My bizarre experience attempting and failing to get Apple to refund erroneous charges to my credit card has reinforced my perspective that companies of this scale cannot be trusted with operations outside of their core competencies, and that any financial product offerings from non-finance companies must be avoided like the plague (not to say that I'm any fan of fintech...). I cannot imagine how Apple's foray into financial products / business can result in anything other than the incorporation of all of the destructive incentives and bad behaviors that come along with big banks as the profits stack up over time. God help anyone who needs customer support from a giant tech company when some unclear policy document or bug leads to a financially-ruinous mistake being made on either end of the relationship. Prediction: the little people will be crushed and have no recourse, just like they are when Google closes their email accounts without warning.

In my case, Apple were attempting to charge me a monthly fee for an app that I installed last year before I ditched my iPhone. After using (and paying for) the app for a month, I realized I didn't like it and declined having a monthly subscription moving forward. After terminating my account with the app and uninstalling it Apple continued to charge me for it for months afterward. Repeated escalations in Apple's customer service labyrinth resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and, ultimately, an admission on their part that they didn't have a clear answer for what was happening or what I did wrong (one customer support person even told me that the same thing had happened to him once upon a time). Despite that, the relevant policy document they referred me to strictly prohibited me from being refunded for the erroneous charges. In the end, the only thing that saved me was being able to turn to my credit card company and flagging the months of charges as fraudulent. In this case I got all of my money back, but the experience really makes me wary of the idea of a big tech company being involved in my finances.