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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?

I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.

A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.

Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.

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I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift card and loaded it into my account.

I do this all the time and I've done it for years.

I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards, $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points that could be spent like cash at a couple of select retail stores for 2X their points value.

It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and generally get resolved after follow up (however inconvenient).

Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough to do that entire process, though. Having the money loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need some significant upside before I'll do it.

Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially giving g you a discount at the cards’ store. $100 Apple gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple for $20 off if it is less than $100.

I buy gift cards often - if I know I’m going to spend money on Uber, why not give myself 25% off $100 before even any actual promotions are applied?

News for you, apparently Uber realizes that you have a gift card payment and jacks up your rates

https://www.reddit.com/r/CreditCards/comments/1hb6rnj/rumors...

I've bought and redeemed gift cards for only one single company ever. Can you guess what company? :) Exactly - Apple. Because these MFs generously banned whole countries from using their services, and not because of the justified sanctions or a law, but simply because they could. So when I lived in Ukraine and got my first Apple device, I had to buy and use gift cards to purchase any app or media in the Apple's closed system.

In Australia, we often have bonus offers on Apple Gift Cards, from the merchant/retailer.

This could include a "real" cash discount of ~8-10% (eg, buy a $100 card for $92), or loyalty points.

Our supermarkets often have a "20x" bonus points promotion, which is effectively 10% off a future shop - eg, buy a $100 Apple gift card, get $10 off a future shop in loyalty points. Buy $1000, get $100 off, etc.

Or, if you're a frequent flyer, earn Qantas points - buy a $2000 gift card, get 20,000 in QFF points - that on its own is some one way/return domestic flights, or halfway to Honolulu (one way), if you were going to spend $2000 on a new iPhone, Mac, iCloud etc anyway.

https://gcdb.com.au/gc/apple/ has been documenting all the recent offers for Australia.

If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card.

I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer.

If you sell it directly to another human, or even use something like ebay, you'll get more and they'll pay less.

Thanks, I’ll look into doing that :)

Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract, but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this… but still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a while to send back with my trade-in.

Ah but you told them at the time of purchase that you were going to do the trade-in. As I said. It’s different if you want to do the trade in later, which at that point looks more like “sell an old random phone back to Apple for some credits”

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