Why was this 4 year old article posted with no additional context?
Lots of red flags here on the author's part. This seems like a case of someone not following through on their tradein, missing a payment due to a changed bank account, and then ignoring Apple’s emails about the issue.
The author makes it sound like Apple acted out of nowhere, but the reality is they gave notice and took action only after the author failed to respond. If you don’t return a trade-in and your card goes past due, it makes sense that Apple would revoke access to services tied to that purchase. Framing it as Apple “holding accounts hostage” feels misleading—it looks more like the natural result of missed obligations and poor follow-up.
thanatosmin · 4h ago
Because today is the day that I read the blog post.
I agree with you that Apple taking action on the account is not wholly unreasonable. What I found shocking was the inability to contact someone who could resolve the situation. I know this is a common issue with Google, but had expected Apple to be different.
Aurornis · 4h ago
> What I found shocking was the inability to contact someone who could resolve the situation.
But they did. The first person was unfamiliar with the issue, likely because the Apple Card program was relatively new at the time. They opened a case to escalate.
Apple’s phone support has been relatively good in my experience. I expect they’d have this situation more integrated into first-line support in 2025 than they did when the program was new.
altairprime · 3h ago
The only issue with posting it today is that it was missing (2021), which has been added since this thread started, so all is well.
j45 · 3h ago
Lose the ID and you lose access to so much.
Identity services from the large companies are very convenient, but the citizens of Google, or Apple, or Microsoft are largely faceless and rightless citizens of a corporation with no ability to contact anyone for anything.
The story and lesson is simple is to tie as little as possible to identity systems using a domain you don't own.
This isn't a statement of expecting perfection from any group, just the opposite, of knowing that things can happen unexpectedly, where is the middle ground in a relationship that impacts the user more than the company if the ID is lost.
II2II · 3h ago
I read the article from the point of view that Apple's response was at issue.
The missed notification is something that we have to take the author's word for, but it could very well be true. Perhaps I'm more sympathetic because I ran into a similar situation recently. I called a company because I hadn't received a bill, was told that they recently sold off the relevant division, and that they sent me an email explaining how to switch my billing information over to the new owner. I don't recall receiving such an email. If it did hit my inbox, it was likely deleted. I would have regarded such an email as a phishing attempt without a second glance. The situation may have been different for the article's author, but they may have still had a legitimate reason for missing it.
Apple's response was also excessive. I would expect them to lose subscription services, but not access to their accounts. At in my experience, my Apple accounts remain active even though my last hardware purchase from them was well over a decade ago. (Clearly I am not receiving subscription services, but the accounts still exist and my purchases are still accessible.)
While Apple's response is nowhere near Google's (e.
g. the customer was able to find out what the problem was and resolve it), it sounds like Apple overstepped bounds.
notpushkin · 4h ago
They never recieved the trade-in kit. When asked, Apple never replied.
And no, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to disable most of the services in case a credit card is past due for a few days.
bastawhiz · 4h ago
I'm not sure I believe they never replied. The author missed an email saying their payment wasn't accepted and that all of their services would be disabled, that's pretty serious. I'm supposed to believe Apple just lost the ticket?
I'm also not sure why the author didn't follow up: not following up has the direct consequence of being charged a substantial amount of money.
gopher_space · 2h ago
The department that handles these problems is unreachable by phone instead of very interested in edge cases and false positives. That's an intentional choice.
notpushkin · 3h ago
Yeah, I mean, I understand them being charged for the failed trade-in. Their credit card was charged, so Apple supposedly got the money (from Goldman Sachs). Why did they still block his account (owned by Apple) when he failed to pay his credit card bill (owed to Goldman Sachs)?
bastawhiz · 3h ago
He didn't pay for the device.
The linkage between the card and the account doesn't actually seem important here. They locked the account that the unpaid iPhone was set up with. Why would Apple continue to provide service to an account that was being used by a device that was effectively partially stolen from them?
josephcsible · 2h ago
If you buy a Corolla, pay it off, then a few years later buy a Camry too, and you default on its loan, should they be allowed to remotely disable both of your cars?
bastawhiz · 2h ago
They didn't disable his phone, they disabled the services that ran on their servers. Should you still get updates and navigation in both of your cars if you effectively steal the car? I can't think of a case where that would be reasonable.
Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
josephcsible · 2h ago
> They didn't disable his phone, they disabled the services that ran on their servers. Should you still get updates and navigation in both of your cars if you effectively steal the car? I can't think of a case where that would be reasonable.
Society has decided that defaulting on a car loan is not equivalent to stealing a car. This is why you can still go to jail for the latter even though debtor's prisons were abolished.
> Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
Sure, let's go that route instead. Should they be able to repossess your paid-off Corolla because you defaulted on payments for your Camry?
pqtyw · 2h ago
Presumably same would apply to all other devices that user might have had? Disabling those seems quite unreasonable..
bastawhiz · 2h ago
They didn't disable the devices, they disabled the connected services.
Spooky23 · 2h ago
The weakest link in Apple’s chain is the return and tradein fulfillment side. They use distinctive boxes for trades and the clown car of couriers — FedEx. Many of the couriers doing pickups at FedEx are private contractors or subcontractors, and their loss rates are high between pilferage and incompetence.
I’ve personally experienced two occasions where iPhones have been stolen in transit by FedEx personnel — one vanished and one, bound for an Apple repair facility in Pennsylvania, was delivered to a residential address a few miles from my city.
In neither case was Apple aware, which was surprising to me as they typically have their shit together. I only realized there was an issue on the one occasion where they were going to charge me for a replacement device, and checking the tracking indicated the phone was delivered to a stay at home mom. The whole process must be outsourced to a meh contractor, and insurance cleans up the mess.
jillyboel3 · 2h ago
not paying for a new phone in full does NOT warrant retaliatory action against all of the author's accounts.
block the device, sure. send collections after him for the unpaid amount, sure.
retaliating by blocking all his unrelated, paid for, accounts is yet another reason apple should be broken up. it also doesn't sound like they refunded him for the days of usage that were lost that surely still had to be paid for.
croes · 4h ago
To be fair Apple didn’t respond to the reply that they hadn’t received the trade-in kit and it’s some kind of hostage situation. No other credit card company could block all these services because a payment was 15 days overdue.
hamburglar · 2h ago
I have an appleid that I’ve had for over 15 years. A couple months ago I bought a Mac and I decided to do it by getting an Apple Card and financing it at 0%. I made the apparent mistake of not creating a new Apple ID for this new machine, because it’s quite a shock to me that if I miss an Apple Card payment, my 17 year old Apple ID that controls my long-paid-off phone is at stake. That’s an unusual amount of leverage for a company to have.
xyst · 3h ago
the idea here is that Apple Card is owned by gs. Being delinquent with AC shouldn’t have any impact to currently leased/paid for digital assets such as Music/Movies.
Good job blaming the victim. Hail corporate, I guess
elzbardico · 4h ago
This was from 2021 and in the end he was at least able to talk to some humans and solve the issue. As bad as it was, it was still miles ahead of what you could expect in a similar situation with google.
r0fl · 4h ago
The fact that you can’t talk to a human about being locked out of Gmail which is used for millions of people’s entire lives is absolutely mind blowing
benoau · 3h ago
The fact that in 2025 there is still no "rights" or "due process" for users is astonishing, you can be banned by automated systems, refused any reason, refused any actual recourse, and it's just forever. Thoroughly inadequate for platforms that have become entrenched in modern life.
tuckerman · 3h ago
It’s also interesting to consider this in the context of some of the anti-trust litigation going on. I have complicated feelings overall but the fact that I might no longer be able to sync my Chrome settings because of automation applied to my YouTube account is not comforting. If these companies stay together there needs to be a change to how account banning is handled.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> fact that in 2025 there is still no "rights" or "due process" for users is astonishing
Most Google users don’t pay a dime for their services. I don’t think it’s reasonable to mandate customer service for free users.
josephcsible · 2h ago
Google is making money off of you by selling your data and showing you ads. The fact that the money they're making off of you isn't coming directly from you is irrelevant.
benoau · 3h ago
Google generates nearly $200 billion a year in ad revenue off those users so I don't think depicting them as a charity is accurate.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> don't think depicting them as a charity is accurate
They’re not a charity. But they also don’t owe their users for what’s tendered for free.
Where I’d agree with OP is in requiring extensive CS for paying users.
benoau · 2h ago
Whenever a company has hundreds of billions in one hand and an excuse not to spend it it is usually a case of "privatize the profits, socialize the costs".
Ban gmail addresses being used for government services, banking, health, utilities etc if they don't want to dip into the staggering profits they generate off these "free" users to guarantee basic rights and recourse from their own systems.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
I’d expect Google would love such legislation as it effectively raises the bar on new-entrant competition.
benoau · 1h ago
Considering Proton can provide this level of support I doubt it raises the bar very much.
> If you would prefer to contact us without using this form, you can email us at support@protonmail.zendesk.com. You can visit this page for more options.
...those more options:
> You can still contact us directly
> All support requests are handled in-house by Proton, but if you have specific concerns and would like to keep your query within Proton Mail (that is, not using Zendesk), you can email us directly at contact@proton.me.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
Most of Proton’s users aren’t free.
benoau · 57m ago
What makes you think that?
> Yen says that "at least 95%" of ProtonMail users don't pay for any services.
I find it hard to understand your comment as you have put a banker title in your profile, but at the same you are out of sync that Google is already providing bank services...
op7 · 3h ago
Some people consider that a security feature.
przemub · 3h ago
I was automatically blocked by Google when I was a teenager, lost data that meant a lot to me… I even wrote a letter to the local Google office asking for help, to no response.
To no surprise, there’s no Google in my life since then, except when my work mandates it.
danieldk · 4h ago
We have had contact with Apple support about three times since 2007 and every time they were both reachable by phone and extremely helpful. Last time there was an issue with ordering Apple Care for a MacBook leading to the amount getting subtracted from our account twice. It took only a few minutes to escalate it from the first line of support to their financial department. After the issue was solved, they called back after a week to make sure things were also good on my end. Same thing happened when my wife had an issue about 10 years ago, not only were they very helpful, they also called her a week later to make sure everything was up to her expectations. (This was in NL and DE respectively.)
The only other large company that I have similar experiences with is our ISP (KPN in NL) who are also really easy to get hold off and very helpful (down to helping you hook up your own fiber equipment).
ipv6ipv4 · 4h ago
Apple support is amazingly good. It’s stark when most other companies have “optimized” customer service to discourage users from using or achieving anything through it. It’s also often an interesting glimpse into Apple’s behind the scenes tech support tools which are quite extensive.
vachina · 4h ago
Yes. Even outside of US. Had a pending unauthorized Apple Store purchase on my CC, it was a 5 minute wait before I could reach a person on Apple Support app and get clarification.
notpushkin · 4h ago
It’s a good thing that Google doesn’t have a credit card (or does it?)
Zak · 4h ago
It has always seemed unwise to me to go all-in on ecosystems where multiple services that aren't inherently related are provided by the same company. If there's a problem ranging from a missed payment to a fraud-detection false positive, someone who does might lose access to multiple services.
I don't want to log in with my Google account, pay with Apple, get phone service from Paypal, or use my bank's app store. It's much less hassle to deal with a problem affecting only one of those than losing them all at once.
Gareth321 · 3h ago
Agreed. Every time I sign up for services I imagine how I would fare if I lost access to everything from this company. It's why I ended up de-Googling my life. The horror stories of people losing access to their Gmail accounts led me to purchase my own domain and migrate all my accounts with that email across. That ended up being a multi-year project, but now if my host ever cuts off access to my emails, I can be back online within an hour.
josephcsible · 2h ago
I don't get why anyone is defending Apple here. Suppose for the sake of argument that Apple did everything right at first, and the author just chose not to pay his credit card bill for no reason.
> We’ve been unable to collect full payment for your new iPhone. As a result, we will block the device on the order from further access to the Apple iTunes and Mac App stores, and disable all accounts associated with the device purchased on the order.
Apple is retroactively making everything you've ever bought from them, even things you've fully paid for and owned outright, be the collateral for whatever payment you're currently behind on. If this weren't "do it on a computer", it would be obviously ridiculous. Imagine that you bought a new sink from Lowe's, defaulted on your Lowe's credit card, and so they came to rip the deck off of your house since you built it with lumber that you bought from them (and paid for) a few years ago.
GuestFAUniverse · 4h ago
That's why an all inclusive account like the X envisioned by EM is a pretty stupid choice, if you're a customer.
Never go all-in, if you cannot win.
jsheard · 4h ago
It's also why you should never use your Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever account to log into third-party services when the option is given.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Important ones anyway. I'll use "Log in with Google" if it's sort of a one-off that I don't want to bother setting up an acocunt for and treat it as a throwaway.
numpad0 · 4h ago
Is that implying Musk got distracted away from SDC and waving around his proverbial reverse pointing gun on Twitter property again?
morning-coffee · 4h ago
Or simply read your emails from them if you do.
icebergonfire · 3h ago
> simply read your emails from them if you do
Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...
Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.
The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!
I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:
- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).
- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.
- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.
- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.
No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
blindriver · 3h ago
There needs to be a better way to deal with trillion dollar companies that have the power to remove essential parts of your life based on bugs or incompetent processes.
Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support.
I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support.
The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to.
This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.
joshstrange · 4h ago
On one hand, I want to reply "duh, you didn't pay your CC" but at the same time Apple is _horrible_ about messaging things like this.
I had some random Apple charge not go through (IIRC it was my monthly iPhone Citizen One bill that was paid on my Apple Card but the Apple Card rejected the payment???). And it fouled up things in odd ways that were not clear at all from any UI I could access.
In the end I had to keep clicking a "retry" payment in some obscure corner of Apple's account management with zero info on if it worked or not then wait a few days to see if I got another scary email from Apple. It ended up working out without my needing to call support so I don't know if they would have been helpful.
I will say, my experiences with Apple support have been largely positive to amazing. Their business support (ABM) is so good I felt like I was getting away with a massive heist getting the amount of help I got as a single-person LLC. Almost instant answer of the phone, clear audio, easy to understand support person, incredibly knowledgeable (used all the right industry terms), and gave me the info I needed to go smack AT&T (read more about here [0]). 10/10 experience.
Side moral there: if you have access to a functional regulatory system, don’t be afraid to ask it for help when a large company is messing with you. In general, such agencies love nothing more than to get to be the one to swat the corp on the nose with a rolled up federal register.
joshstrange · 4h ago
> Side moral there: if you have access to a functional regulatory system, don’t be afraid to ask it for help when a large company is messing with you
True. I've used the FCC and CFPB in the past and while the UI to interface with them is somewhat clunky, it's functional and in all 3 cases I was satisfied (vindicated). In at least 1 of the cases the monetary value was low enough that it was absolutely in my best interests just to pay it and make it go away but it felt so good to have the CFPB slap down Spectrum and get them to drop the fee. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what's going to happen to those agencies over the next few years.
kstrauser · 3h ago
One time I got a senator to tell the Navy Exchange to stop hounding me for a bill where I had receipts showing that I paid. I would’ve loved to be a fly on that wall when the senator’s office called the admiral in charge, resulting in a wet-ink-signed letter of apology from him to me. I bet some people had a “fun” week after that.
Sometimes the only way to fight bureaucracy is with a bigger bureau.
edwinjm · 4h ago
Getting a trade-in credit and then “forgetting about it”. What do you think would happen?
runjake · 4h ago
I did this (there was a lot going on in life) and they just added the balance to my 0% interest loan.
I was able to talk to an Apple rep and get a kit sent out and get the credit re-added. This was in 2024.
Pretty easy.
Zak · 3h ago
I'd expect a charge to my credit card, or a bill. If I didn't pay the bill, I'd expect another bill and a late fee. Eventually, I'd expect the debt to be transferred to a collection agency which would harass me about it for years and report my nonpayment to credit bureaus. If it was a large enough debt and I ignored all of that for long enough, I might expect to get sued.
I would not expect to get locked out of my cloud storage, app store, email, etc....
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Try not paying the rent on a storage unit. After a month or so, you'll find a new lock on the door. Go long enough without settling up (read the lease), and they will sell off the contents.
Zak · 42m ago
Sure, and skipping too many car payments gets your car repossessed, skipping too many mortgage payments leads to foreclosure, etc....
Those are serious consequences, but they're localized to the specific thing or service at issue. You don't lose access to your car because you fail to pay rent on your storage unit. Your house doesn't get foreclosed because your car gets repossessed.
josephcsible · 21m ago
But they can't lock you out of your house, or sell off the contents of your house that were at one point in your storage unit, just because you stopped paying the rent for your storage unit.
accrual · 3h ago
Indeed, that and missing a pretty serious sounding email from Apple.
I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
amelius · 4h ago
> It suggests that charges by Apple on Apple Card are different from other purchases, and this can have serious consequences.
We really need a concept like separation of powers inside companies too, otherwise we end up with corporate dictatorships.
brundolf · 3h ago
Apple's online services have always been a shitshow for me. Tiny details are bad or broken in ways that would never be acceptable on other major online services (or Apple's non-services software!)
I don't know what's rotten- it can't be a lack of expertise, it must be a separate department with a broken culture. But I don't rely on them for anything crucial
kaonwarb · 4h ago
Stories like this have been sufficient to convince me to stay far away from Apple Card or any other financial instrument directly entangled with the tools of my daily life.
rchaud · 3h ago
The moral of this story is that "vertical integration" doesn't always mean what it says on the tin."Carpe Diem" for shareholders can translate to "Caveat emptor" for consumers.
abc_lisper · 4h ago
Article from 2021
xyst · 3h ago
This is nothing new from Apple. They do the same thing with vague ToS violations.
Have moved or purchased alternates to digital assets. Nothing is held behind the Apple/Google/MS wall.
jjtheblunt · 4h ago
tldr : confused, the user decided to go read overlooked emails, and ...
> 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. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.
josephcsible · 1m ago
If you fail to pay a company for a new thing, their self-help recourse should be limited to taking back/disabling the new thing, not all of the old things that you've previously bought from them and paid for. If they want more than that, they should have to go through the courts like any other kind of debt collection would.
fossuser · 4h ago
A non-story about them failing to pay a bill, then writing a blog post complaining about it.
There are few bills you can just ignore without consequence.
ebiester · 4h ago
However, if I miss a bill at my credit card because of some missed email, I can call them and get it fixed up. If I miss a bill at my bank, I can call my bank and we will get it fixed up. And those are a bit too big for my comfort compared to a credit union.
The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
Aurornis · 4h ago
But they did call, talk to someone, and get it fixed. The hitch was that the first person they called was unfamiliar with the issue and had to escalate it.
qcic · 4h ago
I don’t see how that happened in this case. They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed.
kennywinker · 3h ago
The blog post was written NINE days after their first contact with apple support. "They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed" yes, after at least nine days of being locked out. This was all triggered by being 15 days late on a payment, because APPLE screwed up and didn't send a trade-in kit.
If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
fossuser · 4m ago
Based on this post, I doubt Apple failed to send a trade in kit.
jjtheblunt · 4h ago
the author says the phone / imessage kept working fine, just unpaid cloud services froze.
sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)
accrual · 4h ago
> sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services.
Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.
If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.
kstrauser · 4h ago
Yeah, it could’ve been subtitled “Apple finds this one weird trick to get debtors to pay their bills”.
ZeroConcerns · 3h ago
So, yeah, the linked article is half a decade old by now and would best be flagged as "HN is not Apple customer service", but there is something worth salvaging here.
Which is: sure, you're a tech company wanting to change the world. And, sure, this will ruffle some feathers and break a few eggs by design, but: the least you can do is stand up for your customers, right?
So: if your actual customers want to urgently talk to you about, ehm, things, how do you enable this? And, how do you communicate the outcomes to the wider world?
Bad examples abound. But how would you do better?
wat10000 · 3h ago
I’d have a phone number that customers can use to reach someone at my company who can help them, and put that phone number in places where customers can find it.
Which is what most companies actually do, including Apple. Uncontactable companies like Google aren’t the norm.
I understand and share the frustration that email and chat work poorly, but unfortunately that’s often how it is. If you need help, your best bet is usually to call. It doesn’t sound like this guy ever did that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817
Allegedly unrelated to the apple card, your appleid just gets locked if you don't fulfill a trade-in.
Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 - March 2021 (302 comments)
Lots of red flags here on the author's part. This seems like a case of someone not following through on their tradein, missing a payment due to a changed bank account, and then ignoring Apple’s emails about the issue.
The author makes it sound like Apple acted out of nowhere, but the reality is they gave notice and took action only after the author failed to respond. If you don’t return a trade-in and your card goes past due, it makes sense that Apple would revoke access to services tied to that purchase. Framing it as Apple “holding accounts hostage” feels misleading—it looks more like the natural result of missed obligations and poor follow-up.
I agree with you that Apple taking action on the account is not wholly unreasonable. What I found shocking was the inability to contact someone who could resolve the situation. I know this is a common issue with Google, but had expected Apple to be different.
But they did. The first person was unfamiliar with the issue, likely because the Apple Card program was relatively new at the time. They opened a case to escalate.
Apple’s phone support has been relatively good in my experience. I expect they’d have this situation more integrated into first-line support in 2025 than they did when the program was new.
Identity services from the large companies are very convenient, but the citizens of Google, or Apple, or Microsoft are largely faceless and rightless citizens of a corporation with no ability to contact anyone for anything.
The story and lesson is simple is to tie as little as possible to identity systems using a domain you don't own.
This isn't a statement of expecting perfection from any group, just the opposite, of knowing that things can happen unexpectedly, where is the middle ground in a relationship that impacts the user more than the company if the ID is lost.
The missed notification is something that we have to take the author's word for, but it could very well be true. Perhaps I'm more sympathetic because I ran into a similar situation recently. I called a company because I hadn't received a bill, was told that they recently sold off the relevant division, and that they sent me an email explaining how to switch my billing information over to the new owner. I don't recall receiving such an email. If it did hit my inbox, it was likely deleted. I would have regarded such an email as a phishing attempt without a second glance. The situation may have been different for the article's author, but they may have still had a legitimate reason for missing it.
Apple's response was also excessive. I would expect them to lose subscription services, but not access to their accounts. At in my experience, my Apple accounts remain active even though my last hardware purchase from them was well over a decade ago. (Clearly I am not receiving subscription services, but the accounts still exist and my purchases are still accessible.)
While Apple's response is nowhere near Google's (e. g. the customer was able to find out what the problem was and resolve it), it sounds like Apple overstepped bounds.
And no, it doesn’t make sense for Apple to disable most of the services in case a credit card is past due for a few days.
I'm also not sure why the author didn't follow up: not following up has the direct consequence of being charged a substantial amount of money.
The linkage between the card and the account doesn't actually seem important here. They locked the account that the unpaid iPhone was set up with. Why would Apple continue to provide service to an account that was being used by a device that was effectively partially stolen from them?
Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
Society has decided that defaulting on a car loan is not equivalent to stealing a car. This is why you can still go to jail for the latter even though debtor's prisons were abolished.
> Moreover, cars are much more easily repossessed than phones and laptops.
Sure, let's go that route instead. Should they be able to repossess your paid-off Corolla because you defaulted on payments for your Camry?
I’ve personally experienced two occasions where iPhones have been stolen in transit by FedEx personnel — one vanished and one, bound for an Apple repair facility in Pennsylvania, was delivered to a residential address a few miles from my city.
In neither case was Apple aware, which was surprising to me as they typically have their shit together. I only realized there was an issue on the one occasion where they were going to charge me for a replacement device, and checking the tracking indicated the phone was delivered to a stay at home mom. The whole process must be outsourced to a meh contractor, and insurance cleans up the mess.
block the device, sure. send collections after him for the unpaid amount, sure.
retaliating by blocking all his unrelated, paid for, accounts is yet another reason apple should be broken up. it also doesn't sound like they refunded him for the days of usage that were lost that surely still had to be paid for.
Good job blaming the victim. Hail corporate, I guess
Most Google users don’t pay a dime for their services. I don’t think it’s reasonable to mandate customer service for free users.
They’re not a charity. But they also don’t owe their users for what’s tendered for free.
Where I’d agree with OP is in requiring extensive CS for paying users.
Ban gmail addresses being used for government services, banking, health, utilities etc if they don't want to dip into the staggering profits they generate off these "free" users to guarantee basic rights and recourse from their own systems.
https://proton.me/support/contact?topic=Other
> If you would prefer to contact us without using this form, you can email us at support@protonmail.zendesk.com. You can visit this page for more options.
...those more options:
> You can still contact us directly
> All support requests are handled in-house by Proton, but if you have specific concerns and would like to keep your query within Proton Mail (that is, not using Zendesk), you can email us directly at contact@proton.me.
> Yen says that "at least 95%" of ProtonMail users don't pay for any services.
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/09/privacy-business-booming-pr...
The only other large company that I have similar experiences with is our ISP (KPN in NL) who are also really easy to get hold off and very helpful (down to helping you hook up your own fiber equipment).
I don't want to log in with my Google account, pay with Apple, get phone service from Paypal, or use my bank's app store. It's much less hassle to deal with a problem affecting only one of those than losing them all at once.
> We’ve been unable to collect full payment for your new iPhone. As a result, we will block the device on the order from further access to the Apple iTunes and Mac App stores, and disable all accounts associated with the device purchased on the order.
Apple is retroactively making everything you've ever bought from them, even things you've fully paid for and owned outright, be the collateral for whatever payment you're currently behind on. If this weren't "do it on a computer", it would be obviously ridiculous. Imagine that you bought a new sink from Lowe's, defaulted on your Lowe's credit card, and so they came to rip the deck off of your house since you built it with lumber that you bought from them (and paid for) a few years ago.
Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...
Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.
The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!
I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:
- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).
- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.
- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.
- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.
No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.
Companies like Apple. Microsoft, Google, Meta, et al. have the money to spend on better customer support, but they don't because they have a monopoly. They know they can do whatever they want and there's nothing we can do. But even worse, they have absolute and total control and then hide behind their lack of customer support.
I think there should be a law that states that once you become large enough or important enough, you MUST reach a certain level of competent customer support or you will get fined the amount of money it will cost to pay for this competent customer support.
The reason why they get around bad customer support is because they are large enough so that they can bully billions of people by threatening to cut off access. Talk to Youtubers that get mysteriously cut off with no customer support to talk to.
This is all because of customer support. Smaller companies need to invest in customer support because of competition but not these larger companies because they don't have real competition, and something needs to change to force them to do it.
I had some random Apple charge not go through (IIRC it was my monthly iPhone Citizen One bill that was paid on my Apple Card but the Apple Card rejected the payment???). And it fouled up things in odd ways that were not clear at all from any UI I could access.
In the end I had to keep clicking a "retry" payment in some obscure corner of Apple's account management with zero info on if it worked or not then wait a few days to see if I got another scary email from Apple. It ended up working out without my needing to call support so I don't know if they would have been helpful.
I will say, my experiences with Apple support have been largely positive to amazing. Their business support (ABM) is so good I felt like I was getting away with a massive heist getting the amount of help I got as a single-person LLC. Almost instant answer of the phone, clear audio, easy to understand support person, incredibly knowledgeable (used all the right industry terms), and gave me the info I needed to go smack AT&T (read more about here [0]). 10/10 experience.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154315
True. I've used the FCC and CFPB in the past and while the UI to interface with them is somewhat clunky, it's functional and in all 3 cases I was satisfied (vindicated). In at least 1 of the cases the monetary value was low enough that it was absolutely in my best interests just to pay it and make it go away but it felt so good to have the CFPB slap down Spectrum and get them to drop the fee. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what's going to happen to those agencies over the next few years.
Most recently, California’s Department of Insurance helped me when State Farm was being a thorn in my side: https://honeypot.net/2024/04/08/i-fought-state.html
Sometimes the only way to fight bureaucracy is with a bigger bureau.
I was able to talk to an Apple rep and get a kit sent out and get the credit re-added. This was in 2024.
Pretty easy.
I would not expect to get locked out of my cloud storage, app store, email, etc....
Those are serious consequences, but they're localized to the specific thing or service at issue. You don't lose access to your car because you fail to pay rent on your storage unit. Your house doesn't get foreclosed because your car gets repossessed.
I 100% commiserate with the author and have missed important stuff before, but yeah, this article reminds me of the importance of making a habit to read the emails from my "important" accounts each morning. I setup some guardrails to help save myself from my own humanity, e.g. monthly "pay CC" calendar events.
We really need a concept like separation of powers inside companies too, otherwise we end up with corporate dictatorships.
I don't know what's rotten- it can't be a lack of expertise, it must be a separate department with a broken culture. But I don't rely on them for anything crucial
Have moved or purchased alternates to digital assets. Nothing is held behind the Apple/Google/MS wall.
> 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. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.
There are few bills you can just ignore without consequence.
The problem is if something goes wrong with amazon, google or apple, you can get locked into a giant hole.
If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)
Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.
If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.
Which is: sure, you're a tech company wanting to change the world. And, sure, this will ruffle some feathers and break a few eggs by design, but: the least you can do is stand up for your customers, right?
So: if your actual customers want to urgently talk to you about, ehm, things, how do you enable this? And, how do you communicate the outcomes to the wider world?
Bad examples abound. But how would you do better?
Which is what most companies actually do, including Apple. Uncontactable companies like Google aren’t the norm.
I understand and share the frustration that email and chat work poorly, but unfortunately that’s often how it is. If you need help, your best bet is usually to call. It doesn’t sound like this guy ever did that.