There’s a UX defect with Messages right now where if you delete some conversations in succession, randomly will a modal popup and ask you if you want to report the contact as spam.
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.
> 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.
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.
They want to let you know that you are not important to them and that you should feel bad for bothering them; and you should behave well by not making the same 'mistake' again.
I suspect there is a policy otherwise the customer service reps wouldn't be allowed to do it.
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.
What a coincidence. My wife had the same issue a few months ago. It started with her not being able to send or receive IMessages.
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.
Yeah, it's not like the messages in this post. Failures are silent and it's clearly a shadow ban. That's why it was so difficult for us to originally figure out what was wrong.
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.
Such outcomes are also true of email services, which train reputation stochastically.
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.
Reading your comment it just occurred to me that "Junk" is a very poor label for the spam button. Many users are going to legitimately think that a button marked "Junk" simply means "put the message in the trash". That is what the verb means. It's no wonder so many people are getting this wrong.
Hotmail has blacklisted the entire network my mail server is on. I just tell Hotmail users to use a mail provider that isn't garbage if they want mail from me.
> 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.
No other positive outcome is quite as rage-inducing as a "one-time exception" for something that was the vendor's fault, not yours.
I almost switched banks after a CS rep warned me not to attempt another transfer that would get reversed (not enough money in the account). It was a glitch in their system that caused the first one.
When you delete an iMessage conversation from someone not in your contacts and (I believe) which you haven't replied to, it gives an additional prompt to ask if you want to report the unwanted conversation to Apple.
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.
For whatever reason on my iPhone (on the latest version of iOS, hasn't been fixed in 12 months even after a restore) whenever you swipe down on an iMessage in a notification, the popup always has the "report spam" box whether or not I have the contact in my phone (which is supposed to mean that they aren't spam). I've definitely accidentally pressed it before on people I know, I suppose since they still send me messages they haven't been blacklisted.
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 practically wanted to kill the guy over the phone.
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.)
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.
The entire reason why this is being mentioned in the first place is because it's unexpected behavior. You can't honestly expect to resolve their issue with snide remarks and anecdotal "works on my machine" rhetoric.
> There is no quick action to report as spam, so how is it even being triggered?
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?
Now that I work for a big evil corporation, I have some insights on why these inexplicably evil things happen. Fun at parties, I know. Not excusing it, just shedding light for anyone interested in the systems perspective.
>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.
Agreed, people don't, because historically they haven't had to. Who would think that their computer's software update mechanism, streaming music account, calendar sync, and the mechanism that allows them to make phone calls from their computer would all be tied to a credit card account, and if they accidentally missed a payment on that credit card (and not just any payment, but a payment when part of the balance includes a product from the card issuer), they'd lose access to all of those things? It's pretty unprecedented.
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.
> because they don't think about things from the systems perspective
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.
> 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.
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.
I see little reason to believe that a first party payment method is anything more than a red herring. It seems like Apple Retail has a policy in general to shut down Apple IDs for customers with negative balances, and it just so happened that this negative balance was due to payment issues with a first party card. Others have reported similar outcomes when paying with PayPal.
I had a similar terrible experience with Apple Card. Still having it actually, as months later they haven't resolved it.
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.
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.
I've never owned a credit card that would allow me to "block" a merchant from charging me (not saying they don't exist). With a conventional card you can dispute the charge and perform a charge-back, but it's still up to you to ensure that the merchant does not keep charging you. I can see why the rep was confused.
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.
I do not miss the US banking system... with my bank in the EU, I can block merchants, approve or deny direct debits (ACH equivalent), and I’ve set my debit card with two pins: one draws from my account, and the other from my joint account.
+1. Credit Cards are not PayPal. You can only cancel recurring transactions on PayPal because those are set up directly on PayPal.
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.
Several credit cards allow you to generate a new card number to use with a specific merchant. This allows you to shut down that number once you no longer want to be billed by them.
I've done it with Wells Fargo and Ally Bank in the US, they just made me put an expiration on it years in the future. What banks have you been unable to do this with?
Holy Molly! Any credit card company would have done this in 2 minutes and refunded the charges while they investigate. Because this is Apple, one card transaction dispute requires you to change your AppleID password. What a mess!!!
I was considering getting an Apple Card but now I am running the other way.
It’s Goldman Sachs in this case, not Apple. While a few companies run their own banks to issue credit cards, most have partnerships with banks like Synchrony, Capital One, and Chase. Depending on the scope of the partnership, customer service may be handled directly by the bank or by the retailer. In Apple’s case, they’ll explicitly say they’re working for Goldman Sachs.
If there's an unauthorised transaction on your card, that suggests your credit card details have been compromised, no? Additionally, they say the transaction happened via Apple Pay, so it would have been authenticated via a device, so it appears a device was also compromised?
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.
"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. "
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.
Quote from this, including typos: "I will need to changed your card number for your security and protection. Since Apple Pay was used, you will need to changed your Apple ID password."
If you read till the end, you'll realize that the original support request was framed in a way that caused the agent to assume the customer was reporting a fraud or account compromise.
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.
I think support personnel belief while going off their script (as he picked #4 I didn't do the transaction) was that someone guessed/hijacked is apple account and stated using it to buy things on the internet, and that's what derailed the whole support ticket.
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.
It sounds more like you had a problem with Apple Pay, and the fact that the card in question was an Apple Card is incidental. If you hadn't told them that someone was fraudulently using your Apple Pay on a recurring monthly basis, I can't imagine they'd have concluded that your account was compromised. If it was a direct card transaction, they'd have just issued a new number and been done with it.
The confusion around Apple Pay and Apple Card is a design problem created by Apple. It's way too damn confusing, and you can see we were constantly getting routed in the wrong direction. They should have called it Goldman Sachs Card. It was bullsh*t to find out that's what it really was and that the support was atrocious.
lol I had a similar problem, but I just wasnt an a-hole and they blocked New York Times from charging my account with no waiting and no questions.
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.
I don't remember signing up for it. Not out of the question that someone in my family did with my devices. There needs to be an option "5. Some crappy dark pattern subscription that I don't want". It would be very easy to build some type of subscription service that autopauses if you don't use it for a month(s). I did not log in to WaPo and so shouldn't have been getting charged. Let's keep the pressure on the businesses to discourage dark patterns and not nitpick on the consumer because I didn't adequately respond to a set of options that left out a critical and common category of disputes.
Thanks for posting long chat with redactions. That iMessage thread you posted is quite frustrating to read through. I can only empathize you for going through that horrifying experience. Hope you find a resolution soon.
That may be an overreaction. If you read through the transcript, the problem clearly wasn't the Apple Card. It would have happened with any credit card. OP told support that his Apple Pay had been compromised, and was continuing to be compromised monthly. They correctly concluded that the fix was to stop the ongoing Apple Pay fraud by denying the attacker access to his Apple ID. He tried to blow them off but it was too late.
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 worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.
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.
I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card.
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.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
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.
I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:
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.
>Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money.
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...
Apple buys a company every month, sometimes two. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178792 This isn't a case of voting with your wallet because there's no one left to vote for.
I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
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.
interesting to hear -- I had an airdrop failure like you describe the other day, and it was very surprising to me as I'd never seen it happen before. I use airdrop pretty much every single day and it's almost flawless for me.
For the first part I think you're probably right, their all powerful absolute advocate for user experience above all else has gone and isn't about to be replaced. I don't think that's an existential threat to the company, even now who else does any of this stuff better? But it is a problem.
>...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.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.
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.
While I dont fully agree with breaking them up, I do think your comment pretty much sums up all the comment I had on Apple over the past 4-5 years.
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.
Apple will also completely lock you out of all your movies, music, etc if you owe them any balance, even $1.
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.
When I moved from the US, I spent six hours on the phone with Apple trying to figure out why we couldn’t move our family subscriptions from the US to the new country. I bounced around from one support tech department to the next. Eventually they told me they’d call me back. About ten minutes later I received a call from a support VP, she was able to discover I had a failed payment on OSX, for $12. She wrote it off and transferred the accounts to the new country.
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.
Regrettably when it comes to popular media there is no way to permanently buy a copy to access on a mobile device of your choice. The only way to do so is to buy a bluray, and it is not allowed to circumvent the copy protection to transfer it from there to the mobile device.
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.
The end game is they send you to collections or put a lien on your income, they don't drive over and change the locks on your home or disable all your computers
This is Kafka-esque in parts, and not at all what I'm accustomed to when dealing with Apple. Absolutely bizarre, and not at all consistent with other people's experiences missing Apple Card payments.
It looks like they're treating failed auto-payments dramatically differently than "normal" missed payments, and a host of other weird things too.
I found Apple to be super fantastic as long as you don't get them to go off script, and then their support is useless. If you have a problem that fits into the general concerns like shipping, returns, repairs? It's a really great experience. In person? It's a great experience. Remotely? Well it really depends what you are asking.
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.
> 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
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.
It looks like they're treating failed auto-payments dramatically differently than "normal" missed payments
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.
Chase did this with a friend that deposited a check using their app. He entered a lower amount by accident than what was written on the check and they permanently blocked him from depositing checks from his smartphone.
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...
A question from a perplexed non-US person — why do people get credit cards and use them and then pay for them when they have enough money on the account where they get their salary? Why go through credit cards and debts at all instead of just paying straight from that?
At this point I think the only sane way to interact with these companies is to make sure that your life can go on if they decide to lock down your account. Never be too dependent on any single company or account.
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 agree in theory, but it's easier said than done.
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%.
I’m completely disappointed with this post. There’s a curt one sentence update at the end saying the accounts have been reactivated, but the author didn’t add any details on the correspondences about that. I don’t understand such posts that make a lot of noise to get attention when something goes wrong but don’t really help others out when their situation gets sorted out. If it’s just going to take time to compile information, that could’ve been added in the update, but there’s no such statement there.
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.
Shortly after publishing, I received a phone call from "Apple, Inc.". When I tried to answer, the call dropped. Then my Apple ID account was suddenly unlocked and I got an email from someone saying they are going to try to call again tomorrow.
GP here. When I read the post, there was an update after the sentence you pointed out saying “ Update: My accounts have been reactivated.” This update is still there for you to verify for yourself. Perhaps you read the post at the time it was shared and didn’t bother to re-check it after my comment. My comment above was based on reading the post completely.
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.
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
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.
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.
>the Apple account re-activation team can only be contacted by email and the process takes at least 3-5 business days. He emailed them.
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?
In several instances I've seen, it's because that function has been outsourced but the company doesn't want to advertise that, even to its own employees. If you could talk to that department on the phone, you'd realize you were talking to someone in a different country (plus they'd have to work at strange hours in India, the Philippines, etc.).
- 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.
This doesn't surprise me: on a SaaS service, we already had people contacting us like "hello, someone on my company is using your service, could you help me locate them?", and it was not scam, a genuine person lost in their own company.
My guess was that the team is actually an engineering team and the email comes in and your concerns are now a Jira ticket for the most inexperienced person on the team to debug.
It's especially concerning that Apple, who prides themselves on streamlining difficult tasks, would do something like this. Maybe it lends insight into their priorities...
A somewhat similar thing just happened to me with Apple. I did an AppleCare express replacement for an iPhone (swapped out my old, damaged phone for a new one via mail). Fedex then proceeds to lose my phone for about three months. No tracking information, nothing.
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.
> Unfortunately, this email got lost in my inbox and I didn’t see it until I went looking
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"
So because it’s about debt, we should suddenly have zero expectation of a good experience? It’s pretty clear this is not a person who tried to avoid paying, he just missed an email - a human error that good UX would normally be able to support. I would also presume that he’s been an Apple customer for a while, so they should have a track record of him not trying to scam them. Instead all his data is held hostage with very unhelpful messages about what’s gone wrong or how to fix it.
The Apple Card could have send him a letter reminder about the debt instead of some email. These days letters are more effective than sending an email. At least for me I don’t get that many paper letters anymore
Your comment is victim blaming. If your learning here is it’s his fault for using multiple Apple services then I think that’s strange. The problem here is that Apple provided a an awful experience and need to fix multiple issues here. It’s that simple.
What are those things they preach in finance? Diversification? Managing risk? One should never put all their eggs in one basket, in my opinion. The UX difference between an Apple Card and a regular card, GMail and some smaller provider, etc is so small that it is definitely not worth it.
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.
Hard same. If something is really important to me (aka... catastrophic if lost) I try to make sure it's backed up onsite (backup drive on my desk) and offsite (one or multiple cloud services).
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’ve always bought used cars, and refurbed Macs. Just how I roll …
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.
It was flagged because Apple can do no wrong in the eyes of most of the crowd here. Had it been Google, Facebook or anyone else in their place the story would be a #1 trend here and on Twitter, Reddit etc.
Ironic that this very comment is already getting flagged and downvoted just for stating this.
I wonder how much of this is caused by the interplay between Apple and Goldman Sachs complicating things. Normally when I deal with Apple support it's relatively smooth. Just today I worked through an issue that required patiently responding to the scripted Q&A with a first-line tech, who escalated me to a tier 2 tech that very much knew what he was doing. Ultimately he was as baffled as I was about what was broken, but we were able to find a workaround that fixed it even so. But he was very knowledgeable, very courteous, and I was actually pretty impressed by the whole experience. But no third-party support had to be involved, nor anything to do with the presumably highly regulated financial industry, and maybe that's a key difference.
That's true, but I've noticed that any customer service that even touches the Apple Card feels a lot more like dealing with, well, a credit card company than it does Apple's other departments.
In my experience it's the Goldman complexity where the friction is coming from. Exhibit A (A Comedy of Support Errors): https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png
> Apple says it will hold my Apple accounts hostage in order to collect a payment.
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.
I expect Kafka from Google-- strange to see if from Apple (on something besides an app store approval, that is)
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.
It's times like this when I wish Apple would be more transparent with their customers. Their lock-and-key approach generally does a good job of assuaging security fears (regardless of how secure they actually are), but it obviously doesn't do a great job of resolving issues like this. Making matters worse, it's hard to tell what kind of failure this is; is it Apple's fault, or Goldman-Sachs? Either way, I hope Dustin can sort it out without losing anything critical. This whole situation raises a lot of questions, and I fear that we may never receive an answer (or much less, an explanation) from Apple.
There is a mention of an Apple trade-in. My Apple experiences are generally amazing but my wife recently did a trade-in on her old watch through Apple. It was handled by an outside company and they screwed up like 4 times. Total nightmare -- do not do a trade-in unless it's in person. You will have very little recourse if something goes wrong.
> It was handled by an outside company and they screwed up like 4 times.
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.
The real story is - why are you so comfortable giving up your consumer due process and protections by giving everything to one company? Even if the experience is incrementally better (and I don't think the experience of using an Apple CC is much better), surely it is worth diversifying your life platform?
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!
> Apple ID was a different department, he said, and they could only be contacted by email. He emailed them. I continued to wait.
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.
"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."
I've had a similar experience to the OP - but in differing circumstances.
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.
This is why we have always had consumer regulation. Note the relative difference in power here. In the short to medium term apple can do whatever they like and the customer can get stuffed. In the longer term we have regulation so the the strongest might not always get their way.
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.
Particularly these days, Apple's scale and power strikes me as monopolistic. I know that's a bit of an unpopular opinion around here, but I honestly don't know what else to call it. Their negligence on the behalf of the consumer borders on intolerable, and their treatment of developers has been the topic of discussion for years now. If they continue to integrate like this, I fear they'll lose sight of the finish line.
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.
Perhaps we need a new name for this category of companies. Companies that may or may not have a monopoly, but are so big and rich that they do not have to care about what people and most governments think. They are shielded, to a great extent, from normal market forces because of their wealth and market share.
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.
If we are using British English, which we might do if we are (for example) British, then we generally do in fact refer to companies -- as well as rock bands, teams, and other collective nouns -- in the plural.
Too much power in one hand. And Apple isn't here necessarily evil but the high grade of automation.
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.
I would not get the Apple Card because Apple’s documentation around every aspect is missing or incomplete. The 3% savings is not worth the potential disaster of Apple shutting down Apple Card; happened to Googles Wallet Card. If you need a credit card get one that has a better interest rate, bonus’, and terms.
> 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!
I agree, though I think your language comes across as being more complicated than it has to be. If you use Google Drive or something similar, have at least one computer which does a full sync via the default client. To be more secure, set it up so that you have it sync every week or so to protect against accidental or malicious cloud deletion. Having the sync offset probably isn't super necessary since the issues you bring up are most likely to result in the account being disabled; therefore, the machine sync will be unable to login and it will pause syncing but not delete everything that has been downloaded.
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.
Yep, the proper response is all based on individual risk profile. Full local sync works, cloud backups _can_ work and can solve many problems. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good!
Worth noting that being worried or annoyed about losing personal data stored in the cloud does not imply that you don’t have backups. Restoring from backups is annoying in the best case scenario.
Very true, restoring from backup is risky, annoying, and best avoided (but practice is good if you value the data). The article does serve as a _reminder_, though, which was my point.
I use it, it's fine as a "third place." Make sure you set the tier of the storage as the default Standard is fairly pricey. I use Standard-IA (Infrequently Accessed), which is still hot-readable but with a high retrieval charge—perfect for what should normally be write-only. A bucket policy ages out backups > 1 year. Encrypt your backups before you write them, of course.
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.
I don't understand one thing. Why would you get your credit card from the same company who makes your internet appliances? What's the train of logic that leads here?
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.
It seems like the issue had nothing to do with Apple Card and everything to do with an extremely overzealous defaulted payment policy at Apple Store. It seems like anyone who makes a trade-in purchase with Apple Store using a credit card that may not be a valid payment method could be at risk. Terrifying.
> It seems like anyone who makes a trade-in purchase with Apple Store using a credit card that may not be a valid payment method could be at risk.
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.
> 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.
If I made a trade in purchase on January 1st with my Chase card, closed the card account on January 15th, failed to send in my trade in, and then did not act on any threatening emails from Apple thereafter, how do I not end up in exactly this situation?
Looks like a cascade of minor mistakes and overlooked details that escalated too quickly perhaps. IMO the only real problem I see here is the poor resolution options on Apple's side. Hard to entirely fault them for taking action given that it appeared to be a fraud situation, but they should make it straightforward for real, paying customers to rectify mistakes and get everything worked out.
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.
Except this isn't the case - he was supposed to receive a box to send a product to Apple as a credit, which he never got - it's not the case of him forgetting to pay his bill.
You failed to pay your auto-pay bills and your billing account information changed. You probably set off a chain of auto-fraud detection in the process.
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.
Agreed. People on HN think autopay is some kind of default way of financial management. It's not.
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.
For every one case like this there are millions of people with decade+ streaks of no issue. I will continue to trust auto pay because it is such a life simplification and the consequences of accidentally missing a payment is pretty annoying (a much more likely event than autopay messing up by thousands of dollars)
In my personal friend circle, I have heard way too many stories of people missing paying a bill due to mistakes, forgetting, losing the bill. One friend's bar even had their power cut off due to the part-time staff forgetting to mention the bill arrived.
Not once have I heard a story of auto pay go wrong.
One safer alternative is to setup recurring checks that go out for bill pay. Many more controls there to stop stuff like this and it is done by the bank, not by some company whose specialty is not finance.
This sounds as if the author didn't return the trade-in kit in time, and the credit reversal on the Apple Card, which was unpaid and past-due, appeared as a scammer to Apple.
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?
Very strange, and shows a rare frayed edge of Apple. Very bad customer support. However it’s hard to fault them for disabling your account, since from their end it looked like you stole money from them.
The App Store has a grace period of 16 days where they will keep your subscriptions active while trying to collect payment. This cancelled that in less than 15 days. This is not the normal thing that happens when you miss a payment.
Edit: also they disabled his account, so he couldn't even log in. That's a very odd thing to do for nonpayment.
The author isn’t complaining about the disabling of their account per se but how it’s being handled to the customer and the recovery process. You can disable, but you better give me plenty of notice and head ups with correct information and a easy way to contact back. Not wasting time and giving the customer the run around. Imagine your car got towed and your house got reclaimed by the bank and yet not being able to call your bank directly and you have to ask around and find some email which you don’t know if it’s working and it takes days to reply. Not cool when we are talking about money and account disabling here.
There’s a UX defect with Messages right now where if you delete some conversations in succession, randomly will a modal popup and ask you if you want to report the contact as spam.
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.
> 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.
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.
They want to let you know that you are not important to them and that you should feel bad for bothering them; and you should behave well by not making the same 'mistake' again.
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“ I doubt they really believed the same exception shouldn’t apply if this happens again.”
Why do you bend over backwards to explain away Apple's bad behavior?
I suspect there is a policy otherwise the customer service reps wouldn't be allowed to do it.
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.
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What a coincidence. My wife had the same issue a few months ago. It started with her not being able to send or receive IMessages.
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.
Yeah, it's not like the messages in this post. Failures are silent and it's clearly a shadow ban. That's why it was so difficult for us to originally figure out what was wrong.
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.
Nice to know I can burn anyone's account who is in my contact list.
This. Go burn as many contacts as possible, and if a wide enough group you will see the company change its policies.
Otherwise, well we're the product most of the time. (yes even apple messages, all your friends are there!)
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The entire premise of the spam-reporting feature seems misguided given the prevalence of number spoofing among scammers.
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Such outcomes are also true of email services, which train reputation stochastically.
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.
Reading your comment it just occurred to me that "Junk" is a very poor label for the spam button. Many users are going to legitimately think that a button marked "Junk" simply means "put the message in the trash". That is what the verb means. It's no wonder so many people are getting this wrong.
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Hotmail has blacklisted the entire network my mail server is on. I just tell Hotmail users to use a mail provider that isn't garbage if they want mail from me.
> 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.
No other positive outcome is quite as rage-inducing as a "one-time exception" for something that was the vendor's fault, not yours.
I almost switched banks after a CS rep warned me not to attempt another transfer that would get reversed (not enough money in the account). It was a glitch in their system that caused the first one.
When you delete an iMessage conversation from someone not in your contacts and (I believe) which you haven't replied to, it gives an additional prompt to ask if you want to report the unwanted conversation to Apple.
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.
For whatever reason on my iPhone (on the latest version of iOS, hasn't been fixed in 12 months even after a restore) whenever you swipe down on an iMessage in a notification, the popup always has the "report spam" box whether or not I have the contact in my phone (which is supposed to mean that they aren't spam). I've definitely accidentally pressed it before on people I know, I suppose since they still send me messages they haven't been blacklisted.
You should have been grateful he didn't want to suspend your account as sacrifice.
Wait how do I report text messages as spam?
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
They “improved” the UI in iOS 13 and stopped showing that link. Now it only appears if some variables align when you delete the entire conversation.
>Messages
I think this needs to be explicitly written as iMessages to avoid confusion. AFAIK iMessages is rarely used outside of US and France.
Maybe stop using imessage if Apple is going to be this shitty then.
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.
Ah... design in all its glory. With consequences way down the line.
Why the downvotes?...
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.
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> I practically wanted to kill the guy over the phone.
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.)
I’m really confused.
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.
The entire reason why this is being mentioned in the first place is because it's unexpected behavior. You can't honestly expect to resolve their issue with snide remarks and anecdotal "works on my machine" rhetoric.
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> There is no quick action to report as spam, so how is it even being triggered?
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?
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Now that I work for a big evil corporation, I have some insights on why these inexplicably evil things happen. Fun at parties, I know. Not excusing it, just shedding light for anyone interested in the systems perspective.
>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.
Thank you for this explanation.
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.
Agreed, people don't, because historically they haven't had to. Who would think that their computer's software update mechanism, streaming music account, calendar sync, and the mechanism that allows them to make phone calls from their computer would all be tied to a credit card account, and if they accidentally missed a payment on that credit card (and not just any payment, but a payment when part of the balance includes a product from the card issuer), they'd lose access to all of those things? It's pretty unprecedented.
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.
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> because they don't think about things from the systems perspective
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.
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> 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.
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.
I see little reason to believe that a first party payment method is anything more than a red herring. It seems like Apple Retail has a policy in general to shut down Apple IDs for customers with negative balances, and it just so happened that this negative balance was due to payment issues with a first party card. Others have reported similar outcomes when paying with PayPal.
It’s surprising to the OP that failing to pay the statement is being treated like a chargeback. That could only happen with a first party card.
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I had a similar terrible experience with Apple Card. Still having it actually, as months later they haven't resolved it.
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.
I've never owned a credit card that would allow me to "block" a merchant from charging me (not saying they don't exist). With a conventional card you can dispute the charge and perform a charge-back, but it's still up to you to ensure that the merchant does not keep charging you. I can see why the rep was confused.
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.
I do not miss the US banking system... with my bank in the EU, I can block merchants, approve or deny direct debits (ACH equivalent), and I’ve set my debit card with two pins: one draws from my account, and the other from my joint account.
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> I've never owned a credit card that would allow me to "block" a merchant from charging me
American Express will let you do it, but it can (as far as I can tell) only be done with a phone call.
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+1. Credit Cards are not PayPal. You can only cancel recurring transactions on PayPal because those are set up directly on PayPal.
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.
Several credit cards allow you to generate a new card number to use with a specific merchant. This allows you to shut down that number once you no longer want to be billed by them.
It's a little more work, but foolproof.
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I've done it with Wells Fargo and Ally Bank in the US, they just made me put an expiration on it years in the future. What banks have you been unable to do this with?
Holy Molly! Any credit card company would have done this in 2 minutes and refunded the charges while they investigate. Because this is Apple, one card transaction dispute requires you to change your AppleID password. What a mess!!!
I was considering getting an Apple Card but now I am running the other way.
It’s Goldman Sachs in this case, not Apple. While a few companies run their own banks to issue credit cards, most have partnerships with banks like Synchrony, Capital One, and Chase. Depending on the scope of the partnership, customer service may be handled directly by the bank or by the retailer. In Apple’s case, they’ll explicitly say they’re working for Goldman Sachs.
If there's an unauthorised transaction on your card, that suggests your credit card details have been compromised, no? Additionally, they say the transaction happened via Apple Pay, so it would have been authenticated via a device, so it appears a device was also compromised?
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.
"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. "
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.
Quote from this, including typos: "I will need to changed your card number for your security and protection. Since Apple Pay was used, you will need to changed your Apple ID password."
Whaaaaat?
If you read till the end, you'll realize that the original support request was framed in a way that caused the agent to assume the customer was reporting a fraud or account compromise.
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.
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I think support personnel belief while going off their script (as he picked #4 I didn't do the transaction) was that someone guessed/hijacked is apple account and stated using it to buy things on the internet, and that's what derailed the whole support ticket.
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.
It sounds more like you had a problem with Apple Pay, and the fact that the card in question was an Apple Card is incidental. If you hadn't told them that someone was fraudulently using your Apple Pay on a recurring monthly basis, I can't imagine they'd have concluded that your account was compromised. If it was a direct card transaction, they'd have just issued a new number and been done with it.
The confusion around Apple Pay and Apple Card is a design problem created by Apple. It's way too damn confusing, and you can see we were constantly getting routed in the wrong direction. They should have called it Goldman Sachs Card. It was bullsh*t to find out that's what it really was and that the support was atrocious.
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lol I had a similar problem, but I just wasnt an a-hole and they blocked New York Times from charging my account with no waiting and no questions.
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.
I don't remember signing up for it. Not out of the question that someone in my family did with my devices. There needs to be an option "5. Some crappy dark pattern subscription that I don't want". It would be very easy to build some type of subscription service that autopauses if you don't use it for a month(s). I did not log in to WaPo and so shouldn't have been getting charged. Let's keep the pressure on the businesses to discourage dark patterns and not nitpick on the consumer because I didn't adequately respond to a set of options that left out a critical and common category of disputes.
Thanks for posting long chat with redactions. That iMessage thread you posted is quite frustrating to read through. I can only empathize you for going through that horrifying experience. Hope you find a resolution soon.
based on this horror, I'm going to stop using this card. I do not want my apple id locked out because of a stupid credit card issue.
That may be an overreaction. If you read through the transcript, the problem clearly wasn't the Apple Card. It would have happened with any credit card. OP told support that his Apple Pay had been compromised, and was continuing to be compromised monthly. They correctly concluded that the fix was to stop the ongoing Apple Pay fraud by denying the attacker access to his Apple ID. He tried to blow them off but it was too late.
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.
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I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.
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? :’( ]
I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card.
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.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
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.
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I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
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.
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"I didn't read your comment, but you're wrong"
> 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.
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.
I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:
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.
>Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money.
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...
Apple buys a company every month, sometimes two. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178792 This isn't a case of voting with your wallet because there's no one left to vote for.
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Whenever I go to AirDrop something from my Mac to my phone there's a 50/50 chance one of the devices shows up or doesn't show up.
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 have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
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.
interesting to hear -- I had an airdrop failure like you describe the other day, and it was very surprising to me as I'd never seen it happen before. I use airdrop pretty much every single day and it's almost flawless for me.
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For the first part I think you're probably right, their all powerful absolute advocate for user experience above all else has gone and isn't about to be replaced. I don't think that's an existential threat to the company, even now who else does any of this stuff better? But it is a problem.
>...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.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.
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.
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While I dont fully agree with breaking them up, I do think your comment pretty much sums up all the comment I had on Apple over the past 4-5 years.
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.
Apple will also completely lock you out of all your movies, music, etc if you owe them any balance, even $1.
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.
When I moved from the US, I spent six hours on the phone with Apple trying to figure out why we couldn’t move our family subscriptions from the US to the new country. I bounced around from one support tech department to the next. Eventually they told me they’d call me back. About ten minutes later I received a call from a support VP, she was able to discover I had a failed payment on OSX, for $12. She wrote it off and transferred the accounts to the new country.
It was pretty entertaining in retrospect.
> your movies, music, etc
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.
It's not even _their_ content. It's _their_ platform to give _you_ access to content they have licensed with the publisher of the content.
But yeah, if you dont pay them, they will revoke this privileges.
Regrettably when it comes to popular media there is no way to permanently buy a copy to access on a mobile device of your choice. The only way to do so is to buy a bluray, and it is not allowed to circumvent the copy protection to transfer it from there to the mobile device.
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.
Joke's on them, as I was able to get around their silly block by simply torrenting new copies of the music and movies I had once paid for.
You're probably not the average consumer though.
Well, try to owe money to a bank and see what happens
The end game is they send you to collections or put a lien on your income, they don't drive over and change the locks on your home or disable all your computers
Banks aren't allow to do anything like this.
This is Kafka-esque in parts, and not at all what I'm accustomed to when dealing with Apple. Absolutely bizarre, and not at all consistent with other people's experiences missing Apple Card payments.
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.
I found Apple to be super fantastic as long as you don't get them to go off script, and then their support is useless. If you have a problem that fits into the general concerns like shipping, returns, repairs? It's a really great experience. In person? It's a great experience. Remotely? Well it really depends what you are asking.
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.
> 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
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.
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It looks like they're treating failed auto-payments dramatically differently than "normal" missed payments
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.
Chase did this with a friend that deposited a check using their app. He entered a lower amount by accident than what was written on the check and they permanently blocked him from depositing checks from his smartphone.
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...
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A question from a perplexed non-US person — why do people get credit cards and use them and then pay for them when they have enough money on the account where they get their salary? Why go through credit cards and debts at all instead of just paying straight from that?
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It's quite possible. At the very least, there may be rules and limitations imposed on Apple by Goldman Sachs.
At this point I think the only sane way to interact with these companies is to make sure that your life can go on if they decide to lock down your account. Never be too dependent on any single company or account.
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 agree in theory, but it's easier said than done.
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%.
I’m completely disappointed with this post. There’s a curt one sentence update at the end saying the accounts have been reactivated, but the author didn’t add any details on the correspondences about that. I don’t understand such posts that make a lot of noise to get attention when something goes wrong but don’t really help others out when their situation gets sorted out. If it’s just going to take time to compile information, that could’ve been added in the update, but there’s no such statement there.
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.
Shortly after publishing, I received a phone call from "Apple, Inc.". When I tried to answer, the call dropped. Then my Apple ID account was suddenly unlocked and I got an email from someone saying they are going to try to call again tomorrow.
> I’m glad that this vexing issue got sorted out
It didn't! The post ended with "And now I am once again waiting." The account issues haven't been resolved yet.
GP here. When I read the post, there was an update after the sentence you pointed out saying “ Update: My accounts have been reactivated.” This update is still there for you to verify for yourself. Perhaps you read the post at the time it was shared and didn’t bother to re-check it after my comment. My comment above was based on reading the post completely.
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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.
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:
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?
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> 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.
>the Apple account re-activation team can only be contacted by email and the process takes at least 3-5 business days. He emailed them.
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?
In several instances I've seen, it's because that function has been outsourced but the company doesn't want to advertise that, even to its own employees. If you could talk to that department on the phone, you'd realize you were talking to someone in a different country (plus they'd have to work at strange hours in India, the Philippines, etc.).
This is not uncommon at large companies,
- 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.
This doesn't surprise me: on a SaaS service, we already had people contacting us like "hello, someone on my company is using your service, could you help me locate them?", and it was not scam, a genuine person lost in their own company.
Just a guess. It prevents “dumping” calls that are difficult or you don’t want to handle off on another department with limited resources.
By forcing another department to only work through email makes them exhaust all options first.
My guess was that the team is actually an engineering team and the email comes in and your concerns are now a Jira ticket for the most inexperienced person on the team to debug.
It's especially concerning that Apple, who prides themselves on streamlining difficult tasks, would do something like this. Maybe it lends insight into their priorities...
A somewhat similar thing just happened to me with Apple. I did an AppleCare express replacement for an iPhone (swapped out my old, damaged phone for a new one via mail). Fedex then proceeds to lose my phone for about three months. No tracking information, nothing.
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.
> Unfortunately, this email got lost in my inbox and I didn’t see it until I went looking
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"
So because it’s about debt, we should suddenly have zero expectation of a good experience? It’s pretty clear this is not a person who tried to avoid paying, he just missed an email - a human error that good UX would normally be able to support. I would also presume that he’s been an Apple customer for a while, so they should have a track record of him not trying to scam them. Instead all his data is held hostage with very unhelpful messages about what’s gone wrong or how to fix it.
The Apple Card could have send him a letter reminder about the debt instead of some email. These days letters are more effective than sending an email. At least for me I don’t get that many paper letters anymore
I'm not sure about averages but I check my physical mailbox about once a month and my email daily. It definitely isn't universally more reliable.
Your comment is victim blaming. If your learning here is it’s his fault for using multiple Apple services then I think that’s strange. The problem here is that Apple provided a an awful experience and need to fix multiple issues here. It’s that simple.
Right. And at the very least, when he called Apple the customer service people should have been able to tell him what was wrong with his account.
That wasn't what happened.
* 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.
What are those things they preach in finance? Diversification? Managing risk? One should never put all their eggs in one basket, in my opinion. The UX difference between an Apple Card and a regular card, GMail and some smaller provider, etc is so small that it is definitely not worth it.
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.
Hard same. If something is really important to me (aka... catastrophic if lost) I try to make sure it's backed up onsite (backup drive on my desk) and offsite (one or multiple cloud services).
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’ve always bought used cars, and refurbed Macs. Just how I roll …
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.
In most of the world it couldn't even happen as there're not branded cards everywhere. I haven't seen one in my life outside US made movies..
This is a duplicate of a flagged? Earlier story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307246
Not sure why the other was flagged.
People flag articles on HN all the time, especially if they’re critical of FAANG. I wouldn’t read anything into it.
Found the flagging odd but I was mostly just pointing out that this is a duplicate story.
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I notice good threads get buried from the front page all the time from what seems like a single flag
Someone needs to start hnflagged.com and preserve the threads there because I swear it's where 80% of the interesting conversations are.
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Ironically, my post about starting a discussion on how to address this (signal quality vs signal agreement) was, itself, flagged.
Frustrating, yes, but I had to appreciate the recursion.
On mobile I will scroll and accidentally flag things. It’s quite accident prone.
It was flagged because Apple can do no wrong in the eyes of most of the crowd here. Had it been Google, Facebook or anyone else in their place the story would be a #1 trend here and on Twitter, Reddit etc.
Ironic that this very comment is already getting flagged and downvoted just for stating this.
I wonder how much of this is caused by the interplay between Apple and Goldman Sachs complicating things. Normally when I deal with Apple support it's relatively smooth. Just today I worked through an issue that required patiently responding to the scripted Q&A with a first-line tech, who escalated me to a tier 2 tech that very much knew what he was doing. Ultimately he was as baffled as I was about what was broken, but we were able to find a workaround that fixed it even so. But he was very knowledgeable, very courteous, and I was actually pretty impressed by the whole experience. But no third-party support had to be involved, nor anything to do with the presumably highly regulated financial industry, and maybe that's a key difference.
Goldman Sachs isn't the entity that locked his Apple accounts.
That's true, but I've noticed that any customer service that even touches the Apple Card feels a lot more like dealing with, well, a credit card company than it does Apple's other departments.
In my experience it's the Goldman complexity where the friction is coming from. Exhibit A (A Comedy of Support Errors): https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png
> Apple says it will hold my Apple accounts hostage in order to collect a payment.
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.
It’s a good thing he uses Gmail and not iCloud or how would he even deal with the email side of it?
Competing customer support teams under one brand (Goldman Sachs and Apple, in this case) is a recipe for buck-passing disaster.
I expect Kafka from Google-- strange to see if from Apple (on something besides an app store approval, that is)
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.
It's times like this when I wish Apple would be more transparent with their customers. Their lock-and-key approach generally does a good job of assuaging security fears (regardless of how secure they actually are), but it obviously doesn't do a great job of resolving issues like this. Making matters worse, it's hard to tell what kind of failure this is; is it Apple's fault, or Goldman-Sachs? Either way, I hope Dustin can sort it out without losing anything critical. This whole situation raises a lot of questions, and I fear that we may never receive an answer (or much less, an explanation) from Apple.
There is a mention of an Apple trade-in. My Apple experiences are generally amazing but my wife recently did a trade-in on her old watch through Apple. It was handled by an outside company and they screwed up like 4 times. Total nightmare -- do not do a trade-in unless it's in person. You will have very little recourse if something goes wrong.
> It was handled by an outside company and they screwed up like 4 times.
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.
Just found the name of this company, unsure if they handled his Mac trade or not: https://phobio.com/tradein/apple/status
Funny how the author mentioned trade-in.
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.
Seems ridiculous, given that they could email, snail-mail, or send a push notification that a payment from a bank account failed.
Seems ridiculous, given that missing a payment on any other credit card has no bearing on the status of your Apple account.
The real story is - why are you so comfortable giving up your consumer due process and protections by giving everything to one company? Even if the experience is incrementally better (and I don't think the experience of using an Apple CC is much better), surely it is worth diversifying your life platform?
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!
> Apple ID was a different department, he said, and they could only be contacted by email. He emailed them. I continued to wait.
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.
Apple has clarified what happened:
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."
Weird. I had a different, but similar issue -- also related to a purchase of an M1 laptop. No Apple Card involved, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309175
Thanks for taking the time to write this up, dcurtis.
I've had a similar experience to the OP - but in differing circumstances.
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.
This is why we have always had consumer regulation. Note the relative difference in power here. In the short to medium term apple can do whatever they like and the customer can get stuffed. In the longer term we have regulation so the the strongest might not always get their way.
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.
Particularly these days, Apple's scale and power strikes me as monopolistic. I know that's a bit of an unpopular opinion around here, but I honestly don't know what else to call it. Their negligence on the behalf of the consumer borders on intolerable, and their treatment of developers has been the topic of discussion for years now. If they continue to integrate like this, I fear they'll lose sight of the finish line.
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.
Perhaps we need a new name for this category of companies. Companies that may or may not have a monopoly, but are so big and rich that they do not have to care about what people and most governments think. They are shielded, to a great extent, from normal market forces because of their wealth and market share.
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.
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We don't refer to companies in the plural. The correct phrasing is "Apple isn't your friend". Apple is one company. It makes things.
If we are using British English, which we might do if we are (for example) British, then we generally do in fact refer to companies -- as well as rock bands, teams, and other collective nouns -- in the plural.
It is customary in UK english to refer to companies as plural.
You don't. I do.
A company is people. A company does not make a decision. One or more people do.
Too much power in one hand. And Apple isn't here necessarily evil but the high grade of automation.
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.
I would not get the Apple Card because Apple’s documentation around every aspect is missing or incomplete. The 3% savings is not worth the potential disaster of Apple shutting down Apple Card; happened to Googles Wallet Card. If you need a credit card get one that has a better interest rate, bonus’, and terms.
From the article:
> 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!
I agree, though I think your language comes across as being more complicated than it has to be. If you use Google Drive or something similar, have at least one computer which does a full sync via the default client. To be more secure, set it up so that you have it sync every week or so to protect against accidental or malicious cloud deletion. Having the sync offset probably isn't super necessary since the issues you bring up are most likely to result in the account being disabled; therefore, the machine sync will be unable to login and it will pause syncing but not delete everything that has been downloaded.
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.
Yep, the proper response is all based on individual risk profile. Full local sync works, cloud backups _can_ work and can solve many problems. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good!
Worth noting that being worried or annoyed about losing personal data stored in the cloud does not imply that you don’t have backups. Restoring from backups is annoying in the best case scenario.
Very true, restoring from backup is risky, annoying, and best avoided (but practice is good if you value the data). The article does serve as a _reminder_, though, which was my point.
Thoughts on using S3 for personal backups?
(Worried about a physical hard drive getting lost or damaged...)
I use it, it's fine as a "third place." Make sure you set the tier of the storage as the default Standard is fairly pricey. I use Standard-IA (Infrequently Accessed), which is still hot-readable but with a high retrieval charge—perfect for what should normally be write-only. A bucket policy ages out backups > 1 year. Encrypt your backups before you write them, of course.
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.
Suggest you research cloud backup solutions.
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.
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S3 is subject to all the same bullshit. If you want to use S3, use S3... but you should still use that local drive as well.
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buy two physical 12TB USB3.0 HDDs or similar and periodically rotate them through storage at a trusted family member's house off-site
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The only answer for backups is Tarsnap.
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I think everyone in the last thread who defended Apple and blamed dcurtis owes dcurtis an apology.
I don't understand one thing. Why would you get your credit card from the same company who makes your internet appliances? What's the train of logic that leads here?
Well, there's two possible responses:
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.
> I wouldn’t expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple,
Apple is wallet-focused. I'd you keep paying, they'll treat you OK.
Is there any way to easily back up my Google/Apple data in case my account gets locked?
Google has something called Google Takeout that allows you to download all your photos and probably lots of other data too.
I've used this before, but I was hoping for some automatic solution that backs up my data weekly/monthly & hosts it on S3 or something.
Oh, the joys of vendor lock-in! Be glad your oxygen doesn't come from Apple Store.
I was going to purchase iCloud today, I guess that changes.
Unrelated: best personal drive solution HN?
It seems like the issue had nothing to do with Apple Card and everything to do with an extremely overzealous defaulted payment policy at Apple Store. It seems like anyone who makes a trade-in purchase with Apple Store using a credit card that may not be a valid payment method could be at risk. Terrifying.
> It seems like anyone who makes a trade-in purchase with Apple Store using a credit card that may not be a valid payment method could be at risk.
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.
> 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.
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If I made a trade in purchase on January 1st with my Chase card, closed the card account on January 15th, failed to send in my trade in, and then did not act on any threatening emails from Apple thereafter, how do I not end up in exactly this situation?
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Can you backup your apple data somehow? or your Google data?
This is a classic case of the right hand not having a clue what the left is doing, because they're even part of the same body.
The big difference between this and all the “Google deactivated my accounts” is the last line:
“Update: All my accounts are activated”
Please don't.
I hadn't decided yet whether to get an Apple card. Now I know to stay as far as possible from it, thanks.
one basket, too many eggs
tear
I am interested to read what excuses the Apple fan boys come up with for this.
Looks like a cascade of minor mistakes and overlooked details that escalated too quickly perhaps. IMO the only real problem I see here is the poor resolution options on Apple's side. Hard to entirely fault them for taking action given that it appeared to be a fraud situation, but they should make it straightforward for real, paying customers to rectify mistakes and get everything worked out.
I hate when I fail to pay my bills by the agreed upon due date and bad things happen.
https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/1366579647564181507
That's not what happened at all.
"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.
Yeah, I hate when a financial transaction gone wrong locks me out of my personal online accounts.
Locking someone out of their (unrelated) account is definitely not normal behavior for missing a payment, nor should it be.
Except this isn't the case - he was supposed to receive a box to send a product to Apple as a credit, which he never got - it's not the case of him forgetting to pay his bill.
He could have paid his bill without the credit. I doubt that the trade-in credit fully covered the cost of a new MacBook.
You failed to pay your auto-pay bills and your billing account information changed. You probably set off a chain of auto-fraud detection in the process.
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.
Agreed. People on HN think autopay is some kind of default way of financial management. It's not.
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.
For every one case like this there are millions of people with decade+ streaks of no issue. I will continue to trust auto pay because it is such a life simplification and the consequences of accidentally missing a payment is pretty annoying (a much more likely event than autopay messing up by thousands of dollars)
In my personal friend circle, I have heard way too many stories of people missing paying a bill due to mistakes, forgetting, losing the bill. One friend's bar even had their power cut off due to the part-time staff forgetting to mention the bill arrived.
Not once have I heard a story of auto pay go wrong.
One safer alternative is to setup recurring checks that go out for bill pay. Many more controls there to stop stuff like this and it is done by the bank, not by some company whose specialty is not finance.
This sounds as if the author didn't return the trade-in kit in time, and the credit reversal on the Apple Card, which was unpaid and past-due, appeared as a scammer to Apple.
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?
He never received the trade in kit.
Very strange, and shows a rare frayed edge of Apple. Very bad customer support. However it’s hard to fault them for disabling your account, since from their end it looked like you stole money from them.
The App Store has a grace period of 16 days where they will keep your subscriptions active while trying to collect payment. This cancelled that in less than 15 days. This is not the normal thing that happens when you miss a payment.
Edit: also they disabled his account, so he couldn't even log in. That's a very odd thing to do for nonpayment.
The author isn’t complaining about the disabling of their account per se but how it’s being handled to the customer and the recovery process. You can disable, but you better give me plenty of notice and head ups with correct information and a easy way to contact back. Not wasting time and giving the customer the run around. Imagine your car got towed and your house got reclaimed by the bank and yet not being able to call your bank directly and you have to ask around and find some email which you don’t know if it’s working and it takes days to reply. Not cool when we are talking about money and account disabling here.
On their end it looks like they get to add a late fee plus interest on the balance.
They didn't steal money from anyone, that is a serious claim.