Comment by fishywang

5 years ago

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 ...