Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
Some Apple articles will tell you not to worry if you’ve accidentally reported someone as spam, but it actually does something. It’s not a pedestrian crosswalk button.
I found this out the hard way when my wife could no longer send or receive messages nor sign into Messages and we had to contact Apple support. I’ve accidentally reported tons of people as spam because of this stupid Messages experience, and I can only guess that I’ve reported my own wife so many times from clearing all of my Messages conversations that they disabled her Messages account.
The support tech had the gall to tell me they’d reactivate her account as a one-time exception, and I practically wanted to kill the guy over the phone.
Otherwise, well we're the product most of the time. (yes even apple messages, all your friends are there!)
So seems a little self destructive.
At least I only get the option to “report as junk” for iMessages (that are sent by people not in my contacts).
The thing I'm thinking of it:
1. Find the number of $AppleEmployee
2. Spoof a text message from $AppleEmployee to yourself.
3. Report that as spam.
Would 3 even work, and if so - would it have any impact on that employee's Apple account.
1. There is no quick action to report as spam, so how is it even being triggered?
2. You regularly delete your conversation with your wife?
3. It seems implausible that Apple would disable someone’s iMessage account based on one person’s spam report.
Personally, I’ve never seen “report as spam” show up unexpectedly. In fact, I’m not even sure how to get it at all. AFAIK it’s only offered as an inline option when receiving a message from a new sender.
I, too, have gotten "do you still want to receive messages from this person" popup after removing a conversation. It exists.
> You regularly delete your conversation with your wife?
If you send a lot of photos and videos - our family chat fills up with Lego creations and music practice clips - you can wind up with individual conversations eating up gigabytes of space.
> It seems implausible that Apple would disable someone’s iMessage account based on one person’s spam report.
Perhaps more than one person has made the same mistake with OP's wife's text messages?
Of course there may be some histories you want to keep longer than that. Alternatively you can got into Settings -> General -> Storage _> Messages and delete just the large media files directly without affecting chat texts. None of which excuses the issues of course.
You underestimate the number of large files kids and grandparents can send in a chat in 30 days.
Wow that's a ton of storage, a device that wouldn't require constantly deleting messages would be so expensive.
Oh wait, none of that is actually true. Apple just likes screwing over the people that give them money.
My iMessages is currently 24.14gb. I’ve not had storage space issues in a very long time. Apple gives you settings to define retention periods. So how is Apple screwing me over again?
That sounds like “do you want to block this person”, not “do you want to mark this as spam”. Blocking is separate functionality.
> If you send a lot of photos and videos - our family chat fills up with Lego creations and music practice clips - you can wind up with individual conversations eating up gigabytes of space.
General > iPhone Storage will prompt you to review and delete attachments from messages without deleting the whole conversations. You can also review and delete individual media types from the Messages subscreen. And of course you can delete attachments from the info screen of any conversation in Messages.
> Perhaps more than one person has made the same mistake with OP's wife's text messages?
Then this would be expected to be a widespread issue, not something that’s happened to one single person.
I’ve been getting a bunch lately and the thing below it that usually says “mark this as spam” in the text view is never there
This isn't related number of speed of conversation deletions, but a specific intentional path. This does not trigger for SMS-based messages, as Apple does not control the account access for those.
This is language used in the service industry to signal that a “favor” is not policy.
“It’s over the return period, but only by a couple of days, so…”
“You’re a month out of warranty, but I believe you that this has been going on for a while before you brought it in. Well…”
It sounds, to me, like this was someone who was inexperienced (whether at the job or at the task of deescalating a situation). I think that they applied a standard qualifier because they lacked the insight to see that it wasn’t applicable. I doubt they really believed the same exception shouldn’t apply if this happens again.
It's not so much that I feel bothered, but rather I am more-so uncomfortable having to bend the rules (but that might just be me).
Sort of like how you CAN travel without id, but it is in TSA's best interests to not let you know it is possible or the details.
I remember a friend - who was quite astute in saving money - would routinely get his discounts on things because there was a policy to allow expired coupons at certain stores.
Why do you bend over backwards to explain away Apple's bad behavior?
No other positive outcome is quite as rage-inducing as a "one-time exception" for something that was the vendor's fault, not yours.
It recently took me a week of mitigation haggling with Outlook Deliverability Support to overturn an unexpected adverse finding in SNDS for an assigned /29.
Fortunately this hosted a low-volume MTA with few (sender,recipient) tuples to consider, and after a thorough review of our logs the root cause was uncovered, and I was moved to instruct <relative>, in no uncertain terms, to stop using Junk as their deletion mechanism.
As a counterpoint however, I also have a story about a SVP at a high-profile boutique development shop (one of the "fast five", for those who were around two decades ago and remember the term) who habitually filed important documents in the handy wire basket on their desktop. One day, they were enraged to discover that months of work had suddenly vanished. Imagine being the staffer who accepted that particular call for deskside support.
The worst part was that there was no notification nor warning. Some of her friends actually thought that she was mad at them for some reason as they would send her messages and she according to them would not respond at all.
From her perspective though she was responding to every message but they never got them.
After a while we figured out that something was wrong and went to an Apple store.
They told her that she had been reported as spam multiple times and her account was temporarily disabled.
We had to jump through a few hoops to get it reactivated and they told us as well that this was a one time exception.
I believed it was some sort of service issue. I wish there was seriously legal recourse for this nonsense. You pay a cool $1000 or more just to have the device fail on you for no explicable reason.
At this level, this is directly the consequences of either a choice (that Apple services would behave like this), either a lack of design/thinking through the whole user path.
Whichever it is, it does not sound very "Apple", but brutal and complex.
I first had that experience with Apple 25 years ago when I called (from the hinterlands) to get a replacement switch for my Apple (one-button) Mouse.
Apple rep: "No we don't sell parts like that."
Mutter, mutter, something about with a $5 switch I could fix it in two minutes rather than buy a new one.
Apple rep: " Why bother? It's just a cheap peripheral ... only $80 to get a new one."
Epilogue:
Imagine my reaction when I found out that the cost of a 1.5MB "superdrive" (the original had been ruined by all the dust that had been sucked through it by the system fan) was $400. (In that time and place, that was one month's rent.)
iOS has XMPP clients with notification and OMEMO (end to end encryption) support. If you don't want to run your own server dismail.de is pretty great.
I think this needs to be explicitly written as iMessages to avoid confusion. AFAIK iMessages is rarely used outside of US and France.
>It appears as though charges from Apple are special
This is exactly right. You offer branded cards because interchange fees are expensive. You want people who buy your stuff to pay you by ACH. That's not practical at the point of sale, but it is practical if you frame it as the monthly payment on your store-brand credit card. Charges at the store on the store-brand card are always special. That's why the cards are offered.
From a merchant's perspective, anyone who buys something is really taking out a loan. In most cases such a loan will be settled by the customer's card issuer, less the interchange fee. In the case of a branded card, it will be settled by the customer directly and in full. In either case, if this doesn't happen on time, the customer's account with the merchant is now in arrears.
Most of the time this happens, the "customer" is farming stolen credit card numbers for resalable goods. You are never going to find these people, let alone rehabilitate them and settle up. So the "hey, you did a lot of chargebacks to us, what the hell?" state is not user friendly. It's scorched earth. I would be cautious about signing into any other Apple accounts on devices that have been associated with yours.
I think part of the reason people end up in these situations is because they don't think about things from the systems perspective. And in most cases, they don't need to, so long as everything stays on the happy path. But I think knowing the general nature and structure of a system, whom it ultimately serves and why can help one avoid situations where things will go sideways, or if they do, give one a better chance at remedying things.
It's the same thing that people complain about with Google all the time: do something slightly weird with something related to your Google account, and you lose your email, photos, calendar, documents, chat, mobile payments, etc. all at once. And while this instance with Apple was terrible, at least there was a way -- even if incredibly convoluted -- for an individual to get support and get things fixed. With Google, you have to get enough social media buzz that someone high up enough at Google notices and fixes your problem in order to avoid even more bad PR.
We really need some sort of legislation around indiscriminate account bans and recovery procedures. Too much of people's lives depend on their interactions with Apple's and Google's services. Mistakes can cause so much havoc. It's nearly criminal that this is still happening.
Not only it's unprecedented, but it's constantly developing. Apple Health, Home, and in the future amny others - they all link you to a single account a give another party (that you can't communicate meaningfully with) a complete control over important aspects of your life. Still, we prefer convenience over safety, privacy and control.
I keep my email, banking and internet access separate.
You don't even need to go outside Apple's ecosystem to find an example. What you just wrote is just as bad with Apple itself. Publish an app, update it many times and suddenly it gets pulled for something that wasn't changed in any recent update (or maybe Apple changed the rules after the fact).
That's quite a dystopian statement. I don't want to think from the systems perspective.
In fact I want to have the least possible amount of interactions with any system.
Don't buy the "systems" card. Don't listen to all this BS about convenience and cool factor. Who cares. At least banks are regulated and there's a known appeals process.
In addition, if that was indeed the setup, the email would have to include disclosures about being an attempt to collect debt which they did not. And they would likely need to come from the bank and not Apple Payments Receivables.
Finally, people report the same issue with PayPal.
This is only the case if the store cards are serviced by the company that issues them. You can think of those cards as card like financing done by FingerHut.
Most of the cards are issued by regular financial institutions such as WF, BoA, FirstBank of Omaha (?) that specialize in doing branded cards. The deal there is structured as a simple rebate to the introducing company like Apple gets to slap its logo and issuer rebates/refunds the fees for purchases done at the branded stores to the introducing company. If the introducing company gets a certain pre-determined number of new cards with a certain predetermined combined credit lines, the introducing company gets additional money.
The product was great until it wasn't. The amount of hours I've lost to try and fix this, including talking to numerous people on the phone, is absurd. No one can figure out how to unlock, pay, or even close my account. Linking Apple Id's to Apple Card accounts is crazy. Shocked when I realized that was going on.
Here's a *long* screenshot of my support history https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png
Small pain in the big scheme of things, but sad to see Apple not really innovate behind the fancy UI. I'd vote they nix this thing and leave consumer cards to Stripe and PayPal and others who are more focused on building better financial products for consumers. Don't pull a GE and get mixed up in finance Apple, you're better than this.
Whaaaaat?
It was only down in the chain, around November, when the customer mentioned that they may have accidentally signed up for a WaPo subscription (due to dark patterns), and not that their account was compromised.
By then it was too late, as Apple had already applied the nuclear option of a password reset, to keep the customer's account secure.
But PayPal's had that see and control your subscriptions ability for many years and it's embarrassing for Apple to not have that at this point. And then to nuke the account creds was crazy. And then the fact that I was literally texting with the agent on the phone # that they were trying to text to verify the account, and I was getting nothing, was crazy. And the fact that they couldn't override. And then the fact that while waiting for a verification code that never arrived, they booted me from support. And then the fact that the next agent had zero context, crazy. And then on and on. And then that's before all the phone calls! It's sort of like I think they are trolling me.
I speak bluntly but quickly reverse course when someone steps up and does the right thing.
For example, Australian banks are required to provide a list of recurring payments for the last 13 months upon request [1]. The rationale is to make it easier to switch banks, forcing banks to be more competitive.
[1] https://bankingcode.org.au/resources/2019-banking-code-of-pr...
They do. Any subscriptions that Apple bills for are all visible in a single list. But Apple Pay or Apple's Credit Card is not PayPal. They're not compariable products.
The "problem" here is that these are just charges to your credit card. Paypal is not a credit card (well, ignoring their credit products, but I presume that's not what you're talking about), its not a like-for-like comparison.
I don't think it's commonplace for a bank to show a list of subscriptions for a credit card - that's not how banking infrastructure works (I don't think) for credit card transations. By bank does have a feature where it guesses recurring payments to help me plan, but it's not an actual subscription in the way that Direct Debits, or App Store, or Paypal subscriptions are.
they immediately switched gear from support request into a security request, which pumps all the brakes on your account. I'm unfamiliar with apple, but banks will react more or less the same with insured credit cards, because they're the one on the hooks for any fraudulent purchase.
I was considering getting an Apple Card but now I am running the other way.
Isn't changing compromised details common place? The agent did offer to do it immediately but the customer said "no not now" and then ignored it for two months.
Normally if a merchant is charging your card without your permission you contact them first. If it's a recurring fraudulent charge and they won't respond you contact the police, report it to the bank, and have the bank issue a new card.
Now if this is a subscription service offered through the News app I have no idea what the proper procedure would be beyond simply cancelling the subscription and requesting a refund. But even then you aren't "blocking" a merchant.
If you find someone is charging your card, ask them to stop, and to refund you. Only if they refuse should you attempt to cancel the charge via your card. This results in a chargeback to the place that charged you, which typically comes with a hefty fee for them.
American Express will let you do it, but it can (as far as I can tell) only be done with a phone call.
It's a little more work, but foolproof.
How have you found support? I've found Monzo to be fairly lacklustre as they've grown, so considered making my Starling my primary. However, Starling don't really have any particularly exciting features that would motivate me to switch.
Edit: Their site no longer accepts UK numbers. Yet again, FUCK BREXIT.
Edit 2: Managed to reactivate my account, and for obvious reasons they don't seem to support FPS or have an account number either, so not really great for a primary UK account.
There was one time an ATM machine ate my money. Ten minutes later I got my money back, after sending pics of the error, receipt, etc.
The only other time was trying to set my son’s account up and I screwed it up pretty bad and accidentally created duplicate accounts.
> they don't seem to support FPS
It adheres to the Dutch and EU instant payments system, I don’t know how compatible that is with the UK’s. I can send you a £ and you can send me a £ and we can see how long it takes to get there.
> or have an account number either
As in you don’t have an IBAN?
As an Apple Card user myself (and not without my own criticism of the service, to be honest), I'm not sure how I'd end up in a similar situation. The card sends me a push notification in real time when a charge happens. So I'd have seen every one of those months of WaPo subscription. I'd have deduced it was a subscription, and that the WaPo isn't selling retail goods and so it isn't likely a fraud issue. Apple Pay would have had it's own notifications as well. The easiest answer would be to tell WaPo to stop. The next best answer if that didn't immediately work would be to ask Apple how to stop a subscription I signed up for, not tell them I don't remember doing it and therefore it's unauthorized fraud.
I think Apple has earned plenty of criticism, but let's keep it real, at least.
I see you've never used WaPo or NYTimes before :)
I do obviously deeply regret engaging with support on this issue, and my god I would have paid $100 nevermind worrying about $10 to not have to deal with this (still ongoing) issue.
But think about how bad all of the things are here:
1. A product named "Apple Card" that requires "Apple Pay" and feels like the same thing, but apparently is 2 different things.
2. Not only 2 different things, but 2 different companies. "Apple Card" is really "Goldman Sachs Card", but you don't find that out until something goes wrong.
3. But then Goldman Sachs somehow can interact and control your Apple Id account.
4. But there's no communication between support at the 2 companies, and all context is lost when you switch to Goldman Sachs.
5. If you at any point in time mistakenly say "Apple Card" and not "Apple Pay", or vice versa, even though I only ever use both together as a consumer, they will say "oh actually I think you're in the wrong department, let me transfer you", and then you have to start over.
On and on and on. Absolutely atrocious.
But the bottom line, the root cause, is this: payments providers should be on the side of the consumer, and not the merchants. I used to work at Visa. I know how the system works. I know anything is possible. The idea that Apple can't show people all recurring subscriptions and allow 1 click to cancel is bullshit. They absolutely can build that. It would be the right thing to do for consumers. But this is the Goldman Card. Not the Apple Card. And I don't see Goldman as a champion of the end user.
I find that this is the case with distressing frequency with nearly any big-company product I use. I haven't had this problem with Apple yet (which is kind of surprising, given how much Apple there is in my life), but it feels like it's an outgrowth of corporate size and scale more than anything else.
The older I get, the more I loathe the way corporations create an environment where no one is responsible for anything.
The difference is, I told them I had signed up for it, but was unable to cancel due to NYT's policies on canceling accounts.
Maybe next time be truthful. You don't accidentally buy subscriptions because it's full of ad's. You signed up for the sub. or a trial with a delayed payment and forgot.
Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.
The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.
It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).
But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year).
And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.
We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
It’s the case at all Big Tech companies. Time to break them up. https://paygo.media/p/25171
[ ... or if not that, can I at least get USB-C on my iPhone so I can stop carrying two cables? :’( ]
The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical. The Apple Watch still sux IMO, but the way they quickly pivoted toward health surprised me and makes me think they get it.
I think Apple's products are better than ever, on the whole.
I don't think we should "break up" Big Tech just because they are successful. That being said, I do think we need to #AbolishImaginaryProperty laws (#EndCopyrights and #EndPatents), and that will make things much better for everyone (minus some lazy shareholders). Those laws are atrocious in every domain, from bigtech to big pharma, and need to go.
Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.
> I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole
I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)
> I don’t think we should...
Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.
But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.
You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
Well as someone who has worked on this issue for 17+ years, and also a successful entrepreneur and product builder at a few of the big dogs, I'm a hard disagree.
ImaginaryProperty laws are the root of all the biggest evil problems in tech. They corrupt everything at the core and a reckoning is coming.
I know that getting investment as a small company in the hardware space would be near impossible without patents, because any investor without a brain would see that the giant in your industry could decide to take your idea, design it faster, manufacture it cheaper and sell it to a wider audience in a fraction of the time.
I actually take a position that some software maybe should be patentable, but that it's such a tiny percentage of what actually GETS patented that it's likely better to simply prohibit/invalidate all software patents than to allow only certain software patents. The backlog of hundreds of thousands of obviously-bad software patents wouldn't really be able to be individually reviewed by the experts that should be able to invalidate them, and software has copyright and trade secret protections available. That should be good enough for 99.9% of circumstances.
The patent office has clearly proven that they can't be trusted to discern "novelty" in software development, and I don't see that changing any time soon, so time to prohibit the system from applying to software at all. At present it's 100% prohibiting the small inventors from innovating (or allowing a few patent trolls to extorts those who succeed) and 0% allowing small innovators from profiting from their products.
I can't seem to figure out what factors influence the dice roll.
This has been true since the release of AirDrop, across multiple different Macs and iPhones, across multiple OS versions.
AirDrop seems to depend on the moon phase and the tides.
I often wonder how no exec at Apple has experienced this and told someone to just. solve. it.
I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...
Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!
Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.
Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money. I dont understand this need to invest in user hostile tech then demand it not be user hostile any more. It's like you willingly stuck your foot in a bear trap only to walk around in agony while demanding that the government make bear traps less painful. How about not putting your foot into a bear trap?
I know die hard Mac fans who cry endlessly about Apple "fucking up their platform" yet own a shiny new M1 laptop. I don't get it.
1. Apple is “best of the worst” i.e. the other platforms suck more on a usability basis.
2. It doesn’t matter if only a select few understand the long term impact of trading freedom/competition for shininess – our money is a drop in the bucket compared to regular users who care about usability and have already changed the channel when you talk about anything beyond that.
And so, large companies will roll along with exclusive access to things like TSMC 5nm thanks to capital resources and returns 1000x of any upstart like System76/PinePhone/FairPhone/etc.
Free markets work great, except that monopoly-like things form naturally and suck all of the air out of the room; therefore anti-monopoly laws are one of the very few regulations on capitalism I think we should all support (who wouldn’t benefit? 100 people total?).
There’s probably a way to oust them that isn’t legislation, but it will require coming at them from an angle that doesn’t rely on having access to the world’s largest pile of capital and etc. I.e. entrepreneurs getting real creative and taking huge risks on opportunity cost (it’s easier to build an app and get rich, easier still to pull $500k/year in total comp as a mid level SW engineer at big tech co).
But based on my experience and judgment of the situation, I’d like to see concise and progressive (vs regressive) antitrust/antimonopoly legislation, I think it would be both great for the economy and great for individual citizens.
That just "solves" the problem of undue influence of a $1T or close company for you (if that) not for the industry / society at large.
They can e.g. still stomp/buy/kill companies you do like, influence standards you do use, etc., and even hold captive your friends and others, even if you, yourself don't use their products.
I'm not against Apple (if anything the opposite), but I'm against huge companies with huge power. I'd prefer their several businesses (Mac, iOS, OS, Pro Apps) where independent companies.
The Pro Apps would e.g. then have to fight for their lives, with features, frequent releases, good customer communication, and so on, as opposed to coasting on the $2T padding of the mother company...
Of course I cant completely avoid behemoths as I use Android with Google services. But my only google "lock in" as of now is photo storage and gmail. I have only a hand full of apps on my phone. I do not use social media. That's really it.
There is a whole beautiful world outside of the digital prison.
>...domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating...
Where the heck does that come from? Apple coming up with the first 64-bit mobile processor didn't stop anyone else doing it, and the M1 isn't stopping anyone else developing fast efficient ARM processors. In fact it's pretty obvious its pushing their competitors into upping their game.
As for breaking up the company, OMG no, a thousand times no. It would destroy everything good about them. The only people it would benefit are their competitors. The last thing we need is enforced mediocrity. Who else is going to come up with FaceID, M1, Neural Engine, W1, T2 and goodness knows what else. Breaking up the company isn't going to make such tech more ubiquitous.
Well, it might for the existing stuff but it's going to cut off the pipeline cold. It's only their scale and commitment to huge investments and far forward looking technological bets that make these things possible. How is a divided company going to manage the close collaboration and integrated design of hardware and software at every level if they're in separate companies? It would crush out the distinctive features that make Apple what it is.
As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.
Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.
It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.
Apples competitors actually believe this and have done for over a decade. Were Samsung or Huawei ever going to put that much investment into advanced tech? No because they are constantly being told by analysts that they don’t need to.
All those small tech startups Apple keeps buying with advanced Flash memory controllers, new optics, advanced sensors, AI optimised processing hardware. Nobody else in the consumer space sees the value in that, they’re all chasing the lowest common denominator. The idea that Vivo would be investing in tech startups and pushing technological boundaries if only Apple hadn’t beaten them to it is pure fantasy. The nearest any of those companies get to innovation is stupid gimmicks like built in projectors and edge screens.
Breaking up a company vertically can’t work. You wouldn’t end up with 5 smaller Apples. You’d end up with an OS business, a chip business, an applications business, a Mac business and a mobile device business. Everything good about Apple would die on the butcher’s block when it was carved up.
Trivial logic disproves your statement and in 10-20 years it will be proven empirically through disruption from the market (including mini-Apple splinter groups that do exactly what you say is impossible).
SJ’s (awesome, to be admired) reality distortion field was strong and its effects clearly still linger, as evidenced by your leaps here.
Apple is decidedly less innovative than it was in decades past (make sure you don’t misread that as “not innovative”) and others will take the mantle in due time. It’ll just be faster, better for the economy, and better for individual citizens if Apple isn’t allowed to exert undue influence against competitors via monopoly/oligopoly tactics along the way.
Side note: funny enough, your sort of reverence for the status quo is a huge factor in keeping large companies unaware of looming disruption. But nearly every exec that could act on it has a personal time horizon that preserves their legacy and makes it the next guy's problem. This phenomenon, while frustrating to experience on the inside, is one of the most heartening aspects of the situation for would-be competition to take hold.
Apple will continue to make technically superior hardware. But the user experience department, what ( Steve Jobs's ) Apple used to stand for is no longer there ( Or at least less of it ). That is everything from Hardware like Touch Bar, Keyboard, Trackpad, USB-C, Software UI complexity and Services like App Store, Apple ID and Payment issues. No one is saying the User Experience is crap lets fix this. Instead in every single case it took some revenue drops in numbers, customer satisfaction drop ( Apple has not reported any Mac user satisfaction number for 2 years now ), or straight bad press before they even begin to look into it.
Which is why the lag time from Mac Pro was so bad. It took them 3-4 years to admit a mistake. Before making changes that has a lead time of another 2 years.
But having said all them, even at their current level of inefficiency, they are still so far ahead of Google and Microsoft from a product level perspective that there is zero chance both of those company could catch up to Apple within this decade.
For some reason when you purchase something, it’s not instantly charged to your card. It takes a few days and if it doesn’t go through, they lock all your prior purchases, and demand you use a computer to remedy the situation (I was using Apple TV).
Apple is not a company that messes around when you owe them ANY money. They will shut you down with no mercy.
It was never really yours to begin with. Apple sold you a very limited license to enjoy their content at their convenience. They can revoke this privilege at any time and for any reason or no reason.
But yeah, if you dont pay them, they will revoke this privileges.
There isn’t really an option to buy buy instead of rent buy in many situations, so the blame falls squarely on the media companies for failing to provide reasonable options, not the customer for choosing the best option from a bad list.
It was pretty entertaining in retrospect.
It looks like they're treating failed auto-payments dramatically differently than "normal" missed payments, and a host of other weird things too.
So, so bad.
Their "trade in" program is run by a third party who seem to have just given up at some point and stopped doing their job, and Apple itself doesn't seem to have any avenue for responding to that. If you call you get no option for general assistance, if you intentionally call the wrong one to simply speak to somebody you get stonewalled looking for order numbers that don't exist, or whatever. I eventually just gave up and didn't bother trading in my old MacBook, after they lied for months that they were sending me return shipping materials and that the order was mysteriously canceled, or there was nobody available to take the call and to try tomorrow, etc.
This is a trend. So many companies selling a supposedly premium experience insist on ramming you through their AI phone trees and assume knowledge of every possible reason for your call.
That said, I usually have done really well just asking them to route me to the right group.
I wonder if this is standard in the industry. A few years ago I accidentally selected the wrong checking account to pay my Bank of America card, and because that payment failed, BoA will no longer let me pay online.
I have made the same error with my Credit Union's app (and their form on the website where you upload pictures of the checks), but they just email me that the dollar amount of the check has been amended to the correct amount...
This money comes from the very high credit card fees which aren't added on to the price, so if you don't use credit cards you are basically leaving money on the table. This isn't as much of a thing elsewhere (I know in the EU) because credit card fees are much lower so the benefits passed to the consumer are minimal.
Additionally many cards give you more options for chargebacks than debit. So there is a level of safety when you are using your credit card especially for online purchases with unknown retailers.
Yet another reason is that credit score is very important in the US. Having a bunch of credit cards with large limits (even if you don't use them) that you pay off consistently is one of the easiest way to build a good credit score.
Debit cards often can't be used online.
Another outdated reason is that many debit cards had charges per-transactions, sometimes with a very low free allowance. However many banks now offer free debit card usage. Credit cards almost never have a per-transaction fee, and most have no fees at all (assuming you pay it off).
So all-in-all life becomes much more difficult if you don't have a credit card in Canada and the US. The card is less about the "credit" part for most people and just the way that people make payments.
Pay with a credit card, and I pay $98 for $100, plus if I spend the saved $2 on travel, it's actually worth more than $2. Plus other freebies for spending at least $X per year on the card.
In the US, I wish I could use one of my cash-back cards for literally everything.
And this is on a no-fee credit card! There are even better benefits available if you pay an annual fee.
Which is why as Apple is trying to make their ecosystem increasingly sticky I am doing my best to diversify away from their services.
I mean, if you use a smartphone, it's likely tied to either Google or Apple. Are you going to carry two phones in case one account gets closed? Do you buy all cross-platform apps twice, and enter all data on both phones?
Ultimately, I think the best you can do is spread things around so that a single company deciding you're persona non grata only means you lose some percentage of your stuff, rather than 95%.
Did someone inform him about the iCloud account reactivation? Did anyone at Apple/Goldman apologize for the issues? Did anyone say what went wrong and how they’re going to prevent this from happening in the future? Did they provide any indication as to whom to contact if the issue happens again (would be very useful for others)? I’m glad that this vexing issue got sorted out and I agree it shouldn’t even have happened or be so draconian, but the information sharing leaves a lot out.
It didn't! The post ended with "And now I am once again waiting." The account issues haven't been resolved yet.
I wasn't aware of that, but are you aware that very little time has passed? The post was written based on the the incomplete information available to the author. Do you expect the author to have rewritten everything based on the accounts suddenly having been restored after the post was published? Most likely Apple itself scrambled to reactive the accounts quickly when they saw this going viral. Maybe the author will have a follow-up later.
In a response to the original tweet, the author said that "the only thing Apple Card was paying for was the 2TB iCloud upgrade". Now, in this blog post hours later, we learn that actually the author is at least $250* short on a payment for a MacBook Pro. While this is still a grey issue, not having paid your minuscule iCloud subscription versus not having paid for your new Apple computer in full are qualitatively different situations.
*the trade-in value of the author's old Mac; my 2017 MacBook Pro trades in for $360.
Apple made a mistake with the credit process and decided to reclaim the credit by applying it as a balance on the card without notification and then sent a strange email referencing the wrong product with a dead reply-to email address
The article is ambiguous on this point, though I would presume they did pay with Apple Card given that Apple charged the debt to it?
An important detail left completely out from any of the tweets.
He was expecting a trade-in kit that never arrived
He contacted them but got no answer
They contacted him but got no answer (also because the reply address did not exist)
The Apple Card autopay failed because the bank number changed
Apple failed in at least 4 points in this process and it lead to a week of downtime. His only mistake was missing one (unanswerable) Alert email.
This trope of one team being unable to contact another team except via email seems to be popping up more and more in my customer service interactions - it feels like an active and intentional impediment to actually getting anything done. Why do companies do this?
By forcing another department to only work through email makes them exhaust all options first.
- because different divisions have different budgets, you might see each department running their own Slack, etc.
- you want to make sure work doesn't fall on the floor, so you want a persistent queue of requests. I see this almost always as a Google form or via email - except development organizations.
Three months after mailing it back, Apple said they received the phone and then proceed to charge me the full price for the phone, as they say they will do when you don't return the old device. Bear in mind that nobody at Apple or Fedex contacted me in those three months to say that the phone was due, or anything was amiss.
Now, I was in the position of being charged over $1000 for a phone they acknowledged that they were in the possession of. I went through many (10 or so) rounds of phone support. In a few cases, the higher up support people refused to hear my case. I finally disputed the charge with the credit card and after a while, my claim was approved.
Long story short, never shopping with them again.
So the author didn't follow up on some debt he owed to Apple, he missed the email about it and it now complaining with a clickbait title that Apple is blocking accounts almost like Google.
To me it seems nothing special, issue appears, he has an email on what exactly the issue is but he misses that email and feels like blames Apple for blocking he's accounts.
The key learnings from this one:
- Don't put your eggs in one basket - separate services for email, photo backup, messages and such
- Pay attention to your email, bank statement and follow-up on trade-in credit you receive if you have not actually traded in your item.
I don't like the sensationality of this title, I would go with more: "I missed an email about an important payment from Apple and now they disable my account"
* He was expecting a trade-in kit that never arrived
* He contacted them but got no answer
* They contacted him but got no answer (also because the reply address did not exist)
* The Apple Card autopay failed because the bank number changed
The only problem here was Apple.
I pay Apple for... iCloud storage for photos I could lose.
I pay Google for... a dumb internet pipe and YouTube Premium/Music where I could jump in a heartbeat to another ISP, Spotify, etc.
I have some email on my own domain with third party hosting.
And so on.
The price to pay for this is extremely small. I'm not excusing Apple here, but reality is reality -- you are a single person among billions.
Otherwise I try to diversify services and stay in a place where I can switch services if needed. I don't obsess about it or anything and I still sometimes choose convenience over keeping my options open. But anytime I get involved with a service, I try not to go all-in.
I never use a dealership’s banking service, and feel the same about financing a Mac (I also wouldn’t use Dell or HP’s financing).
But never really thought about the separation of concerns benefit, with respect to financing through the same company that provides critical services.
Now that seems like a good call.
Not saying anything about the details of the original post, except that whether he’s completely right or wrong he’d never run into something this catastrophic if he’d used (almost?) any other credit card.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307246
Not sure why the other was flagged.
Frustrating, yes, but I had to appreciate the recursion.
Someone needs to start hnflagged.com and preserve the threads there because I swear it's where 80% of the interesting conversations are.
dcurtis had said in the comments on the other submission that he would write up the details, so I guess this is more like a follow-up than a dupe.
Perspective is important because to Apple they’re not your accounts or devices. They’re the accounts and devices in which you have access. Premium Lock-in is Premium Lock-out.
Competing customer support teams under one brand (Goldman Sachs and Apple, in this case) is a recipe for buck-passing disaster.
Hopefully this isn't a sign of decline in focus on customer service.
Not to mention the extremely strange "special" treatment that Apple purchases receive. Why would they treat them separately? Also it's.pretty scary that at some point in the future you became behind on payments for any part of your balance that they could use the same tactic for debt collection.
This is an interesting observation. So there may have been at least 3 companies involved in this situation: Apple, Goldman Sachs, and the company that handles trade-ins for Apple.
Each company has own bureaucracy, and if you combine those 3 bureaucracies together, you get a tangled mess that's impossible to untie.
Sometime 2020 my 5+ years old iMac started to show sign of disk failures, so I decided to trade it in and move on. I didn't have any apple product to buy at the time (we already mostly moved on from Apple in our household), so I chose to trade in for gift card. That went smoothly, I ended up using roughly half of the gift card to buy their Thunderbolt 3 Pro Cable a few months later.
Early this year, they finally released the new iPad Air that uses USB-C and is not crazy expensive as iPad Pro. We decided to trade in my wife's old iPad Air to the new one, because we've really had enough for lightning cables. At the same time, since I still have a sim card from my home country, because I need that to receive text messages to login to my bank accounts from my home country, and those bank accounts all provided iOS apps that's slightly less crazy than their Android apps, I decided to spend $130 more for that new iPad Air to add cellular, so I can put that sim card in it and use it to login to those bank accounts when I need them. I also used what's left from the previous gift card from trade in, and paid the rest of the purchase using credit card.
It turned out that iPad Air order has two issues:
1. After they finished the trade in, I expected that they would refund the trade in value to my credit card. But in reality they split the trade in value and refunded part of them to my credit card, and the rest to a new gift card issued to me, probably split by the same percentage I split the original payment. How is that reasonable?
2. It turned out that iPad with cellular cannot be used to receive text messages. It can receive _some_ of the text messages from the carrier, but I never received a single text message from my banks, nor the ones I sent from my US number. If you Google for that issue, you'll find that a lot of people claim that iPad with cellular just cannot receive text messages at all (which seems to be false, as I did receive some of the text messages from my carrier), but they do have an official iPad user guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20201223140550/https://support.a...) suggests otherwise. Here is direct quote from its first sentence:
>In the Messages app , you can send text messages as SMS/MMS messages through your cellular service, or ...
"Customer-focused company like Apple" you say? Good luck with that.
It is alarming to me how many people would be totally comfortable living in an entire cocoon provided by Apple - watch you Apple TV, Drive your Apple Car, Pay with your Apple Car, Call with your Apple phone. Never give one company that much power over you!
While a step up from Google it still worries me that they hide behind email and you can't call (or live chat) and have someone on the line and stay on the line until the issue is resolved. Can't even raise a ticket to at least confirm you're being ignored, just email and hope someone shows mercy.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated...
From their statement:
"The issue in question involved a restriction on the customer’s Apple ID that disabled App Store and iTunes purchases and subscription services, excluding iCloud. Apple provided an instant credit for the purchase of a new MacBook Pro, and as part of that agreement, the customer was to return their current unit to us. No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309175
Thanks for taking the time to write this up, dcurtis.
I had a subscription on my account I'd forgotten about. My CC had expired, and I didn't bother giving Apple the new one. The sub pulled, card wasn't charged - but the charge stayed on my account.
Apple then turned off all access (Apple ID, iTunes, Store etc) until the new CC was added to the account.
Once that was done, the account was available again. The sub was immediately removed, along with any others.
I have also supported Mac users with exactly the same issue, resolved in exactly the same way.
I look at this as blackmail. Apple hold an account which has fully paid up software and services to ransom until you cough up what they deem is unpaid.
That, IMHO, is monopolistic behaviour.
It's yet another kind of bait and switch. Bait you with good service then switch to behavior that would be considered abusive inside any bricks and mortar shop anywhere in the world.
Apple aren't your friend. They'll show you this whenever it suits them. If you have feelings other than suspicion and dread about Apple (or any other big tech company) you need to address those because you're having your basic human responses of being kind and decent hacked by highly paid and trained professionals.
"I don't like Apple but some of their products are better than the competition" Is the absolute best they should ever get from your emotions.
I'm particularly nostalgic for the older days of the Mac, where integration was between my apps and my operating system, not my operating system and my life. Part of what I enjoy about computing is that it isn't all-consuming, so it strikes me as suspicious when I hear that Apple wants to take control of my finances.
I propose "too big to care". It should be up to the governments to force "too big to care" companies care about their customers, because in the absence of regulatory pressure, they can simply ignore them and still bring in billions.
The master replied: “Why do you ask such foolish questions? That company is large because it is large. If it only made hardware, nobody would buy it. If it only made software, nobody would use it. If it only maintained systems, people would treat it like a servant. But because it combines all these things, people think it one of the gods! By not seeking to strive, it conquers without effort.”
— The Tao of Programming (Geoffrey James, 1987), chapter 8.1
A company is people. A company does not make a decision. One or more people do.
Initially just a changed number and nothing more than a glitch to fix? The consequences show that we should as customers never built solely on one {manufacturer, provider, device, service} and must keep our data local - at all time.
It just a phone or computer which you own. Just use email and stuff somewhere else. And don't use their cards or financial services. Amazon credit cards are for the same reason problematic. One mishap during a return and you're in big trouble.
PS: I'm afraid that Apple will likely argue that you don't own your Mac.
> Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud.
It seems we get a weekly reminder that using someone else's computer does not remove the need for backups. Nebulous you-violated-terms-of-service claims, billing issues, an AI flagging you as suspicious, companies axing services or changing pricing, ransomware, etc are the drive crashes of this decade. Use multiple clouds, or mirror to a local disk. Do what you need to do. Just remember: nobody cares more about your data than you!
(Worried about a physical hard drive getting lost or damaged...)
Myself I pay for Backblaze's Personal backup solution.
There also is Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage (free 10GB tier) if you want something similar to S3.
Myself, I keep everything on my cheap surplus NAS (2 drive redundancy), snapshot regularly, and occasionally sync to an airgapped drive the next town over. I keep a cold copy at my parents house, but that's last-resort.
The important bit is that I've successfully trialed recovering from a total loss of my NAS and house, in case that ever actually happens :)
There's nothing wrong with Backblaze et al. either. They may give much lower costs for bulk data. I only back up a few dozen GB so it's not worth opening another vendor relationship for me.
Somebody else suggested "hard drives at a relative's house." What's more likely, you lose S3 access—or your relative's house burns down / floods / is robbed / their kid yoinks a drive to use at school / any number of other disasters? Also, a backup should be as easy to do as possible—having to manually shuttle a drive back and forth from a remote location is probably not the best, unless you are extremely disciplined.
Having cloud backups is still really nice to have because while they do come with some new risks, they almost eliminate whole classes of errors like backup corruption.
One other important point is to avoid cloud services that cannot easily be replaced with some equivalent. You are far more likely to live longer than whatever random SaaS company you are using. In this case, you will probably have warning before it goes down, but you need to be able to migrate off of it (migration meaning no important data loss, not necessarily having a fully functional replacement) given a week's notice.
1) Store credit cards have been a thing for decades. I never got one before the Apple Card, but most department stores have them, airlines have them, Disney has them, etc. Sometimes they're "real" credit cards, and sometimes they're only ones that work at that store. In the latter case, people get them because they may give really good deals at that store and they shop there a lot, or because they're easier to qualify for and help you build credit. (Or both.)
2) The Apple Card is a real credit card, backed by Goldman Sachs. So in some ways, what I really have is a Goldman Sachs Mastercard with an Apple logo on it. I got mine because it has decent cash rewards, especially for the way I tend to use credit cards, and -- I know this will sound ironic in the context of this comment thread! -- a really nice payment system integrated into the Apple Wallet app.
Apple is wallet-focused. I'd you keep paying, they'll treat you OK.
Unrelated: best personal drive solution HN?
No, because the main issue isn't the disputed payment, the main issue is that Apple shut down his other Apple services because of non-payment. This presumably wouldn't happen if the charge was on a non-Apple card.
Not entirely true. If you owe money on the App Store because maybe your non-Apple card expired and you never updated it, Apple will shut down your account still.
That's not what happened though. His credit card didn't expire. His credit card was the Apple Card.
With any other credit card, the merchant gets their money regardless of whether the card holder pays their credit card bill on time. You can buy a MacBook Pro with a Bank of America card, default on your credit card bill, and Apple still gets paid for the MacBook Pro. That's why the money is "credit". So defaulting on your Bank of America payments doesn't make your Apple ID shut down, there's no connection. If merchants didn't get their money from credit cards, then they would stop accepting credit cards. (Merchants are already pissed about the high fees charged by the cards.)
This situation with the Apple Card is weird because the merchant and the credit card company are more or less the same company. It turns out, this is very problematic.
I didn't say that's what happened. I'm saying it's entirely possible Apple can shutdown your account for owing money even if you don't have an Apple Card.
I had an iTunes account back in 2012 linked to my Paypal. One time I accidentally unlinked my Paypal and Apple wouldn't let me access my iCloud email unless I typed my password. When I typed in my password, it would ask me to verify my CC/Paypal details. When I clicked cancel, the entire process would just happen again.
Owing money to whom is the question.
Apple can't shut down your account for owing money to Bank of America. Or for owing money to Goldman Sachs for a credit card not associated with Apple. In the case of Apple Card, who is the money owed to, Apple or Goldman Sachs? The latter is supposed to be the bank.
Today I can put an App Store charge on my Chase card and do a chargeback making up some stupid reason that I never got my app in which the chargeback would be successful. It's not entirely out of the question that Apple would lock my account until that charge is resolved.
Similarly, Dustin could have used a Chase card to buy the M1 Mac, supposedly "tradein" without sending the device back, Apple erroneously crediting that CC, and then Apple locking down the account until that's resolved.
Both situations result in owing Apple and both are totally plausible situations.
Yes, we're all aware of chargebacks, and nobody is disputing that you would owe Apple in that situation. Not sure how this really helps the argument.
The issue here is that the Apple Card seems to completely obliterate any separation between the merchant and the bank, which is obviously problematic. In fact there are 3 different things that you would expect to have some separation: the hardware (MacBook Pro), the services (iCloud), and the credit card. But now all 3 are the same, so buying the hardware with the credit card causes the service to be shut down.
Whereas if the hardware were Dell, the service was Google, and the credit card was Chase, then this problem wouldn't exist, and it would merely be an issue between Chase and the card holder, not affecting the Google services at all.
Dustin was erroneously credited for something from Apple, and now Apple shutdown his account because they want the money back. This would have happened if it was a Chase card which would prove this statement wrong (which is my whole point):
" the main issue is that Apple shut down his other Apple services because of non-payment. This presumably wouldn't happen if the charge was on a non-Apple card."
It is true! If Dustin missed a Chase payment, it has no effect on any of these other things. The iCloud account was paid up already, it wasn't late.
If Dustin used a Chase card for the trade in/payment for the Mac, this situation would have resulted in the exact same way.
How so? Apple charges the Chase card, Chase pays Apple, end of story as far as Apple is concerned, Apple gets its money.
"Very soon after, it seems that Apple simply added the amount of the credit I received when I purchased the M1 MacBook Pro to my Apple Card balance."
Timeline is as follows: Dustin bought the MacBook in mid January, he mentioned he never received a trade in kit after 2 weeks, then received a reminder in mid-February to send the item in, and "soon after" received credit on his Apple Card. This tells me Apple refunded a portion of the M1 purchase to the credit card erroneously. This can happen with any credit card, not just Apple Card.
As I've already established, if Apple thinks you owe them any amount of cash, they'll lock your account. In this case, Apple thinks Dustin owes them money because Apple accidentally refunded a portion of the M1 purchase.
What happened is that when Apple did not receive the trade-in, they added a charge to the card for the amount of the credit.
Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money, because Chase pays Apple for any charges to the card. You're conceiving of a scenario where Apple doesn't get all of its money, and that's simply not the case with a third-party credit card.
Now if Apple and Goldman Sachs operated in the same manner, then Apple would also get all of the money it was owed, from Goldman Sachs, and then it would be up to Goldman Sachs to get payment from Dustin, which is no concern of Apple's. But apparently Apple and Goldman Sachs have a different kind of relationship with the Apple Card.
It appears that Apple is using its iCloud leverage to force the card holder to pay Goldman Sachs. Apple would have no such leverage to force the card holder to pay Chase, nor would Apple have any desire to use such leverage for Chase, because Apple is not "in bed", so to speak, with Chase.
Unsubstantiated statements like this suggest you do not understand how card authorization and liability work for merchants, and it doesn’t seem like you’re interested in finding out.
That would still be a refund on the Apple Card. "amount of the credit [...] to my Apple Card balance." means Apple refunded a portion of the balance.
> Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money
They sure would if they accidentally credited your Chase card. Apple's site says
"Once we receive it, we’ll inspect it and verify its condition. If everything checks out, we’ll credit your original purchase method and send you any remaining balance on an Apple Gift Card by Email."
If they erroneously "credit your original purchase method", they would, in fact, be out of money. Dustin was erroneously credited. I don't see how it would be any different, other than it seems Dustin got his credit instantly, if his tweets were accurate.
If they instantly credited me and I sent them a lump of coal in the trade in, they would be, in effect, out of money, regardless if it was an Apple Card or a Chase card.
1. Apple instantly gave Dustin the credit (because he opted into paying monthly). From Apple's site: "If you pay monthly: We’ll apply the value as an instant credit to lower your monthly payments."
2. Apple failed to send the box
3. Apple tried to get its credit back by charging the value to the Apple Card
4. Dustin didn't update the bank info, so Apple couldn't get its money back as the card denied the charge.
5. Apple's fraud alarm went off.
Apple gives you instant trade in credit if you pay monthly. While that's unique to the Apple Card here in USA, other countries that don't have Apple Card offer financing too. It's not out of the question that instant trade in credit is offered to countries that don't have Apple Card but also offer financing on Macbooks too.
Everyone is at fault it seems (more on Apple than Dustin). Dustin failed to update the bank info, Apple failed to send the box, and Apple failed to communicate properly.
I did the same with the Apple Watch. I bought my last Apple Watch using monthly payments, so I got instant trade in credits. I was sent a trade in box, but my cousin wanted to buy the Watch off of me so I never sent in the trade in. Apple simply charged the trade in credit on my card after not receiving the trade in.
Problem solved.
"No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card."
In your BofA card, the credit card could decline the charge if it put the holder over their credit limit. For all we know, that might be why the Apple Card charge was declined.
Yes, but when charges are declined, merchants don't ship the products.
This is a weird case, because it was a retroactive charge not explicitly authorized by the card holder. That kind of thing rarely happens.
> For all we know, that might be why the Apple Card charge was declined.
What do you mean "For all we know"? The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.
And that is a feature of the trade-in buy flow and not how the purchaser chose to pay. Which is my point exactly which you have been trying to dispute.
> The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.
No we don’t. The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.
It's all spelled out very clearly: "As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card."
His Apple Card was paid from his bank account. His bank account changed. He failed to update the bank info. Simple as that, no mystery whatsoever.
In addition, you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.
I don't even know what you're talking about. The transaction was posted. And then the transaction was billed to the card holder. The credit card bill didn't get paid, because the autopay had the wrong bank info. And that's when all the problems occurred. Again, this was all spelled out in the article.
There was no authorization failure. This was a simple case of a missed credit card payment.
Apple Retail in mid-February decided to authorize a charge for the difference and reached out to me when the charge did not post.
and
Apple Retail decided to force me to resolve my credit card balance because I was revolving.
In both cases, Dustin would see a transaction appear on his card transaction history before the merchant learns that the payment won’t post. In your terminology, pending and posted transactions can both be “billed” but they are very different for the merchant in terms of liability.
Furthermore, credit cards aren’t an unregulated Wild West. A minimum payment must be delinquent for 90 days before banks can start moving towards collections. Goldman Sachs is not cavalier enough to risk having the state of New York investigating their bank over a very creative definition of what isn’t collections. In addition, Apple Card offered extremely generous payment terms during the pandemic - there is no reason to believe they’d start aggressively collecting now.
In addition, if the email from Apple was about collections on a credit card, it is required to have a host of disclosures before the contents which are not present in the complete excerpt posted on the blog. Even more evidence that this action had nothing to do with the credit card balance.
Finally, a poster reported the same experience with a PayPal payment method gone bad.
There is no reason to believe this issue stemmed from Apple strong-arming people into paying off their Apple Card revolving credit balance.
This isn't what happened, so why make a false analogy?
We know the reason. This was explained in the article.
In addition, the reason in the article is a speculation qualified with “it appears.”
“Update: All my accounts are activated”
"But the trade-in kit never arrived."
Apple was supposed to send him a trade-in kit for the old MacBook Pro. Apple failed to do so. Then Apple added an unexpected charge to the card for the amount of the trade-in credit.
"Disabling iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts". This is very strange and worth complaining about. If the iCloud subscription is up-to-date, being less than 14 days late on a credit card payment shouldn't disable it.
Edit: wait, this seems to be contradicted by the blog post. I'm following up on Twitter.
Edit2: "It's policy, but not in the agreement." https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/1366579647564181507
Locking someone out of their (unrelated) account is definitely not normal behavior for missing a payment, nor should it be.
What's the issue here?
Auto-pay is such a dumb idea and it's quite crazy how people don't understand that when it doesn't work it can cause a terrible chain reaction.
In the early 2000's, State Farm's auto insurance auto pay hit my bank account, not for the $250 it has been deducting for years, but for $25,000! It caused my rent and all of my other bills to bounce.
To its credit, State Farm paid all of my associates fees and sent a letter to my landlord, but it took months to get everything straightened out.
Do not trust autopay.
Not once have I heard a story of auto pay go wrong.
What isn't said here, is that Goldman Sach's is likely to have a number of people attempting these sorts of things as scams.
Can someone who works in finance comment as to whether Apple's action might be something contractually required by Goldman Sachs?
Edit: also they disabled his account, so he couldn't even log in. That's a very odd thing to do for nonpayment.