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Comment by returningfory2 | Hacker News Reader

As an aside to the main issue here, I feel this is another cautionary tale in jumping to conclusions based on something someone says on social media.

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.

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But they did not buy the macbook with the Apple Card.

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

It’s actually a series of unfortunate events:

    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

So at some point his Apple ID was locked without further communication from Apple, which should have sent at least another email and text message about it.

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.

> But they did not buy the macbook with the Apple Card.

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?

I agree. I have charged an Apple product on a credit card which was invalid by the time the product shipped (iPhone pre-order), and at no point did Apple try to randomly charge other payment methods they had for me. In fact, at the time I found this frustrating because my pre-order ended up being cancelled.

> Apple made a mistake with the credit process

An important detail left completely out from any of the tweets.

The trade in price is funny, you can sell the Macbook for a lot more than $360 in the second hand market.

It doesn't sound like he was short on the payment. Apple failed to pick up the device they offered to take as a trade-in, and then just proceeded with locking him out of the account rather than just contacting him and asking what's up.

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