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.
AFAIK Apple has departmental walls for information access, linked by AppleID #. If you route to the wrong group they will likely not have the training nor the information access to help you.
That said, I usually have done really well just asking them to route me to the right group.
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?
Credit cards in Canada and the US generally give you benefits. It isn't uncommon to get about 3% of your purchases back in various benefits. Sometimes direct cash off your bill sometimes hotels or flights, even insurance for purchases made on the card (example rental car insurance or phone insurance).
This money comes from the very high credit card fees which aren't added on to the price, so if you don't use credit cards you are basically leaving money on the table. This isn't as much of a thing elsewhere (I know in the EU) because credit card fees are much lower so the benefits passed to the consumer are minimal.
Additionally many cards give you more options for chargebacks than debit. So there is a level of safety when you are using your credit card especially for online purchases with unknown retailers.
Yet another reason is that credit score is very important in the US. Having a bunch of credit cards with large limits (even if you don't use them) that you pay off consistently is one of the easiest way to build a good credit score.
Debit cards often can't be used online.
Another outdated reason is that many debit cards had charges per-transactions, sometimes with a very low free allowance. However many banks now offer free debit card usage. Credit cards almost never have a per-transaction fee, and most have no fees at all (assuming you pay it off).
So all-in-all life becomes much more difficult if you don't have a credit card in Canada and the US. The card is less about the "credit" part for most people and just the way that people make payments.
In the UK credit cards have much better legal protection - you can essentially dispute any charge and no money will leave your actual account until they've proven that you authorised the charge. Whereas if you pay via debit card, direct debit, or cheque, then the money is removed from your account and while you can dispute the charge and will probably get the money back eventually, in the meantime your account is empty.
Pay with cash or debit card, and I pay $100 for $100.
Pay with a credit card, and I pay $98 for $100, plus if I spend the saved $2 on travel, it's actually worth more than $2. Plus other freebies for spending at least $X per year on the card.
In the US, I wish I could use one of my cash-back cards for literally everything.
And this is on a no-fee credit card! There are even better benefits available if you pay an annual fee.
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%.
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.
As you can only report messages you receive, and you probably need to report them many times before it has an effect, you are limited to hurting people you are in frequent contact with.
Don't even spoof - just text them a "hey Bob, really sorry to hear that your mother got cancer - please let me know if there's anything I can do to help the family - I'm in the area tomorrow". Chances of a "sorry, wrong number" response are fairly high. Report that as spam and it will have all the legit traffic flow on it.
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.
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?
That's perfectly legit and if that works for you fine, but there are automatic ways to mitigate this. If you go into Settings -> Messages -> Keep Messages you can set the retention period for messages to 30 days and they'll automatically get cleaned up.
Of course there may be some histories you want to keep longer than that. Alternatively you can got into Settings -> General -> Storage _> Messages and delete just the large media files directly without affecting chat texts. None of which excuses the issues of course.
> Apple just likes screwing over the people that give them money.
My iMessages is currently 24.14gb. I’ve not had storage space issues in a very long time. Apple gives you settings to define retention periods. So how is Apple screwing me over again?
> I, too, have gotten "do you still want to receive messages from this person" popup after removing a conversation. It exists.
That sounds like “do you want to block this person”, not “do you want to mark this as spam”. Blocking is separate functionality.
> 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.
General > iPhone Storage will prompt you to review and delete attachments from messages without deleting the whole conversations. You can also review and delete individual media types from the Messages subscreen. And of course you can delete attachments from the info screen of any conversation in Messages.
> Perhaps more than one person has made the same mistake with OP's wife's text messages?
Then this would be expected to be a widespread issue, not something that’s happened to one single person.
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.
> 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.
At least from my own retail experience, the whole "we're not supposed to, but..." means exactly what was said -- we're not supposed to, but we're willing to make an exception this time because insert reason.
It's not so much that I feel bothered, but rather I am more-so uncomfortable having to bend the rules (but that might just be me).
This mean-spirited view slanders those who have the least control over policy. Frontline support personnel have a limited palette of authorised remedies available to them, and anything beyond predetermined options often does require them to stick their neck out.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That is quite astute, and yes, I will confirm that the example above was born of flawed UX and consequential misunderstanding. Also that the cherished relative in question is a perfectly reasonable, intelligent, and thoughtful human being, I might even say a notable systems thinker in their own field, but otherwise a layperson with regards to email; so the blame attaches entirely to the interface even though the remedy sits with the individual.
As a counterpoint however, I also have a story about a SVP at a high-profile boutique development shop (one of the "fast five", for those who were around two decades ago and remember the term) who habitually filed important documents in the handy wire basket on their desktop. One day, they were enraged to discover that months of work had suddenly vanished. Imagine being the staffer who accepted that particular call for deskside support.
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.
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.)
> 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 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
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.
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.
"Disabling iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts". This is very strange and worth complaining about. If the iCloud subscription is up-to-date, being less than 14 days late on a credit card payment shouldn't disable it.
Edit: wait, this seems to be contradicted by the blog post. I'm following up on Twitter.
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.
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.
A novice asked the master: “I perceive that one computer company is much larger than all others. It towers above its competition like a giant among dwarfs. Any one of its divisions could comprise an entire business. Why is this so?”
The master replied: “Why do you ask such foolish questions? That company is large because it is large. If it only made hardware, nobody would buy it. If it only made software, nobody would use it. If it only maintained systems, people would treat it like a servant. But because it combines all these things, people think it one of the gods! By not seeking to strive, it conquers without effort.”
— The Tao of Programming (Geoffrey James, 1987), chapter 8.1
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
That's not what happened though. His credit card didn't expire. His credit card was the Apple Card.
With any other credit card, the merchant gets their money regardless of whether the card holder pays their credit card bill on time. You can buy a MacBook Pro with a Bank of America card, default on your credit card bill, and Apple still gets paid for the MacBook Pro. That's why the money is "credit". So defaulting on your Bank of America payments doesn't make your Apple ID shut down, there's no connection. If merchants didn't get their money from credit cards, then they would stop accepting credit cards. (Merchants are already pissed about the high fees charged by the cards.)
This situation with the Apple Card is weird because the merchant and the credit card company are more or less the same company. It turns out, this is very problematic.
> That's not what happened though. His credit card didn't expire
I didn't say that's what happened. I'm saying it's entirely possible Apple can shutdown your account for owing money even if you don't have an Apple Card.
I had an iTunes account back in 2012 linked to my Paypal. One time I accidentally unlinked my Paypal and Apple wouldn't let me access my iCloud email unless I typed my password. When I typed in my password, it would ask me to verify my CC/Paypal details. When I clicked cancel, the entire process would just happen again.
Apple can't shut down your account for owing money to Bank of America. Or for owing money to Goldman Sachs for a credit card not associated with Apple. In the case of Apple Card, who is the money owed to, Apple or Goldman Sachs? The latter is supposed to be the bank.
Neither is relevant. The account was shut down because it owed Apple Retail money and they weren’t able to collect on its payment method on file, regardless of what that payment method was.
Today I can put an App Store charge on my Chase card and do a chargeback making up some stupid reason that I never got my app in which the chargeback would be successful. It's not entirely out of the question that Apple would lock my account until that charge is resolved.
Similarly, Dustin could have used a Chase card to buy the M1 Mac, supposedly "tradein" without sending the device back, Apple erroneously crediting that CC, and then Apple locking down the account until that's resolved.
Both situations result in owing Apple and both are totally plausible situations.
> Today I can put an App Store charge on my Chase card and do a chargeback making up some stupid reason that I never got my app in which the chargeback would be successful. It's not entirely out of the question that Apple would lock my account until that charge is resolved.
Yes, we're all aware of chargebacks, and nobody is disputing that you would owe Apple in that situation. Not sure how this really helps the argument.
The issue here is that the Apple Card seems to completely obliterate any separation between the merchant and the bank, which is obviously problematic. In fact there are 3 different things that you would expect to have some separation: the hardware (MacBook Pro), the services (iCloud), and the credit card. But now all 3 are the same, so buying the hardware with the credit card causes the service to be shut down.
Whereas if the hardware were Dell, the service was Google, and the credit card was Chase, then this problem wouldn't exist, and it would merely be an issue between Chase and the card holder, not affecting the Google services at all.
Chargeback is to establish that Apple can shutdown your services if Apple thinks you owe them money.
Dustin was erroneously credited for something from Apple, and now Apple shutdown his account because they want the money back. This would have happened if it was a Chase card which would prove this statement wrong (which is my whole point):
" 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."
I think you missed the point where Dustin mentioned this:
"Very soon after, it seems that Apple simply added the amount of the credit I received when I purchased the M1 MacBook Pro to my Apple Card balance."
Timeline is as follows: Dustin bought the MacBook in mid January, he mentioned he never received a trade in kit after 2 weeks, then received a reminder in mid-February to send the item in, and "soon after" received credit on his Apple Card. This tells me Apple refunded a portion of the M1 purchase to the credit card erroneously. This can happen with any credit card, not just Apple Card.
As I've already established, if Apple thinks you owe them any amount of cash, they'll lock your account. In this case, Apple thinks Dustin owes them money because Apple accidentally refunded a portion of the M1 purchase.
What happened is that when Apple did not receive the trade-in, they added a charge to the card for the amount of the credit.
Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money, because Chase pays Apple for any charges to the card. You're conceiving of a scenario where Apple doesn't get all of its money, and that's simply not the case with a third-party credit card.
Now if Apple and Goldman Sachs operated in the same manner, then Apple would also get all of the money it was owed, from Goldman Sachs, and then it would be up to Goldman Sachs to get payment from Dustin, which is no concern of Apple's. But apparently Apple and Goldman Sachs have a different kind of relationship with the Apple Card.
It appears that Apple is using its iCloud leverage to force the card holder to pay Goldman Sachs. Apple would have no such leverage to force the card holder to pay Chase, nor would Apple have any desire to use such leverage for Chase, because Apple is not "in bed", so to speak, with Chase.
> if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money, because Chase pays Apple for any charges to the card
Unsubstantiated statements like this suggest you do not understand how card authorization and liability work for merchants, and it doesn’t seem like you’re interested in finding out.
> That's not exactly what happened. "they give you a credit at purchase time"
That would still be a refund on the Apple Card. "amount of the credit [...] to my Apple Card balance." means Apple refunded a portion of the balance.
> Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money
They sure would if they accidentally credited your Chase card. Apple's site says
"Once we receive it, we’ll inspect it and verify its condition. If everything checks out, we’ll credit your original purchase method and send you any remaining balance on an Apple Gift Card by Email."
If they erroneously "credit your original purchase method", they would, in fact, be out of money. Dustin was erroneously credited. I don't see how it would be any different, other than it seems Dustin got his credit instantly, if his tweets were accurate.
If they instantly credited me and I sent them a lump of coal in the trade in, they would be, in effect, out of money, regardless if it was an Apple Card or a Chase card.
After looking into it more, I see that the instant credit system is the culprit.
1. Apple instantly gave Dustin the credit (because he opted into paying monthly). From Apple's site: "If you pay monthly: We’ll apply the value as an instant credit to lower your monthly payments."
2. Apple failed to send the box
3. Apple tried to get its credit back by charging the value to the Apple Card
4. Dustin didn't update the bank info, so Apple couldn't get its money back as the card denied the charge.
5. Apple's fraud alarm went off.
Apple gives you instant trade in credit if you pay monthly. While that's unique to the Apple Card here in USA, other countries that don't have Apple Card offer financing too. It's not out of the question that instant trade in credit is offered to countries that don't have Apple Card but also offer financing on Macbooks too.
Everyone is at fault it seems (more on Apple than Dustin). Dustin failed to update the bank info, Apple failed to send the box, and Apple failed to communicate properly.
I did the same with the Apple Watch. I bought my last Apple Watch using monthly payments, so I got instant trade in credits. I was sent a trade in box, but my cousin wanted to buy the Watch off of me so I never sent in the trade in. Apple simply charged the trade in credit on my card after not receiving the trade in.
"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."
No. An auth can fail for regular cards as well, especially in a case like this when the auth was placed almost two months before the attempted charges. Most auth holds are only valid for a week or so.
In your BofA card, the credit card could decline the charge if it put the holder over their credit limit. For all we know, that might be why the Apple Card charge was declined.
> This is a weird case, because it was a retroactive charge not explicitly authorized by the card holder. That kind of thing rarely happens
And that is a feature of the trade-in buy flow and not how the purchaser chose to pay. Which is my point exactly which you have been trying to dispute.
> The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.
No we don’t. The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.
> The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.
It's all spelled out very clearly: "As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card."
His Apple Card was paid from his bank account. His bank account changed. He failed to update the bank info. Simple as that, no mystery whatsoever.
If my auto pay information changed for my Apple Card today and became invalid, I would still be able to charge my card a year from today because I have no outstanding balance to pay. Failure to have valid auto pay is necessary but not sufficient.
In addition, you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.
> you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.
I don't even know what you're talking about. The transaction was posted. And then the transaction was billed to the card holder. The credit card bill didn't get paid, because the autopay had the wrong bank info. And that's when all the problems occurred. Again, this was all spelled out in the article.
There was no authorization failure. This was a simple case of a missed credit card payment.
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.
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?
In this same thread people are reporting a similar experience when their PayPal account was unlinked. Even more evidence that Apple Card is primarily incidental.
In addition, the reason in the article is a speculation qualified with “it appears.”
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.
> 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 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!
>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?
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...
- 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I agree. I have charged an Apple product on a credit card which was invalid by the time the product shipped (iPhone pre-order), and at no point did Apple try to randomly charge other payment methods they had for me. In fact, at the time I found this frustrating because my pre-order ended up being cancelled.
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.
> 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!
Frustratingly, the Backblaze personal backup client doesn't support Linux, because they don't want people to abuse the personal backup service for their server, NAS, etc.
Assuming you have a local backup too, rsync.net is an interesting option. It even supports ZFS snapshots natively if you're using a NAS. In case of ransomware it's useful to have access to older snapshots.
Myself, I keep everything on my cheap surplus NAS (2 drive redundancy), snapshot regularly, and occasionally sync to an airgapped drive the next town over. I keep a cold copy at my parents house, but that's last-resort.
The important bit is that I've successfully trialed recovering from a total loss of my NAS and house, in case that ever actually happens :)
A good third option is at the office (remember those?). Tends to be a little more secure than a residential building. Before the human malware I'd bring home the disk stashed in my desk drawer on Thursday, sync the data at home, then re-stash the drive on Friday morning. Good-enough solution for my comically slow upstream bandwidth at home.
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.
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 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!
319 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
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.
That said, I usually have done really well just asking them to route me to the right group.
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.
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...
This money comes from the very high credit card fees which aren't added on to the price, so if you don't use credit cards you are basically leaving money on the table. This isn't as much of a thing elsewhere (I know in the EU) because credit card fees are much lower so the benefits passed to the consumer are minimal.
Additionally many cards give you more options for chargebacks than debit. So there is a level of safety when you are using your credit card especially for online purchases with unknown retailers.
Yet another reason is that credit score is very important in the US. Having a bunch of credit cards with large limits (even if you don't use them) that you pay off consistently is one of the easiest way to build a good credit score.
Debit cards often can't be used online.
Another outdated reason is that many debit cards had charges per-transactions, sometimes with a very low free allowance. However many banks now offer free debit card usage. Credit cards almost never have a per-transaction fee, and most have no fees at all (assuming you pay it off).
So all-in-all life becomes much more difficult if you don't have a credit card in Canada and the US. The card is less about the "credit" part for most people and just the way that people make payments.
Pay with a credit card, and I pay $98 for $100, plus if I spend the saved $2 on travel, it's actually worth more than $2. Plus other freebies for spending at least $X per year on the card.
In the US, I wish I could use one of my cash-back cards for literally everything.
And this is on a no-fee credit card! There are even better benefits available if you pay an annual fee.
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 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%.
Edit: also they disabled his account, so he couldn't even log in. That's a very odd thing to do for nonpayment.
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.
Otherwise, well we're the product most of the time. (yes even apple messages, all your friends are there!)
So seems a little self destructive.
At least I only get the option to “report as junk” for iMessages (that are sent by people not in my contacts).
The thing I'm thinking of it:
1. Find the number of $AppleEmployee
2. Spoof a text message from $AppleEmployee to yourself.
3. Report that as spam.
Would 3 even work, and if so - would it have any impact on that employee's Apple account.
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.
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?
Of course there may be some histories you want to keep longer than that. Alternatively you can got into Settings -> General -> Storage _> Messages and delete just the large media files directly without affecting chat texts. None of which excuses the issues of course.
You underestimate the number of large files kids and grandparents can send in a chat in 30 days.
Wow that's a ton of storage, a device that wouldn't require constantly deleting messages would be so expensive.
Oh wait, none of that is actually true. Apple just likes screwing over the people that give them money.
My iMessages is currently 24.14gb. I’ve not had storage space issues in a very long time. Apple gives you settings to define retention periods. So how is Apple screwing me over again?
That sounds like “do you want to block this person”, not “do you want to mark this as spam”. Blocking is separate functionality.
> 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.
General > iPhone Storage will prompt you to review and delete attachments from messages without deleting the whole conversations. You can also review and delete individual media types from the Messages subscreen. And of course you can delete attachments from the info screen of any conversation in Messages.
> Perhaps more than one person has made the same mistake with OP's wife's text messages?
Then this would be expected to be a widespread issue, not something that’s happened to one single person.
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
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.
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.
It's not so much that I feel bothered, but rather I am more-so uncomfortable having to bend the rules (but that might just be me).
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.
Why do you bend over backwards to explain away Apple's bad behavior?
No other positive outcome is quite as rage-inducing as a "one-time exception" for something that was the vendor's fault, not yours.
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.
As a counterpoint however, I also have a story about a SVP at a high-profile boutique development shop (one of the "fast five", for those who were around two decades ago and remember the term) who habitually filed important documents in the handy wire basket on their desktop. One day, they were enraged to discover that months of work had suddenly vanished. Imagine being the staffer who accepted that particular call for deskside support.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
I think this needs to be explicitly written as iMessages to avoid confusion. AFAIK iMessages is rarely used outside of US and France.
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.
"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.
"Disabling iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts". This is very strange and worth complaining about. If the iCloud subscription is up-to-date, being less than 14 days late on a credit card payment shouldn't disable it.
Edit: wait, this seems to be contradicted by the blog post. I'm following up on Twitter.
Edit2: "It's policy, but not in the agreement." https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/1366579647564181507
Locking someone out of their (unrelated) account is definitely not normal behavior for missing a payment, nor should it be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307246
Not sure why the other was flagged.
Ironic that this very comment is already getting flagged and downvoted just for stating this.
Frustrating, yes, but I had to appreciate the recursion.
Someone needs to start hnflagged.com and preserve the threads there because I swear it's where 80% of the interesting conversations are.
dcurtis had said in the comments on the other submission that he would write up the details, so I guess this is more like a follow-up than a dupe.
Competing customer support teams under one brand (Goldman Sachs and Apple, in this case) is a recipe for buck-passing disaster.
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.
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.
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.
The master replied: “Why do you ask such foolish questions? That company is large because it is large. If it only made hardware, nobody would buy it. If it only made software, nobody would use it. If it only maintained systems, people would treat it like a servant. But because it combines all these things, people think it one of the gods! By not seeking to strive, it conquers without effort.”
— The Tao of Programming (Geoffrey James, 1987), chapter 8.1
A company is people. A company does not make a decision. One or more people do.
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.
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.
Not once have I heard a story of auto pay go wrong.
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.
Apple is wallet-focused. I'd you keep paying, they'll treat you OK.
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.
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.
That's not what happened though. His credit card didn't expire. His credit card was the Apple Card.
With any other credit card, the merchant gets their money regardless of whether the card holder pays their credit card bill on time. You can buy a MacBook Pro with a Bank of America card, default on your credit card bill, and Apple still gets paid for the MacBook Pro. That's why the money is "credit". So defaulting on your Bank of America payments doesn't make your Apple ID shut down, there's no connection. If merchants didn't get their money from credit cards, then they would stop accepting credit cards. (Merchants are already pissed about the high fees charged by the cards.)
This situation with the Apple Card is weird because the merchant and the credit card company are more or less the same company. It turns out, this is very problematic.
I didn't say that's what happened. I'm saying it's entirely possible Apple can shutdown your account for owing money even if you don't have an Apple Card.
I had an iTunes account back in 2012 linked to my Paypal. One time I accidentally unlinked my Paypal and Apple wouldn't let me access my iCloud email unless I typed my password. When I typed in my password, it would ask me to verify my CC/Paypal details. When I clicked cancel, the entire process would just happen again.
Owing money to whom is the question.
Apple can't shut down your account for owing money to Bank of America. Or for owing money to Goldman Sachs for a credit card not associated with Apple. In the case of Apple Card, who is the money owed to, Apple or Goldman Sachs? The latter is supposed to be the bank.
Today I can put an App Store charge on my Chase card and do a chargeback making up some stupid reason that I never got my app in which the chargeback would be successful. It's not entirely out of the question that Apple would lock my account until that charge is resolved.
Similarly, Dustin could have used a Chase card to buy the M1 Mac, supposedly "tradein" without sending the device back, Apple erroneously crediting that CC, and then Apple locking down the account until that's resolved.
Both situations result in owing Apple and both are totally plausible situations.
Yes, we're all aware of chargebacks, and nobody is disputing that you would owe Apple in that situation. Not sure how this really helps the argument.
The issue here is that the Apple Card seems to completely obliterate any separation between the merchant and the bank, which is obviously problematic. In fact there are 3 different things that you would expect to have some separation: the hardware (MacBook Pro), the services (iCloud), and the credit card. But now all 3 are the same, so buying the hardware with the credit card causes the service to be shut down.
Whereas if the hardware were Dell, the service was Google, and the credit card was Chase, then this problem wouldn't exist, and it would merely be an issue between Chase and the card holder, not affecting the Google services at all.
Dustin was erroneously credited for something from Apple, and now Apple shutdown his account because they want the money back. This would have happened if it was a Chase card which would prove this statement wrong (which is my whole point):
" 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."
It is true! If Dustin missed a Chase payment, it has no effect on any of these other things. The iCloud account was paid up already, it wasn't late.
If Dustin used a Chase card for the trade in/payment for the Mac, this situation would have resulted in the exact same way.
How so? Apple charges the Chase card, Chase pays Apple, end of story as far as Apple is concerned, Apple gets its money.
"Very soon after, it seems that Apple simply added the amount of the credit I received when I purchased the M1 MacBook Pro to my Apple Card balance."
Timeline is as follows: Dustin bought the MacBook in mid January, he mentioned he never received a trade in kit after 2 weeks, then received a reminder in mid-February to send the item in, and "soon after" received credit on his Apple Card. This tells me Apple refunded a portion of the M1 purchase to the credit card erroneously. This can happen with any credit card, not just Apple Card.
As I've already established, if Apple thinks you owe them any amount of cash, they'll lock your account. In this case, Apple thinks Dustin owes them money because Apple accidentally refunded a portion of the M1 purchase.
What happened is that when Apple did not receive the trade-in, they added a charge to the card for the amount of the credit.
Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money, because Chase pays Apple for any charges to the card. You're conceiving of a scenario where Apple doesn't get all of its money, and that's simply not the case with a third-party credit card.
Now if Apple and Goldman Sachs operated in the same manner, then Apple would also get all of the money it was owed, from Goldman Sachs, and then it would be up to Goldman Sachs to get payment from Dustin, which is no concern of Apple's. But apparently Apple and Goldman Sachs have a different kind of relationship with the Apple Card.
It appears that Apple is using its iCloud leverage to force the card holder to pay Goldman Sachs. Apple would have no such leverage to force the card holder to pay Chase, nor would Apple have any desire to use such leverage for Chase, because Apple is not "in bed", so to speak, with Chase.
Unsubstantiated statements like this suggest you do not understand how card authorization and liability work for merchants, and it doesn’t seem like you’re interested in finding out.
That would still be a refund on the Apple Card. "amount of the credit [...] to my Apple Card balance." means Apple refunded a portion of the balance.
> Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money
They sure would if they accidentally credited your Chase card. Apple's site says
"Once we receive it, we’ll inspect it and verify its condition. If everything checks out, we’ll credit your original purchase method and send you any remaining balance on an Apple Gift Card by Email."
If they erroneously "credit your original purchase method", they would, in fact, be out of money. Dustin was erroneously credited. I don't see how it would be any different, other than it seems Dustin got his credit instantly, if his tweets were accurate.
If they instantly credited me and I sent them a lump of coal in the trade in, they would be, in effect, out of money, regardless if it was an Apple Card or a Chase card.
1. Apple instantly gave Dustin the credit (because he opted into paying monthly). From Apple's site: "If you pay monthly: We’ll apply the value as an instant credit to lower your monthly payments."
2. Apple failed to send the box
3. Apple tried to get its credit back by charging the value to the Apple Card
4. Dustin didn't update the bank info, so Apple couldn't get its money back as the card denied the charge.
5. Apple's fraud alarm went off.
Apple gives you instant trade in credit if you pay monthly. While that's unique to the Apple Card here in USA, other countries that don't have Apple Card offer financing too. It's not out of the question that instant trade in credit is offered to countries that don't have Apple Card but also offer financing on Macbooks too.
Everyone is at fault it seems (more on Apple than Dustin). Dustin failed to update the bank info, Apple failed to send the box, and Apple failed to communicate properly.
I did the same with the Apple Watch. I bought my last Apple Watch using monthly payments, so I got instant trade in credits. I was sent a trade in box, but my cousin wanted to buy the Watch off of me so I never sent in the trade in. Apple simply charged the trade in credit on my card after not receiving the trade in.
Problem solved.
"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."
In your BofA card, the credit card could decline the charge if it put the holder over their credit limit. For all we know, that might be why the Apple Card charge was declined.
Yes, but when charges are declined, merchants don't ship the products.
This is a weird case, because it was a retroactive charge not explicitly authorized by the card holder. That kind of thing rarely happens.
> For all we know, that might be why the Apple Card charge was declined.
What do you mean "For all we know"? The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.
And that is a feature of the trade-in buy flow and not how the purchaser chose to pay. Which is my point exactly which you have been trying to dispute.
> The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.
No we don’t. The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.
It's all spelled out very clearly: "As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card."
His Apple Card was paid from his bank account. His bank account changed. He failed to update the bank info. Simple as that, no mystery whatsoever.
In addition, you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.
I don't even know what you're talking about. The transaction was posted. And then the transaction was billed to the card holder. The credit card bill didn't get paid, because the autopay had the wrong bank info. And that's when all the problems occurred. Again, this was all spelled out in the article.
There was no authorization failure. This was a simple case of a missed credit card payment.
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.
This isn't what happened, so why make a false analogy?
We know the reason. This was explained in the article.
In addition, the reason in the article is a speculation qualified with “it appears.”
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.
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!
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?
By forcing another department to only work through email makes them exhaust all options first.
- 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.
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.
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.
But yeah, if you dont pay them, they will revoke this privileges.
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.
It was pretty entertaining in retrospect.
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.
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.
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
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?
An important detail left completely out from any of the tweets.
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.
> 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!
(Worried about a physical hard drive getting lost or damaged...)
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.
Myself, I keep everything on my cheap surplus NAS (2 drive redundancy), snapshot regularly, and occasionally sync to an airgapped drive the next town over. I keep a cold copy at my parents house, but that's last-resort.
The important bit is that I've successfully trialed recovering from a total loss of my NAS and house, in case that ever actually happens :)
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.
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.