Comment by shuckles

The post simply does not have enough information to distinguish between:

Apple Retail in mid-February decided to authorize a charge for the difference and reached out to me when the charge did not post.

and

Apple Retail decided to force me to resolve my credit card balance because I was revolving.

In both cases, Dustin would see a transaction appear on his card transaction history before the merchant learns that the payment won’t post. In your terminology, pending and posted transactions can both be “billed” but they are very different for the merchant in terms of liability.

Furthermore, credit cards aren’t an unregulated Wild West. A minimum payment must be delinquent for 90 days before banks can start moving towards collections. Goldman Sachs is not cavalier enough to risk having the state of New York investigating their bank over a very creative definition of what isn’t collections. In addition, Apple Card offered extremely generous payment terms during the pandemic - there is no reason to believe they’d start aggressively collecting now.

In addition, if the email from Apple was about collections on a credit card, it is required to have a host of disclosures before the contents which are not present in the complete excerpt posted on the blog. Even more evidence that this action had nothing to do with the credit card balance.

Finally, a poster reported the same experience with a PayPal payment method gone bad.

There is no reason to believe this issue stemmed from Apple strong-arming people into paying off their Apple Card revolving credit balance.