18 ms·

So i'm not the only one, huh. Got myself an iPhone, downloaded 2 apps, went to bed, woke up to a complete lockout. They unblocked me through a phone support req

• luckylettuce 2y ago
  This is scary…
• Nextgrid 2y ago
  What did the legal notice say?
  • dinckelman 2y ago
    Nothing. It’s just a link to the generic legal notice on apple.com
• Handprint4469 2y ago
  I bought an iPhone a couple of days ago, and was planning on using the weekend to finally migrate from my old Android phone. Luckily, I haven't even opened the box so I should be able to return it for a full refund. No way I'm spending over $1000 for this kind of experience.
  • cal85 2y ago
    Apple lets you return anything, opened and used, within 14 days.
    • PedroBatista 2y ago
      Apple doesn’t really “let”, the law demands.
      • adamomada 2y ago
        They do eat the restocking fee that others would charge, taking the haircut on refurb sales
      • cal85 2y ago
        Interesting, is that in the US? I’ve never heard of that being required by law in the UK. I think it’s just an Apple thing here. I mean we obviously have laws about refunds etc but I don’t think we have any law saying you can open any product and start using it and then return it even if you have no complaint with it.
        • PedroBatista 2y ago
          There is no uniform law. In the EU most countries have this type of laws but they all vary in the duration and scope. In the US is more or less similar as it varies by state and many don't have any laws regarding this. But even the more permissive laws have many exceptions, like not applying to perishable goods, underwear, lipstick, etc. and it's heavily tilted for unused products or very light us that doesn't affect the value of the product when re-sold. When the product doesn't work like in the case of this Apple situation, it's not even a question. As long as the hardware is not damaged and everything is return, "the law" completely sides with the consumer.
  • cddotdotslash 2y ago
    Google has done the exact same thing in the past, deleting Google accounts without warning (which is arguably worse because not only can you not access your phone backups but your email, calendar, drive, etc. is gone too).
    • oops 2y ago
      > which is arguably worse because not only can you not access your phone backups but your email, calendar, drive, etc. is gone too Some people use iCloud for email, calendar and storage so for them I imagine losing access to Apple ID would be just as bad.
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yeah, and to stress the point: this is not "can't send vacation pictures to my grandma" bad, this is "might lose my company/my job and my house" bad, as everything else in life treats one's email (and increasingly, app 2FA) as infallible backup.
    • bdw5204 2y ago
      Companies that wrongfully ban or delete email or phone accounts need to be civilly liable and this civil liability needs to supersede any arbitration agreement or terms of service agreement. An Apple or Google account is far too important to people's lives to let them hide behind the "we're a private company and can do whatever we want" canard. They do need to have the right to ban spammers or people using YouTube or Drive to infringe copyrights but just randomly shutting off somebody's email or somebody's ability to make video calls should be against the law. The same would also apply to a text chat company like Slack or Discord banning somebody's work account for no reason. Certain tech companies have government-like levels of power over people's lives so they need to be restricted in how they can treat users like the government is restricted in how it can treat citizens.
  • jjallen 2y ago
    What are the odds of having this experience? Shouldn’t they affect your behavior?
    • recursive 2y ago
      What's your recommendation? Try it 1000 times to get statistics? Likelihood should affect your behavior in the same way it affects whether it actually happens and it did. "Fool me once..."
      • 1123581321 2y ago
        One in a thousand wouldn't yield anything. Because it's such an unusual experience (just a few of these happening around the same time would create a news cycle), one in ten million is probably closer since there are around a billion active Apple accounts. That's similar to the odds of dying in a non-Boeing plane ride. Even if the odds were one in a million, that's about the odds of being struck by lightning over a lifetime. I'd think someone returning a phone over this was regretting the switch for other reasons. It's fine to keep using Android.
        • recursive 2y ago
          This is a reasonable point of view I guess. But there's not really a reliable way for the consumer to get the real probability. If it happened to me, it's likely enough to consider. Maybe there's a hidden variable about my usage pattern that makes it more likely. Since it's totally opaque, there's no way to know.
          • 1123581321 2y ago
            Sure, if actually happens to someone, they're rightfully not risking it again. If for no other reason, it'd be likely that a fresh account would be detected and associated with the old one. Plus, whatever unusual situation of yours triggered the ban, such as border crossing or how you route your Internet traffic, would probably still apply. (I'm not saying someone is doing the wrong thing if those things are the case for them.)
  • yannis 2y ago
    Black swan events can happen to you. Recently I traveled to a European country from my base (Middle East). I normally take my phone and laptop with me and they are synced. I forgot the laptop charger and could not get one locally not at least for about a week and then dropped my phone and it got damaged. I bought another phone (Adroid) and tried to log in to by google accounts. It recognized the email and the pswd but then wanted verification from the original device! Despite having the original sim in the new phone. On my return everything went smoothly through my laptop. Scary though. My conclusion - have two physical phones + laptop all synced, plus hardcopy of important pswds etc. Data is easier to protect by offline and online back-ups, but your online identity is hard.
    • andersa 2y ago
      This is standard Google behavior. Logging into Google on any new device always asks me to confirm it on one of the other devices that are logged in (i.e. phones, tablets). Suppose it's some kind of 2FA.
      • yannis 2y ago
        I understand the security concept of it. Luckily my trip was short. As I also use wechat to communicate with some Chinese friends, my experience was different. First it send me an OTP on the new phone, then asked for two friends to send a number to the phone. Luckily I had the phone number of one and I managed to restore and to be honest having humans in the pipeline was a plus. Negative this had to be done over 5 minutes otherwise you back to square one.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Don't bind your online identity to Apple or Google or Microsoft, in particular not the email addresses you use for accounts. That at least limits the damage they can do.
      • CatWChainsaw 2y ago
        Which is why they make it so hard to avoid doing this.
• chrisjj 2y ago
  Return for refund?
• uh_uh 2y ago
  Same applies to Apple terminating legitimate developer accounts and thus destroying livelihoods.
• johndunne 2y ago
  This happened to me yesterday although I was able to quickly unlock my account on my MacBook pro. I spent a while making sure it wasn't an attempt by a backdoor to access my password. Felt very suspicious!
• javajosh 2y ago
  >smells like a class action suit You (and others like you) need to meticulously record and assess the financial damage the lockout does to you.
  • everforward 2y ago
    Do I bill them for my time hourly, or as a cost plus project?
    • rtaylorgarlock 2y ago
      Can't be that hard to justify in some way for a filing. The industrials and big commercial guys do this all. the. time. I even bet there's bunches of SLA templates out there with the right litigious lingo to ease the filing.
• anecdotendum 2y ago
  Bought a brand new MacBook last year and set up a fresh iCloud account to go with it. Problem was for the First and Last Name I entered some variant of Unknown User / Unknown Account (for privacy..) and chose a username “user.mailbox.unknown@icloud.com”. Everything was fine but 24 hours later, I could no longer sign into the account. It was saying my password was incorrect! I was 100% sure this password was right so wtf? In a panic, try to remove the account from my brand new device and can’t! You have to sign in normally to remove an account in settings. Obviously I called Apple support and a high quality American sounding woman took my call. She said my account appeared like it had been deleted, like when a user deletes their own account. She placed me on hold and found out what’s going on. Apparently “engineering” had my account DELETED. My only guess is they didn’t like my user name / mailbox name and suspected I was a fake person. Anyways the lady was able to get my account temporarily reinstated right there on the spot and I was able to login and delete that toxic account off my Mac. I made a new account and everything’s working fine. Needless to say I was very impressed with how they handled my situation, within 20 mins no less.
  • idle_zealot 2y ago
    You were impressed with how they automatically deleted your legitimate account and forced you to make a new one?
    • nrml_amnt 2y ago
      They were impressed by the high quality American woman.
      • anecdotendum 2y ago
        Wrong. That description was meant to provide context to the story. Vs the alternative: getting some foreign oversees call center agent who doesn’t speak English as a first language and doesn’t truly care about my account, as many companies use. When I said quality, I meant professional and helpful at the same time as an employee. Her being female was of no consequence and that’s your own projection. I was impressed simply by the timely resolution of their engineering issue.
• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > The fact that your device can become a complete brick, because of an issue in their completely hands-off account management system, smells like a class action suit This is HN frontpage. It's on a big "Mac" website. The damage is done. Many are going to write nonsense like: "Apple is still a $2 trillion company, so this obviously works for them" to which I'll respond with a simple question: Did it not work for Apple before these SNAFUs? Does it work better for Apple now, after fuck ups like that? It's not normal behavior and they are losing customers over this. We had an Apple "moment" in the family: around the 2012'ish MacBook Air era. Two at home and they worked fine, for about ten years. Then the battery issues, the keyboard issues, the trackpad issues. Eventually these MacBook Airs died a painful death. I'm on Linux since the nineties (and, yup, I can get into my system with Apple or Microsoft forcing an online ID down my throat) but the Macs were convenient for the wife. So we bought a MacBook Air M1. After 13 months or so the screen died alone, overnight: was working fine before closing the lid, was dead in the morning. There are threads with dozens of pages on that subject. That's when I switched the wife to Ubuntu. Ubuntu, Linux Mint: she doesn't care. Heck, I probably could have her use Debian or Devuan (Debian without systemd). Apple is done for us. It's over. We'll never ever buy a Mac again and I'll never ever recommend a Mac to anyone. And I'm far from the only one thinking that way. The damage is done. Rationalize as much as you want, invoke AAPL's market cap as much as you want, and enjoy being locked out of of your devices without any recourse.
  • blegr 2y ago
    Everyone has a brand they're never buying again because of a few problems they had in the past. For every new brand they _are_ still buying, there are 10000 other people who are never buying _that_ one again because of a few problems they had in the past. The only difference I've seen between Apple and my previous laptop brands is that their support techs are useful.
    • sottol 2y ago
      And unlike, say, Samsung Ultrabooks or even Microsoft Surfaces, Macs last a really long time. My kids are using my 2011 MacBook Air and 2009 iMac and they still work, even the battery still kinda hangs in. They've had a few rough years 2016-2019 with the butterfly keyboards but I don't know many current manufacturers with products as solid long term.
• willis936 2y ago
  Stories like this is why I keep a used pixel 6 in my backpack.
  • fsflover 2y ago
    Instead, you could choose a GNU/Linux phone as a backup and benefit from lifetime updates.
• beeboobaa3 2y ago
  wtf? They destroyed your property and then started threatening you with legal notices?
  • crossroadsguy 2y ago
    Have you checked their terms and condition? There might be a clause that says - since you are using their devices you forfeit claim to your own backyard ;-) J/K. But since it's Apple, nothing is far off.
• crossroadsguy 2y ago
  > they just started sending me a legal notice instead This is bizarre and fucked up even from Apple's standard. Did you get to know anything about it - what happened? Did those legal notices seem to be automated? Any inkling what could have triggered it (False alarm? And Apple is known to hide its incompetence in this manners)?
• seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Something seems missing from your story. They banned you for downloading two apps, or was something else involved? Or you still have no idea why they banned you in the first place? Just curious.
  • bobmcnamara 2y ago
    Probably installed fortnite.
  • lupusreal 2y ago
    Of course there is much missing from his story, these tech corps keep the victims of their incompetence in the dark so not even the victims know the full story.
  • LivenessModel 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • talldayo 2y ago
      > They don't spend billions of dollars to get basic things like this wrong. I'm not sure if you've ever worked in tech, but a good early takeaway is that billions of dollars does not necessarily buy billion-dollar code.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • dinckelman 2y ago
    I wish that were the case, but I've really just gotten the bare necessities in messaging apps, and called it a day. Didn't have time to set anything up that night. They didn't tell me what was wrong, as supposedly the support is not allowed to disclose that. All they were repeating is that after a confirmation of which account it is, they will put in an unblock request. It's supposed to send you either a confirmation (which i got the first time), or a denial message. I never got a single one of the latter. A few calls later, the system prohibited putting any new requests in, with no option to override, "supposedly".
• j45 2y ago
  The cloud is someone else's computer, but I thought customers owned their phones.
• hx833001 2y ago
  You should email Tim Cook. Executive relations can often fix problems. Edit: amazing that someone downvoted advice. This site has some problems.
• Teever 2y ago
  Class actions just make lawyers rich. A real way to hit these kinds of companies selling defective products is to coordinate simultaneous small claims courts cases around the world.
  • anticensor 2y ago
    In most of the world, the reach of small claims systems are far more limited than in the US.
  • m463 2y ago
    but don't they have a real effect on the company? I mean, yes each claimant gets 0.53 cents (applied to their next purchase), but don't the sued companies still shell out millions?
• eyelidlessness 2y ago
  I’m curious, would you be willing to share the gist of the legal notice(s)? Even just broad strokes categorization of what they claim, perhaps… - unauthorized access related to the lockouts and support requests you already described - unauthorized activity related to something else you didn’t mention (even if unfounded) - some other unrelated but specific violation of TOS or other cited rules (even if unfounded) - zero additional information, perhaps reiterating some previous finding (even if unfounded) I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, but I agree with another commenter that it sounds like something is missing from your story. Details like these might help us understand how your experience fits the pattern of accounts in the article.
  • fsflover 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40179105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40179105
• jjtheblunt 2y ago
  What were the apps, and what did you (either explicitly or inadvertently) allow them to access? I am wondering if your account was collateral damage of an automated system detecting misbehavior of the apps.
• russellbeattie 2y ago
  > ... a class action lawsuit After filling out an online form you receive in a year or so, then waiting another three, you'll get a check in the mail for $2. Justice! Hooray! The only people class action lawsuits benefit are the lawyers.
  • hypothesis 2y ago
    Meanwhile batterygate payouts are quite generous: “Images show the settlement payments to be $92.17 per claim” [0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/06/apple-finally-sends-batterygate-checks-to-iphone-owners https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/06/apple-finally-sen...
• amelius 2y ago
  You just paid $1000 for something you don't own now. Sounds like you have been scammed. Maybe just try to get your money back?