them is when there's an ad (ad-ception) on the main screen.
The real test, I thought, would be Karla saying "hell no" and making me either return the TV or moving it to another room, but let's just say the TV is still where I put it and it gets used.
So thus far, this seems to have been a good deal.
Everyone wants a folding phone
Apple released the new iPhone and I have to be honest, this is one of the first years where I'm like... meh. 🤷
I'm usually one to block time on my calendar to watch the event live and this time, I just forgot about it. It was interesting as well because the weekend before, I was trying to figure out and justify how to get my hands on a Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold and after watching the live episode of the Waveform podcast at Apple Park, I'm not the only one!
I think people, at least people like me, who have had iPhones since the iPhone 3Gs are... bored? Sure, there's an orange iPhone now. Oh, there's an iPhone Air now, which is an iPhone, but thinner. But they're iPhones and people kinda know what to expect with iPhones now? Better camera. Better display. Better software (questionable). But at the end of the day, it's rather boring.
I think that's why the Pixel 10 Pro Fold has my attention. It's a different form factor. There's different ways to use it. It's new. Novel. Now if it weren't freaking $1,800.
While we're on iPhone though, there were a few things that interested me about the iPhone Air in particular. Not enough to get me to buy one, but enough to get me thinking about what next year would be: the Plateau.
The Plateau is the Apple-esque branding of the camera bump, but what's interesting is that Apple was able to fit most of the phone components within the Plateau, which allowed them to make the phone so thin. My thought is that this is the first half of Apple's upcoming foldable phone and that next year, or the next, Apple will have something that's really new (to them) and something I'll spend some time thinking about buying.
Catch up on things
Chris Huerta
It's no shocker that I love my Rivian and I shared a bit about what it's been like on EV Chris!
Chris Huerta
I wrote about Dia last week and whether intentional or coincident, I finally got my invite to use Comet, Perplexity's AI browser. I have invites for both and am happy to share with folks! If you'd like one, just reply Dia or Comet and I'll share the links 😄
That's a wrap
I’m off to a birthday lunch, but this was fun to write. If there’s a topic you want me to go deeper on, reply and tell me. And one quick poll: what’s your credit card of choice—and why?
Happy Sunday!