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Comment by userbinator

2 months ago

To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things

That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

51 comments

userbinator

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trinsic2  2 months ago

This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.

  • KPGv2  2 months ago

    > This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality.

    macOS doesn't require this. My Apple account has a handful of apps purchased over the years, and that's it. I could've bought them directly from the vendors, but the store makes it easier to update.

  • 14  2 months ago

    I don’t think it is stupid but the golden rule is multiple backups. I personally believe 3 backups is the minimum. A physical one and 2 others. Either another physical copy stored at another location to protect against things like fire or 2 cloud backups to prevent situations like this. But I have only ever met one person who did this. His house burned to the ground and lost all data at his house but had back ups at his brother and on some cloud service and lost nothing. I was impressed as most people I know have zero back ups.

    • left-struck  2 months ago

      It’s pretty silly to rely an OS that you don’t own. Though one can be forgiven if you have basically no other reasonable choice such as on mobile phones.

christoph  2 months ago

I think we must have passed peak Apple this week or something…

I’ve had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn’t get past its activation lock. At all.

This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an email address on a domain I can control, but Apple in their infinite wisdom are still locking me out of my own hardware because I don’t know the password the last employee used on the computer! I don’t want any data off it, thats gone, I just want the computer I spent money on to actually be usable!

I initiated a “recovery” process to unlock it (at Apples discretion?) and they’ve sent me an automated email saying the initial checks are passed and they will contact me again in 7 calendar days. Kafka-esque doesnt even begin to describe it. So for the next week I have to whistle Dixie!

I’ve been a massive Apple fanboy since I swore off Windows a couple of decades ago, giving them a decent high 6 figure spend over that time and influencing countless others to buy Apple devices. Well that very much ended this week & going forwards without Apple will be painful, but the message they sent me couldn’t have been any louder & clearer. The writing has been slowly creeping on to the wall for the last few years, between buckling to UK government pressure, the CSAM photo scanning nonsense, the absolute UI abomination of this new glass crap, this was my final straw.

I’m also going to be relaying their “message” very clearly and loudly now to any friend or family member considering another Apple device.

  • heavyset_go  2 months ago

    This happened to me[1] a decade ago, now. Left Apple hardware on shelf for a year or two, Apple in the mean time did their iCloud migration or something, and my login account could no longer unlock the device. It's been effectively bricked since.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482635

    • vasac  2 months ago

      A similar thing happened to me - I lent a phone to my mother-in-law and created an account for her. She returned the phone once her own phone was fixed.

      A few years passed, and a couple of weeks ago my phone broke, so I wanted to use that one until I bought a new one. It turned out that Apple had permanently deactivated the iCloud account on that phone. I could make calls, but I couldn’t install or update any apps, even though I still controlled the email address that was used to create the Apple account. Not that 5S is very useful these days but still.

  • userbinator  2 months ago

    Not sure if the Chinese have figured out a way for the newer ARM-based ones yet (I realise it's already been several years since the M1 was released...) but I believe most of the older x86 ones have been cracked.

    I've unlocked some old Thinkpads that were similarly left locked with a BIOS password by departed employees, officially not possible, but actually possible if you reflash the BIOS and EC ROMs.

    • subscribed  2 months ago

      Thanks, that gives me hope - my SO bricked their Thinkpad by forcibly powering it off in the midst of the firmware upgrade of all things. Don't ask.

      I was looking for the flashing hardware around here, but i should probably peek on AliExpress :)

      2 replies →

  • browningstreet  2 months ago

    This is what most corporations want, esp for remote employees. I had a work supplied laptop and I couldn’t access via my machine account password. I could login via MFA but I couldn’t reset my local password. They made me initiate the account recovery, wait 8 days, and then I could change the password. I suspect my employer’s account synchronization tools mangled my password or changed it to a password in flux.

    In that light, they are fulfilling a use case with greater market value than your conundrum. Is it annoying? Sure. Is it a problem? Debatable. You didn’t recover the passwords on the machine when your employee left. Maybe it’s your problem? Will you get in? Likely and eventually.

afandian  2 months ago

I’ve talked to apple support reps in the past. It’s absolutely not surprising to hear that there’s confusion. ISTR some aren’t actually direct Apple employees, so they don’t have access to certain information.

maccard  2 months ago

> That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human

It’s almost certainly not, it’s just humans being human and going off script. I worked in a place where we dealt with an enormous number of customer service requests, and one of our measured support metrics was “how often do the agents deviate from what they’re allowed to offer”.

  • davidhs  2 months ago

    > It’s almost certainly not

    AIs are RLHF'd to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t. metrics.

Dracophoenix  2 months ago

> I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?

kingleopold  2 months ago

with this same logic, you don't want to know how much your government and your country cares about you. odds are even a lot lower for them.

  • freddie_mercury  2 months ago

    Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live?

    My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want.

    None of that applies to a multinational corporation.

    • subscribed  2 months ago

      You're lucky and this is not a representative of the politicians at all.

      In my Parliament MPs seem to represent primarily the interests of their donors, not those of their country, not even constituents. It still better than it used to be, the corr...., er lobbying is not as blatant, but its still obvious.

      Seeing the MP? Yeah. Maybe if someone lives in the "unsafe seat" area and the MP is trying to get reelected:)