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Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts

• pwinnski 6y ago
  This is Kafka-esque in parts, and not at all what I'm accustomed to when dealing with Apple. Absolutely bizarre, and not at all consistent with other people's experiences missing Apple Card payments. It looks like they're treating failed auto-payments dramatically differently than "normal" missed payments, and a host of other weird things too. So, so bad.
  • RL_Quine 6y ago
    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.
    • SheinhardtWigCo 6y ago
      > 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.
      • dwaite 6y ago
        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.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    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.
    • posguy 6y ago
      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...
      • sofixa 6y ago
        It's always baffling when people talk about depositing checks via forms and apps. The US banking system is moving sideways instead of forwards.
    • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      It's quite possible. At the very least, there may be rules and limitations imposed on Apple by Goldman Sachs.
    • grishka 6y ago
      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?
      • kevincox 6y ago
        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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • cageface 6y ago
    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.
    • pwinnski 6y ago
      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%.
• nobodyno2 6y ago
  I am interested to read what excuses the Apple fan boys come up with for this.
• symlinkk 6y ago
  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.
  • sp332 6y ago
    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.
  • water8 6y ago
    On their end it looks like they get to add a late fee plus interest on the balance.
  • CyberMew 6y ago
    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.
  • fsociety 6y ago
    They didn't steal money from anyone, that is a serious claim.
• andrewmcwatters 6y ago
  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.
  • sitkack 6y ago
    Nice to know I can burn anyone's account who is in my contact list.
    • marakv2 6y ago
      This. Go burn as many contacts as possible, and if a wide enough group you will see the company change its policies. Otherwise, well we're the product most of the time. (yes even apple messages, all your friends are there!)
      • srswtf123 6y ago
        This makes a strong case for determining the contact details of the Apple executives, and reporting them all as spam.
        • amelius 6y ago
          They will just end up on the whitelist, if they aren't already.
      • sorbits 6y ago
        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. So seems a little self destructive.
• yepthatsreality 6y ago
  > 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.
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  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.
  • lupire 6y ago
    Goldman Sachs isn't the entity that locked his Apple accounts.
    • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      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.
  • breck 6y ago
    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 https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png
• astrea 6y ago
  I hate when I fail to pay my bills by the agreed upon due date and bad things happen.
  • sebastien_b 6y ago
    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.
    • astrea 6y ago
      He could have paid his bill without the credit. I doubt that the trade-in credit fully covered the cost of a new MacBook.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    That's not what happened at all. "But the trade-in kit never arrived." Apple was supposed to send him a trade-in kit for the old MacBook Pro. Apple failed to do so. Then Apple added an unexpected charge to the card for the amount of the trade-in credit.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • sp332 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308271 "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 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/1366579647564181507
  • brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    Yeah, I hate when a financial transaction gone wrong locks me out of my personal online accounts. Locking someone out of their (unrelated) account is definitely not normal behavior for missing a payment, nor should it be.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  This is a duplicate of a flagged? Earlier story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307246 Not sure why the other was flagged.
  • paxys 6y ago
    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.
  • hedora 6y ago
    People flag articles on HN all the time, especially if they’re critical of FAANG. I wouldn’t read anything into it.
    • claytongulick 6y ago
      Ironically, my post about starting a discussion on how to address this (signal quality vs signal agreement) was, itself, flagged. Frustrating, yes, but I had to appreciate the recursion.
    • wp381640 6y ago
      I notice good threads get buried from the front page all the time from what seems like a single flag Someone needs to start hnflagged.com and preserve the threads there because I swear it's where 80% of the interesting conversations are.
      • c23gooey 6y ago
        try using https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/ - it's a hacker news feed sorted by time that shows all posts, flagged, dead or otherwise.
    • ogre_codes 6y ago
      Found the flagging odd but I was mostly just pointing out that this is a duplicate story.
• jeffgreco 6y ago
  It’s a good thing he uses Gmail and not iCloud or how would he even deal with the email side of it? Competing customer support teams under one brand (Goldman Sachs and Apple, in this case) is a recipe for buck-passing disaster.
• harry8 6y ago
  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.
  • smoldesu 6y ago
    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.
    • smnrchrds 6y ago
      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.
• sebastien_b 6y ago
  This is a classic case of the right hand not having a clue what the left is doing, because they're even part of the same body.
• nojito 6y ago
  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.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Agreed. People on HN think autopay is some kind of default way of financial management. It's not. In the early 2000's, State Farm's auto insurance auto pay hit my bank account, not for the $250 it has been deducting for years, but for $25,000! It caused my rent and all of my other bills to bounce. To its credit, State Farm paid all of my associates fees and sent a letter to my landlord, but it took months to get everything straightened out. Do not trust autopay.
    • bhandziuk 6y ago
      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)
    • slaymaker1907 6y ago
      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.
    • kalleboo 6y ago
      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.
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  Seems ridiculous, given that they could email, snail-mail, or send a push notification that a payment from a bank account failed.
  • brendoelfrendo 6y ago
    Seems ridiculous, given that missing a payment on any other credit card has no bearing on the status of your Apple account.
• tehwebguy 6y ago
  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.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > 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.
    • tehwebguy 6y ago
      Just found the name of this company, unsure if they handled his Mac trade or not: https://phobio.com/tradein/apple/status https://phobio.com/tradein/apple/status
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  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.
• lupire 6y ago
  > I wouldn’t expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, Apple is wallet-focused. I'd you keep paying, they'll treat you OK.
• shuckles 6y ago
  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.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > 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.
    • komocode 6y ago
      > 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.
      • _qulr 6y ago
        > 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.
• smoldesu 6y ago
  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.
• cube00 6y ago
  > 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.
• santoshalper 6y ago
  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!
• plantain 6y ago
  >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?
  • smoldesu 6y ago
    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...
  • BrianGraggg 6y ago
    Just a guess. It prevents “dumping” calls that are difficult or you don’t want to handle off on another department with limited resources. By forcing another department to only work through email makes them exhaust all options first.
  • dwaite 6y ago
    This is not uncommon at large companies, - because different divisions have different budgets, you might see each department running their own Slack, etc. - you want to make sure work doesn't fall on the floor, so you want a persistent queue of requests. I see this almost always as a Google form or via email - except development organizations.
  • eigenvector 6y ago
    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.).
  • gregoriol 6y ago
    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.
• iamleppert 6y ago
  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.
  • matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > your movies, music, etc It was never really yours to begin with. Apple sold you a very limited license to enjoy their content at their convenience. They can revoke this privilege at any time and for any reason or no reason.
    • mvanbaak 6y ago
      It's not even _their_ content. It's _their_ platform to give _you_ access to content they have licensed with the publisher of the content. But yeah, if you dont pay them, they will revoke this privileges.
    • Joeri 6y ago
      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.
  • withinboredom 6y ago
    When I moved from the US, I spent six hours on the phone with Apple trying to figure out why we couldn’t move our family subscriptions from the US to the new country. I bounced around from one support tech department to the next. Eventually they told me they’d call me back. About ten minutes later I received a call from a support VP, she was able to discover I had a failed payment on OSX, for $12. She wrote it off and transferred the accounts to the new country. It was pretty entertaining in retrospect.
• fishywang 6y ago
  Funny how the author mentioned trade-in. Sometime 2020 my 5+ years old iMac started to show sign of disk failures, so I decided to trade it in and move on. I didn't have any apple product to buy at the time (we already mostly moved on from Apple in our household), so I chose to trade in for gift card. That went smoothly, I ended up using roughly half of the gift card to buy their Thunderbolt 3 Pro Cable a few months later. Early this year, they finally released the new iPad Air that uses USB-C and is not crazy expensive as iPad Pro. We decided to trade in my wife's old iPad Air to the new one, because we've really had enough for lightning cables. At the same time, since I still have a sim card from my home country, because I need that to receive text messages to login to my bank accounts from my home country, and those bank accounts all provided iOS apps that's slightly less crazy than their Android apps, I decided to spend $130 more for that new iPad Air to add cellular, so I can put that sim card in it and use it to login to those bank accounts when I need them. I also used what's left from the previous gift card from trade in, and paid the rest of the purchase using credit card. It turned out that iPad Air order has two issues: 1. After they finished the trade in, I expected that they would refund the trade in value to my credit card. But in reality they split the trade in value and refunded part of them to my credit card, and the rest to a new gift card issued to me, probably split by the same percentage I split the original payment. How is that reasonable? 2. It turned out that iPad with cellular cannot be used to receive text messages. It can receive _some_ of the text messages from the carrier, but I never received a single text message from my banks, nor the ones I sent from my US number. If you Google for that issue, you'll find that a lot of people claim that iPad with cellular just cannot receive text messages at all (which seems to be false, as I did receive some of the text messages from my carrier), but they do have an official iPad user guide (https://web.archive.org/web/20201223140550/https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/set-up-messages-ipad70482978/ipados 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.
• returningfory2 6y ago
  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.
  • coagmano 6y ago
    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
    • returningfory2 6y ago
      > But they did not buy the macbook with the Apple Card. The article is ambiguous on this point, though I would presume they did pay with Apple Card given that Apple charged the debt to it?
      • shuckles 6y ago
        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.
    • komocode 6y ago
      > Apple made a mistake with the credit process An important detail left completely out from any of the tweets.
    • 6y ago
• progman32 6y ago
  From the article: > Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud. It seems we get a weekly reminder that using someone else's computer does not remove the need for backups. Nebulous you-violated-terms-of-service claims, billing issues, an AI flagging you as suspicious, companies axing services or changing pricing, ransomware, etc are the drive crashes of this decade. Use multiple clouds, or mirror to a local disk. Do what you need to do. Just remember: nobody cares more about your data than you!
  • rattray 6y ago
    Thoughts on using S3 for personal backups? (Worried about a physical hard drive getting lost or damaged...)
    • jklhkhjl 6y ago
      S3 is subject to all the same bullshit. If you want to use S3, use S3... but you should still use that local drive as well.
      • bitexploder 6y ago
        At least you can find someone for support at Amazon.
    • edsouza 6y ago
      Suggest you research cloud backup solutions. Myself I pay for Backblaze's Personal backup solution. There also is Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage (free 10GB tier) if you want something similar to S3.
      • nerdponx 6y ago
        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.
• incadenza 6y ago
  A somewhat similar thing just happened to me with Apple. I did an AppleCare express replacement for an iPhone (swapped out my old, damaged phone for a new one via mail). Fedex then proceeds to lose my phone for about three months. No tracking information, nothing. Three months after mailing it back, Apple said they received the phone and then proceed to charge me the full price for the phone, as they say they will do when you don't return the old device. Bear in mind that nobody at Apple or Fedex contacted me in those three months to say that the phone was due, or anything was amiss. Now, I was in the position of being charged over $1000 for a phone they acknowledged that they were in the possession of. I went through many (10 or so) rounds of phone support. In a few cases, the higher up support people refused to hear my case. I finally disputed the charge with the credit card and after a while, my claim was approved. Long story short, never shopping with them again.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  I don't understand one thing. Why would you get your credit card from the same company who makes your internet appliances? What's the train of logic that leads here?
  • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    Well, there's two possible responses: 1) Store credit cards have been a thing for decades. I never got one before the Apple Card, but most department stores have them, airlines have them, Disney has them, etc. Sometimes they're "real" credit cards, and sometimes they're only ones that work at that store. In the latter case, people get them because they may give really good deals at that store and they shop there a lot, or because they're easier to qualify for and help you build credit. (Or both.) 2) The Apple Card is a real credit card, backed by Goldman Sachs. So in some ways, what I really have is a Goldman Sachs Mastercard with an Apple logo on it. I got mine because it has decent cash rewards, especially for the way I tend to use credit cards, and -- I know this will sound ironic in the context of this comment thread! -- a really nice payment system integrated into the Apple Wallet app.
• breck 6y ago
  I had a similar terrible experience with Apple Card. Still having it actually, as months later they haven't resolved it. The product was great until it wasn't. The amount of hours I've lost to try and fix this, including talking to numerous people on the phone, is absurd. No one can figure out how to unlock, pay, or even close my account. Linking Apple Id's to Apple Card accounts is crazy. Shocked when I realized that was going on. Here's a *long* screenshot of my support history https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png https://breckyunits.com/appleCard.png Small pain in the big scheme of things, but sad to see Apple not really innovate behind the fancy UI. I'd vote they nix this thing and leave consumer cards to Stripe and PayPal and others who are more focused on building better financial products for consumers. Don't pull a GE and get mixed up in finance Apple, you're better than this.
  • tehwebguy 6y ago
    Quote from this, including typos: "I will need to changed your card number for your security and protection. Since Apple Pay was used, you will need to changed your Apple ID password." Whaaaaat?
    • ayewo 6y ago
      If you read till the end, you'll realize that the original support request was framed in a way that caused the agent to assume the customer was reporting a fraud or account compromise. It was only down in the chain, around November, when the customer mentioned that they may have accidentally signed up for a WaPo subscription (due to dark patterns), and not that their account was compromised. By then it was too late, as Apple had already applied the nuclear option of a password reset, to keep the customer's account secure.
      • breck 6y ago
        To be honest I don't remember signing up for the account. The fact that Apple Pay was used makes me think somehow I did it on my phone by accident. I do read the WaPo on occasion, so that sounds like the most likely scenario. And they are full of dark patterns, which I guess Apple at least tacitly supports. But PayPal's had that see and control your subscriptions ability for many years and it's embarrassing for Apple to not have that at this point. And then to nuke the account creds was crazy. And then the fact that I was literally texting with the agent on the phone # that they were trying to text to verify the account, and I was getting nothing, was crazy. And the fact that they couldn't override. And then the fact that while waiting for a verification code that never arrived, they booted me from support. And then the fact that the next agent had zero context, crazy. And then on and on. And then that's before all the phone calls! It's sort of like I think they are trolling me.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  I expect Kafka from Google-- strange to see if from Apple (on something besides an app store approval, that is) Hopefully this isn't a sign of decline in focus on customer service. Not to mention the extremely strange "special" treatment that Apple purchases receive. Why would they treat them separately? Also it's.pretty scary that at some point in the future you became behind on payments for any part of your balance that they could use the same tactic for debt collection.
• boardwaalk 6y ago
  What are those things they preach in finance? Diversification? Managing risk? One should never put all their eggs in one basket, in my opinion. The UX difference between an Apple Card and a regular card, GMail and some smaller provider, etc is so small that it is definitely not worth it. I pay Apple for... iCloud storage for photos I could lose. I pay Google for... a dumb internet pipe and YouTube Premium/Music where I could jump in a heartbeat to another ISP, Spotify, etc. I have some email on my own domain with third party hosting. And so on. The price to pay for this is extremely small. I'm not excusing Apple here, but reality is reality -- you are a single person among billions.
  • blakewatson 6y ago
    Hard same. If something is really important to me (aka... catastrophic if lost) I try to make sure it's backed up onsite (backup drive on my desk) and offsite (one or multiple cloud services). Otherwise I try to diversify services and stay in a place where I can switch services if needed. I don't obsess about it or anything and I still sometimes choose convenience over keeping my options open. But anytime I get involved with a service, I try not to go all-in.
• AnonC 6y ago
  I’m completely disappointed with this post. There’s a curt one sentence update at the end saying the accounts have been reactivated, but the author didn’t add any details on the correspondences about that. I don’t understand such posts that make a lot of noise to get attention when something goes wrong but don’t really help others out when their situation gets sorted out. If it’s just going to take time to compile information, that could’ve been added in the update, but there’s no such statement there. Did someone inform him about the iCloud account reactivation? Did anyone at Apple/Goldman apologize for the issues? Did anyone say what went wrong and how they’re going to prevent this from happening in the future? Did they provide any indication as to whom to contact if the issue happens again (would be very useful for others)? I’m glad that this vexing issue got sorted out and I agree it shouldn’t even have happened or be so draconian, but the information sharing leaves a lot out.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > I’m glad that this vexing issue got sorted out It didn't! The post ended with "And now I am once again waiting." The account issues haven't been resolved yet.
    • AnonC 6y ago
      GP here. When I read the post, there was an update after the sentence you pointed out saying “ Update: My accounts have been reactivated.” This update is still there for you to verify for yourself. Perhaps you read the post at the time it was shared and didn’t bother to re-check it after my comment. My comment above was based on reading the post completely.
      • _qulr 6y ago
        > there was an update after the sentence you pointed out saying “ Update: My accounts have been reactivated.” I wasn't aware of that, but are you aware that very little time has passed? The post was written based on the the incomplete information available to the author. Do you expect the author to have rewritten everything based on the accounts suddenly having been restored after the post was published? Most likely Apple itself scrambled to reactive the accounts quickly when they saw this going viral. Maybe the author will have a follow-up later.
• IncRnd 6y ago
  This sounds as if the author didn't return the trade-in kit in time, and the credit reversal on the Apple Card, which was unpaid and past-due, appeared as a scammer to Apple. What isn't said here, is that Goldman Sach's is likely to have a number of people attempting these sorts of things as scams. Can someone who works in finance comment as to whether Apple's action might be something contractually required by Goldman Sachs?
  • Daho0n 6y ago
    He never received the trade in kit.
• closeparen 6y ago
  Now that I work for a big evil corporation, I have some insights on why these inexplicably evil things happen. Fun at parties, I know. Not excusing it, just shedding light for anyone interested in the systems perspective. >It appears as though charges from Apple are special This is exactly right. You offer branded cards because interchange fees are expensive. You want people who buy your stuff to pay you by ACH. That's not practical at the point of sale, but it is practical if you frame it as the monthly payment on your store-brand credit card. Charges at the store on the store-brand card are always special. That's why the cards are offered. From a merchant's perspective, anyone who buys something is really taking out a loan. In most cases such a loan will be settled by the customer's card issuer, less the interchange fee. In the case of a branded card, it will be settled by the customer directly and in full. In either case, if this doesn't happen on time, the customer's account with the merchant is now in arrears. Most of the time this happens, the "customer" is farming stolen credit card numbers for resalable goods. You are never going to find these people, let alone rehabilitate them and settle up. So the "hey, you did a lot of chargebacks to us, what the hell?" state is not user friendly. It's scorched earth. I would be cautious about signing into any other Apple accounts on devices that have been associated with yours.
  • korethr 6y ago
    Thank you for this explanation. I think part of the reason people end up in these situations is because they don't think about things from the systems perspective. And in most cases, they don't need to, so long as everything stays on the happy path. But I think knowing the general nature and structure of a system, whom it ultimately serves and why can help one avoid situations where things will go sideways, or if they do, give one a better chance at remedying things.
    • kelnos 6y ago
      Agreed, people don't, because historically they haven't had to. Who would think that their computer's software update mechanism, streaming music account, calendar sync, and the mechanism that allows them to make phone calls from their computer would all be tied to a credit card account, and if they accidentally missed a payment on that credit card (and not just any payment, but a payment when part of the balance includes a product from the card issuer), they'd lose access to all of those things? It's pretty unprecedented. It's the same thing that people complain about with Google all the time: do something slightly weird with something related to your Google account, and you lose your email, photos, calendar, documents, chat, mobile payments, etc. all at once. And while this instance with Apple was terrible, at least there was a way -- even if incredibly convoluted -- for an individual to get support and get things fixed. With Google, you have to get enough social media buzz that someone high up enough at Google notices and fixes your problem in order to avoid even more bad PR. We really need some sort of legislation around indiscriminate account bans and recovery procedures. Too much of people's lives depend on their interactions with Apple's and Google's services. Mistakes can cause so much havoc. It's nearly criminal that this is still happening.
• totalZero 6y ago
  Weird. I had a different, but similar issue -- also related to a purchase of an M1 laptop. No Apple Card involved, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309175 Thanks for taking the time to write this up, dcurtis.
• pauljurczak 6y ago
  Oh, the joys of vendor lock-in! Be glad your oxygen doesn't come from Apple Store.
• rStar 6y ago
  one basket, too many eggs
• jbluepolarbear 6y ago
  I would not get the Apple Card because Apple’s documentation around every aspect is missing or incomplete. The 3% savings is not worth the potential disaster of Apple shutting down Apple Card; happened to Googles Wallet Card. If you need a credit card get one that has a better interest rate, bonus’, and terms.
• shepherdjerred 6y ago
  Is there any way to easily back up my Google/Apple data in case my account gets locked?
  • chihuahua 6y ago
    Google has something called Google Takeout that allows you to download all your photos and probably lots of other data too.
    • shepherdjerred 6y ago
      I've used this before, but I was hoping for some automatic solution that backs up my data weekly/monthly & hosts it on S3 or something.
• r_singh 6y ago
  I was going to purchase iCloud today, I guess that changes. Unrelated: best personal drive solution HN?
• sdfhbdf 6y ago
  > Unfortunately, this email got lost in my inbox and I didn’t see it until I went looking So the author didn't follow up on some debt he owed to Apple, he missed the email about it and it now complaining with a clickbait title that Apple is blocking accounts almost like Google. To me it seems nothing special, issue appears, he has an email on what exactly the issue is but he misses that email and feels like blames Apple for blocking he's accounts. The key learnings from this one: - Don't put your eggs in one basket - separate services for email, photo backup, messages and such - Pay attention to your email, bank statement and follow-up on trade-in credit you receive if you have not actually traded in your item. I don't like the sensationality of this title, I would go with more: "I missed an email about an important payment from Apple and now they disable my account"
  • tobr 6y ago
    So because it’s about debt, we should suddenly have zero expectation of a good experience? It’s pretty clear this is not a person who tried to avoid paying, he just missed an email - a human error that good UX would normally be able to support. I would also presume that he’s been an Apple customer for a while, so they should have a track record of him not trying to scam them. Instead all his data is held hostage with very unhelpful messages about what’s gone wrong or how to fix it.
  • davedx 6y ago
    Your comment is victim blaming. If your learning here is it’s his fault for using multiple Apple services then I think that’s strange. The problem here is that Apple provided a an awful experience and need to fix multiple issues here. It’s that simple.
    • fortran77 6y ago
      Right. And at the very least, when he called Apple the customer service people should have been able to tell him what was wrong with his account.
  • wdb 6y ago
    The Apple Card could have send him a letter reminder about the debt instead of some email. These days letters are more effective than sending an email. At least for me I don’t get that many paper letters anymore
• ho_schi 6y ago
  Too much power in one hand. And Apple isn't here necessarily evil but the high grade of automation. Initially just a changed number and nothing more than a glitch to fix? The consequences show that we should as customers never built solely on one {manufacturer, provider, device, service} and must keep our data local - at all time. It just a phone or computer which you own. Just use email and stuff somewhere else. And don't use their cards or financial services. Amazon credit cards are for the same reason problematic. One mishap during a return and you're in big trouble. PS: I'm afraid that Apple will likely argue that you don't own your Mac.
• bogwog 6y ago
  I hadn't decided yet whether to get an Apple card. Now I know to stay as far as possible from it, thanks.
• gduffy 6y ago
  I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019. Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint. The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore. It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc). But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year). And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them. We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow. It’s the case at all Big Tech companies. Time to break them up. https://paygo.media/p/25171 https://paygo.media/p/25171 [ ... or if not that, can I at least get USB-C on my iPhone so I can stop carrying two cables? :’( ]
  • breck 6y ago
    I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card. The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical. The Apple Watch still sux IMO, but the way they quickly pivoted toward health surprised me and makes me think they get it. I think Apple's products are better than ever, on the whole. I don't think we should "break up" Big Tech just because they are successful. That being said, I do think we need to #AbolishImaginaryProperty laws (#EndCopyrights and #EndPatents), and that will make things much better for everyone (minus some lazy shareholders). Those laws are atrocious in every domain, from bigtech to big pharma, and need to go.
• ppetty 6y ago
  I’ve always bought used cars, and refurbed Macs. Just how I roll … I never use a dealership’s banking service, and feel the same about financing a Mac (I also wouldn’t use Dell or HP’s financing). But never really thought about the separation of concerns benefit, with respect to financing through the same company that provides critical services. Now that seems like a good call. Not saying anything about the details of the original post, except that whether he’s completely right or wrong he’d never run into something this catastrophic if he’d used (almost?) any other credit card.
  • Daho0n 6y ago
    In most of the world it couldn't even happen as there're not branded cards everywhere. I haven't seen one in my life outside US made movies..
• fortran77 6y ago
  I think everyone in the last thread who defended Apple and blamed dcurtis owes dcurtis an apology.
• zwily 6y ago
  The big difference between this and all the “Google deactivated my accounts” is the last line: “Update: All my accounts are activated”
  • Daho0n 6y ago
    Please don't.
• jmacjmac 6y ago
  Can you backup your apple data somehow? or your Google data?
• heloofromme 6y ago
  tear
• bitlevel 6y ago
  I've had a similar experience to the OP - but in differing circumstances. I had a subscription on my account I'd forgotten about. My CC had expired, and I didn't bother giving Apple the new one. The sub pulled, card wasn't charged - but the charge stayed on my account. Apple then turned off all access (Apple ID, iTunes, Store etc) until the new CC was added to the account. Once that was done, the account was available again. The sub was immediately removed, along with any others. I have also supported Mac users with exactly the same issue, resolved in exactly the same way. I look at this as blackmail. Apple hold an account which has fully paid up software and services to ransom until you cough up what they deem is unpaid. That, IMHO, is monopolistic behaviour.
• ubermonkey 6y ago
  Apple has clarified what happened: https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated... From their statement: "The issue in question involved a restriction on the customer’s Apple ID that disabled App Store and iTunes purchases and subscription services, excluding iCloud. Apple provided an instant credit for the purchase of a new MacBook Pro, and as part of that agreement, the customer was to return their current unit to us. No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card."