So many people running wild based on one twitter post.
/s if not obv
Ban vertical integration. The government needs to force divestiture of each product category into a separately run company.
Can you give an idea for how this law is written? For example, where is the line for a company that sells butter? Are they able to sell milk? Cheese? Ice cream? Frozen dinners? Wholesale to other restaurants? Are they allowed to open restaurants where they sell the same things they sell in the grocery store?
You can't ban private property Rights / freedom of association.
If anything, Goldman Sachs is the one that continues to be a bank, and Apple is providing the technical front end for it. It’s the opposite of vertical integration. A tech company is doing the tech part, a finance company is doing the finance part.
Yeah, not disagreeing at all. This is the exact correct reality of this business arrangement...
But its meant to feel like apple is the bank. The only time you see GS is in the fine print. Its clearly meant to be an "apple experience", and you'd be forgiven for not remembering GS was involved at all.
I have an apple card and a amazon visa card. This is completely an apple experience, and not a store card like the amazon one. Regardless of who is issuing bank, the lived experience of using it is that it feels like apple is managing my money. Esp. with apple pay and apple cash (which also all technically use existing financial infra including other banks), you would have no idea.
So, for example, Google could be forbidden from requiring Google product apps are preloaded on Android phones. They could be required to give alternate web browsers and account systems equal visibility in new Chrome installs, for free. Google could face penalties for injecting Google Meet links into Zoom emails received by Gmail users.
The ways the government could prevent Google's self-preferencing is a very large matrix.
Apple has some similar examples, though less. I think Epic v. Apple will accomplish some big things there, particularly around the App Store.
An example would be what was done with AIM. As a condition of AOL merging with Time Warner, AOL had to agree to allow competitors to interoperate with AIM: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/aol-near-release-of-in...
Many of the other potential actions are similar to those already proposed or imposed upon Google in various European or other international jurisdictions. Though some of the search engine choice screen options have proven ineffective, and if the US wants to carry that forward, they might need to prohibit auctioning off the slots or other methods that just serve to add to Google's revenue at the expense of everyone else.
I set it up to pay a few subscriptions and promptly forgot about it.
As a result, I carried a balance for I think three months without making payments, and only noticed when I hit my credit limit. This was an expensive mistake, and also dinged my credit score for about four months. Still kinda mad at myself about it.
No, Apple did not disable my account.
> No, Apple did not disable my account.
I believe you, but I also trust the original poster by reputation. So what is the difference?
I manually pay my electric and gas. I can skip if for a month (or two) and not a problem. Except sometimes (once)..
I have no idea why. I feel its just some random thing depending on who's running the dept that day.
We experienced the same thing in College when after paying our electric bill for two months, they shut our power off without notice. Upon digging it was because we were still listed as "Residents" on the bills we were paying.
Your expectation that a policy or rule would be enforced evenly across the organization..
I think at this point it is clear that Big Tech do not have any policy, rule or terms of service that is enforced with anything that could be reasonably be considered "uniform"
Why is that embarassing? Why on earth would you set up auto-pay? That's just asking for a headache if anything is every compromised, or if a vendor fraudulently or accidentally overcharges you. Reversing charges from your bank is a headache, and rogue charges can quickly cascade into a series of overdrafts, other failed payments, etc. Good luck getting reimbursed for all the charges if that happens, and hope it doesn't get you into a situation where you can't pay an important bill.
It's madness to ever allow automatic financial transactions that aren't fixed, scheduled payments from trusted vendors.
I've setup auto-pay on several accounts and left it running for over a decade. whatever issue I may have in the future would not exceed the amount of time wasted in manually paying each account.
If that's the case, and I can only speak for my experience in the UK and across the EU for a few years, I'll take the automated payment over the infinitesimal threat of being compromised and clicking a 'dispute this payment' link in my account.
ATM withdrawals have far more risk and you wouldn't do those with a credit card.
I regularly verify what transactions show up across my cards and you have 30 days to dispute anything.
10+ years and I never had an issue.
How is any of that specific for auto pay? Non-auto pay transactions can be compromised, and a non-auto pay vendor can fraudulently charge you, too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26300139
I'd _never_ let any major bills pull directly from my accounts. I'm bothered just by having a recurring Netflix draw. I'm not claiming one perspective is right and the other wrong... but that my history and experiences have strongly trained me into one behavior, and yours into another.
Because it's super convenient. I resisted a long time and just had some of my accounts set to pay minimum payments, but that got expensive when I forgot to make manual payments.
Regardless, the important bit here isn't so much that he forgot autopay, it's that he didn't pay at all for 3 months.
I check the bank account every 6 weeks or so, and can investigate then if necessary. It's never been necessary.
autopay on a credit card is great.
But some are. the sketchy and hard-to-cancel services.
I consider it worrying that a claim wholly lacking evidence is getting so much attention.
But to clear a couple of things up:
1. I've since learned that the reason this happened could be due to an unusual confluence of events including Apple Card, autopay, and the online Apple Store.
2. The disabling of iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts, and they have a team dedicated to handling these account de-activation issues. (I think this is absurd, which is why I am drawing attention to it.)
> The only thing Apple Card was paying for was the 2TB iCloud upgrade — and when I try to change the payment method, it refuses and says “Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes.”
It's not hard to imagine a payment issue for iCloud causing iCloud to be locked or otherwise limited, and given that Apple's online services tend to be buggy and unreliable it's not a huge stretch to think this could have some unintended consequences for adjacent things like the App Store. As someone else in the thread pointed out, surely others have missed Apple Card payments at this point, and we would've already heard about this if it were consistent and/or by design.
Of course even if it wasn't intentional, it's still another example of the single-point-of-failure problem we have when our entire lives depend on an account with a tech company that's way too big to care when users fall through the cracks.
My mom's Apple account was disabled with the same message, thought it was billing related as well. It turned out that someone with a similar surname had called in and requested their account to be disabled, but the call had cut out. The support rep happily connected the two dots and disabled my mom's account.
Fraud detection is plausible too, though
I'm assuming someone hacked into my Apple ID, but not sure. I was never told.
I understand WHY companies do this, with respect to spam accounts and what not, but the false positives for real human users can be devastating, when every service and product connected to your account gets blocked/bricked.
I remember stories about having an issue with an account on a Google property and losing all your access to all your Google accounts.
It's a prime reason to buy services from different companies.
And no I don't think it matters that Dustin has so many twitter followers in terms of believability.
Test should be has enough info been presented to draw a conclusion even if the person was nobody or just had opened a twitter account?
The discussion is often interesting and sure you might learn things. But still why not just make random things up and do it that way (I am joking).
John Gruber ( and only him ) [1] suggest Epic was making things up when Apple would terminate Sign in with Apple on EPIC's App. While I dont fully side with EPIC on their case against Apple, on this issue alone it was clear the fault was on Apple [2].
And imagine you are in a dispute with Apple on this matter for longer than 30days without resolution, the time your iCloud would keep your backup before it is completely wipe out due to Account termination.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/09/29/epic-games-unre...
[2] https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/131179493779778355...
Says nothing about termination of SIWA on current apps as SIWA will continue to work on existing Apps.
I think Tim wasn't being too honest here.
> Apple is entirely within its rights to terminate Epic Games, Inc.'s developer account and all related functionality, but Sign In with Apple will continue to function for Apple customers for the next two weeks.
Making entirely unlinked/unique Apple IDs is expensive because each one requires a working phone number to create.
This is really the only safe approach these days, given nonsense like this.
Because iCloud Backup is non-e2e (like most of iCloud) and thus permits Apple (and the FBI by extension without a warrant) to read whatever they want out of your phone's contents, I have to do manual corded backups periodically because Apple doesn't have their cryptographic shit together. :/
I have one old wiped phone that is signed in to my ~decade-old Apple ID for managing my Apple Card, which cannot be moved between Apple IDs (just like your purchases). I'll probably cancel the card soon and delete that account. I've already replaced all of the movies I foolishly bought years ago on iTunes with torrented copies.
That never fails to completely throw financial institutions for a loop; they can't conceptualize it.
Ironically it means that if I was to apply for a credit card it would be very difficult to get it.
I canceled Twitter so that I wouldn't have to see these tempests in teacups. Once you do this, your eyes open to just how much of our news cycle is being carried by Twitter, and how much it bleeds over into everything else now. Half the "front page" of Imgur is Twitter hot takes now, so I don't go there any more either. Half of serious news articles seem to either be ABOUT a Tweet, or carry at least one Twitter quote to further its narrative. I think this encroachment should alarm everyone.
#SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety
I think it should be illegal for a company to block your account on unrelated services. For example, Facebook should not be able to block your Occulus account, based on what happens on Facebook or WhatsApp. If the companies argue that these accounts are tied to closely together to be able to separate enforcement like that, the answer should be, "too bad, then you can't block at all, until you figure out how to separate the service blocks."
According to the OP, they haven’t - Sign In with Apple still works.
There's simply no way that Apple is doing this; there is another explanation for this single user having this experience and I'm sure that will come out. This isn't found anywhere in Apple's terms of service.
I'll give 10-1 odds on a $100 bet that this isn't happening. Any takers?
I use a lot of Apple products and services, but if Apple did this to me it would be at worst an inconvenience. Nothing existential requires my Apple account. They don't, for example, handle my email; I prefer Dropbox to iCloud; etc.
It's not just an Apple thing. Google chicanery could hit someone much harder, given how many more folks depend on Google for email. It's a great time to review your own services and products, and figure out if you have any "portfolio killer" dependencies.
That doesn’t mean Facebook is somehow behind these posts, but their attempt could be working and causing people to report things more.
You could be right that this is someone sniping at their issues and maybe playing the market at the same time. Even if it is a larger evil competitor, these do seem like legitimate problems.
If the question is "will they" though, I doubt they'll go that far. Apple is super wary of tipping their hand when they're holding all of the cards, and an action like this would raise a lot of concern, even within the walled garden.
I think it's reasonable to believe that this system as a whole is exploitive and unfair, those with poor credit pay more to fund cash back for others and the high interest rates leading to circles of debt, but given this is the way it is, I think its a perfectly good idea for someone to have an Apple Card depending on their circumstances.
The Apple Card t&c are here: https://www.goldmansachs.com/terms-and-conditions/Apple-Card...
They prominently mention any reference to iCloud, etc as your "Apple ID" and "account" is used with respect to the financial account. On page 11, consequences of "Default" include suspension of your "account". You are required to use a "Required Device", and specifically an Apple ID in "good standing" with Apple and Apple two-factor auth.
My guess is that if anything happened to this guy, he did something to fubar his Apple ID, which then fubared his Apple Card.
For the record, I always pay the balance in full and until this I loved the UI and the product. But boy what a fucked up support experience and they should probably end relationship with Goldman and just stick to apple pay. There are about 6 points of total failure in the support experience. I could only spend so many hours holding their fucking hands before I had to give up.
I emailed TCook about this on 11/10/2020.
I greatly regret signing up for Apple Card and please DON'T. It was the best card until it stopped working, then it's the worse card I've ever had. I stick to Apple Pay now with an amex.
I'd also recommend using PayPal for recurring charged. 1 click to see all recurring charges and 1 click to cancel. Apple needs this ASAP.
They're paying for iCloud with their Apple Card. If that payment fails, the account can be locked.
So it's not "Missing a payment on the Apple Card locks your account" it might be "Missing an iCloud Payment locks your account."
They also say the iCloud payment wasn't past due. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some weird edge case or bug that caused the account to be locked.
I agree with rblatz's response's reasoning.
Do you have any more information on this?
It sounds alarming when stated without further context, because it makes it sounds like a slightly overdue payment could cause an instant shutdown of ones account.
You originally seemed to be saying this is what happened, but now you are saying it’s not that simple.
I would be very surprised if my Apple account was locked out after 15 days of non payment of my card.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was locked out (for example) after 100 days, especially if I hadn’t communicated with them.
Another reason for it to be locked out might be fraud detection, in which case I might actively want that, even thought it occasionally causes inconvenience.
One is indeed absurd and very salient to all Apple users, the other two would be unsurprising and frankly of no real concern. At this point we don’t know where on the spectrum the policy actually lies.
So without more context, #2 seems like a potentially very serious claim that could later turn out not to be so bad.
This is a common way damaging misinformation starts to spread.
I’m not for a second suggesting this is your intent, but I am pointing out that this is a likely effect, dependent on what the context actually turns out to be.
Edit: also worth noting that the tweet, and the HN headline are worded in an unequivocal way. It seems like as written, they may simply be false based on what you have now said.
My understanding is that the Apple Card policy is referring to "account" as "Apple Card Account is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA", and not the iCloud account issued by Apple.
I'm aware of a situation where a user wanted to cancel an account with an app they had subscribed to via the app store. To do so they did a charge back on their credit card. Because he bought via the app store he ended up charging back Apple.
Apple then blocked his icloud.
This is a heavy accusation and I think the burden is heavily on the accuser to provide clear evidence that lack of payment for anything somehow locks you out of your Apple account. These comments and posts also seem to be conflating different accounts, like Apple ID, iCloud, and the Apple Card Account.
I’m in no way trying to defend Apple, this just seems like an incredibly user hostile policy, and also one that doesn’t exactly follow sound business logic.
If this is true, can you point to this policy? Can you share the “unusual confluence of events”?
You suddenly notice that you can't access any of the stuff you need to live out your life. Oh fuck. You make a tweet in a panic, and maybe hoping to get some attention, since the faceless trillion dollar company doesn't give a fuck about you.
The tweet blows up, and wbronitsky comes along demanding more information. A clear timeline, strong evidence, legal arguments etc etc. Meanwhile this poor guy is just trying to get his shit back.
Trust me, Apple pays plenty of people to run interference for them. You don't need to do it for free.
dcurtis isn't a random Twitter account; he's a regular here (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dcurtis) and made svbtle.
He has credibility here, and I think a lot of the upvotes (including mine) are based on expecting he wouldn't say something like this without a good reason.
This is a very serious accusation and it's irresponsible to fling around such charges without evidence.
There's no way Apple is doing this.
-Apple and Goldman Sachs' service with Apple Card has been exemplary in every detail
-Apple went out of its way throughout the early months of covid to let users skip payments for any reason. No extra interest charges
-Apple Card doesn't even have any late fees, or annual fees, or fees of any kind. And the app for the card goes out of its way to keep you from paying any unnecessary interest charges
-This sort of punitive action just does not jibe with the entire nature of the product or Apple's service in general
Or are you simply following a chain of assumptions to a place that meets your opinion of Apple?
Please provide some clearer support for this statement of supposed fact.
We've got so many MUCH MORE likely scenarios.
These are the common ones that disable or lock account:
* Repeatedly entering an incorrect Apple ID and password. * Not using your Apple account for an extended amount of time * Billing issues such as unpaid iTunes or App Store orders * Security reasons * Charge disputes on your credit card
I've yet to hear of a missed payment on an apple card resulting in this (and I have an apple card and have missed payments).
1. The OP in a response tweet said it took ~15 days before his accounts were disabled and a few more before he linked to two things together. Meaning likely there is a process that the bank handling the actual card sends details to Apple on some interval which says who is late etc, and when Apple got it they then process the disabling of accounts.
2. If it was unintentional I'd expect Apple to have an easy and quick resolution to fixing it, and I'd also think if Apple's systems were that linked it would have happened more immediate not taken ~15 days.
3. The reason it would take 3-5 days to re-enable the Apple ID's and associated services would be because the bank has to update their records for payment and then send notice to Apple that the user is current, hence it isn't an immediate task and takes a small process with associated delays. This fits the description of what the user stated.
Lastly, personally, Apple has been helpful to me in the past when a company I was working with had an issue with our corporate Apple ID & services. Apple support were able to unlock the account (and associated services) after just a couple of hours of back and forth and they were clear their managers had clear ability to enable/disable Apple ID's. I am sure they have some decision tree they use but it was immediate once the support woman told me it was reactivated I could immediately log in, no delay.
This isn't true. I have an email-only apple account that works fine. My lock screen constantly carries a "Verify your phone number" badge that's rather annoying, but otherwise everything functions.
You can't today make a new Apple ID without a phone number.
(Please double check that your information is current before you claim something is false.)
(I've gone through this recently when I created a new, separate account.)
If you ever write this up (or have written this up) in detail, please do share.
The big one I thought I was going to miss: contacts sync. I don't miss it. I keep a phone number list in Standard Notes. Most of the functionality of Signal's "recent conversations" covers this need for me.
I'm setting up nextcloud soon and I understand that can do contacts/calendar sync to iOS. The only thing I haven't found a solution for is email inbox delegation and shared calendars.
You're right that this would make a good writeup.
They can conceptualize it. No one has come up with an automated way to adequately predict someone's ability to repay a loan other than the current credit reporting system that greatly factors in one's history of repaying previous loans. If you have a better idea, it's probably worth a lot of money.
>Ironically it means that if I was to apply for a credit card it would be very difficult to get it.
It wouldn't be very difficult to get. You would just have to submit proof of your assets and possibly history of expenses.
Not to say everybody needs a credit card/score, but they do have advantages if you’re responsible with them. :)
You can do this with a credit card, fwiw, but i'm sure i'm not the first to tell you this.
I don't think we should glorify debt avoidance, and avoidance of financial tools (like CCards) as the only, or best, way to be financial responsible. It works for some people, but that doesn't mean its for everyone or should be a goal.
Perhaps it’s a new policy though which would explain the difference.
The iCloud subscription was not past due. [1]
It's possible that the card was maxed out and payments for the subscription failed, maybe? I caught mine before that happened.
Edit: a sibling comment makes it clear that that isn't what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26308468
There are a lot of places in tech where human opinion is interjected introducing variability, but I doubt this is one of them.
I stopped paying for iCloud and it didn’t diable my Apple ID nor my Apple Card.
Also you don’t have past due iCloud accounts. You stop paying iCloud services stop working for you.
Sounds like something else is a going on here.
I understand the need for analytics in some situations but registration, signin, recovery, etc are critical paths and every layer of indirection is playing with fire.
There are a variety of things someone could mean when they say "auto-pay" in the US, including:
1. Authorizing a merchant to keep your credit card info on file and to charge that whenever they want to bill you,
2. Providing a merchant with your checking account information and authorizing them to take money from there whenever they want to bill you,
3. Many banks include a bill paying service for free with your checking account, which can be configured to receive bills electronically from many merchants, and to automatically pay them from your checking account. Many banks will allow you to choose whether to automatically pay the full bill amount, the minimum due amount, the full balance amount, or a fixed amount, and will allow you to set a maximum amount.
4. For merchants that can not send bills electronically to your bank's bill paying service, many banks will let your configure the bill paying service to send the merchant a fixed amount on a regular schedule.
5. For bills for credit cards issued by the same bank where you have your checking account, there is often an auto-pay feature to automatically pay your credit card from that checking account.
This often means that there are several ways to auto-pay a given bill. For example, I could auto-pay my electric bill by method #1, method #2, or method #3. If I used method #1, I could auto-pay that credit card with #2 and maybe #3.
You wouldn't be able to run a bank without it. Most monthly outgoings will be through such an agreement.
(I've worked on such systems. XML up the wazoo but you're expected to be able to cryptographically verify a mandate years after the fact, for auditing purposes, so the format works. And it's all API'd up.)
I’m asserting that they are likely to be legitimate.
My suggestion is that the reason we are hearing about them so much at the moment could be Facebook’s influence in setting a tone which encourages people to write about problems we didn’t otherwise hear about.
But yes - it absolutely could be a symptom of a breakdown in management somewhere in Apple leading to more customer unfriendly policy outcomes. It wouldn’t be the first time they have gone through such phases.
In this instance: https://www.apple.com/apple-card/monthly-installments/
Buying a Mac on credit is considerably cheaper than buying with cash. 12 months of the time-value of money + you get 3% cash back.
Granted, there's not much way to avoid that in american society.
To your point, I don't know for fact just as you don't know for fact I'm wrong. And this could even be a false claim without having some sort of proof. Maybe my wording was to deterministic and should've been worded as more a "possibility", but a complex system like this takes a ton of requirements and testing and it is super hard to see Apple not paying attention to this specific issue.
You don't know my opinion of Apple. I generally like Apple and use them for quite a lot of things. Sure, maybe they are priced too high on some hardware (IMO) and some app store policies I dislike but overall I don't view them as evil and I build things for their platform because it is worth it. Apple simply takes advantage of their platform and why wouldn't they?
My one complaint with Apple is just wanting to know all the rules ahead of time so we can play by the rules, and sometimes it does feel like we find many of the rules out through this type of scenario versus Apple being 100% transparent up front.
> I'll tell you what makes _me_ certain
And you're now accusing someone of being dishonest due to lack of evidence based on your anecdotal experience, also absent evidence.
> Apple and Goldman Sachs' service with Apple Card has been exemplary in every detail
So that makes it "certainly" not possible that someone can have a sub-par customer sevice interaction?
> Apple Card doesn't even have any late fees
You're right. Good for them. They absolutely will charge you "additional interest" on top of your current APR for any late fees, however. That gets the same net effect, while providing a nice little soundbite.
Also, since you seem so very certain about this, I offered 10-1 odds on $100 elsewhere in the thread if it's proven Apple is doing this intentionally as a policy. Nobody took me up on it. Would you like to? Easy money, if you're right.
Tim Sweeny took this and misled the public saying "oh yeah, Apple is terminating it for sure" which is not the case.
Either way, I’m sure this person had their account frozen; I’m merely wondering how this person knows that there is policy at Apple to intentionally do such things.
This forum is no longer seems a place for rational conversation backed up by facts. The GP used dismissive language to put me down and even called me out by my user name in an attempt to intimidate me into silence. I flagged it, but nothing happens; in HN it’s not the intent but purely the language. We are allowed to go on insulting and attacking each other as long as it’s subtle enough to be able to be explained away. This is corporate gaslighting coming down to us here.
It’s a trap full of idiotic rhetorical devices and capitalist wannabes. But then I remind myself that really HN is just a tool for billionaires to steal our ideas.
Receipts: https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account
"If you or someone else enters your password, security questions, or other account information incorrectly too many times, your Apple ID automatically locks to protect your security and you can't sign in to any Apple services."
There is then an immediate unlock option with a trusted device or recovery key etc. There are other recovery methods if you don't have 2FA. If you don't have 2FA you are in security question land, which is more heavily rate limited even beyond this for recovery.
I keep my checking account balance intentionally low and often run into times where paying off my cards would overdraft me.
I don't think it's all that crazy of a thing to do, I just don't do it.
Additionally, I like to review every bill I pay to make sure it makes sense. I've had to dispute bills in the past that were unexplainably incorrect by $10, $20, sometimes close to $50, and if I had them on AutoPay I probably wouldn't have even noticed it.
That said, the real solution here is to not spend more than you can pay off. Every time you carry over your balance, it's a big win for the credit companies. If you get to the end of the pay period and your card balance is greater than your checking balance, then you lose.
I don’t even know how to respond to this appeal to amorphous authority, and to reply to the best possible interpretation of the post, I’ll pass over it.
I’m sure this person is not lying that their account was shut down; I’m asking for an accounting of the Apple policy that supposedly exists. It would certainly be something I would be deeply concerned about.
Maybe we shouldn’t just blindly believe and defend people just because lots of karma and Twitter followers and built a thing. I think these actions make this forum much much worse.
That’s why people are asking for the reasons.
He’s exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be able to be able to give them, and frankly without them it doesn’t matter who is making the statement.
He has already partially walked it back, effectively invalidating the tweet.
I'm just asking whether there's any meat to your claim.
I can tell from your response that there is not. For example, evidence would be "this happened to me and I didn't encounter the same consequences for my Apple account."
You can see other commenters on this thread saying exactly this.
Definition ->
“Account” means the Apple Card consumer credit account opened for you under this Agreement
Default actions ->
WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF BEING IN DEFAULT If you are in default, we may take any of the following actions to the extent permitted under applicable law: • Continue to charge you interest as long as you have an outstanding Account balance; • Lower your credit limit; • Decline or otherwise limit your ability to make Transactions; • Report information about your Account to the credit reporting bureaus; • Begin collections activities; • Suspend or close your Account; • Require you to immediately pay all or any portion of your total outstanding balance (this action may also be taken upon death); • If we retain an attorney who is not our salaried employee to collect amounts you owe, we may require you to pay for the court costs and reasonable attorneys' fees that we actually incur; and/or • Take any other action permitted by law.
I guess account is one whole system the way they built it so it includes his iCloud and whatnot.
This should be last resort solution for Apple. I’m thinking well past 3 months of notifications or something, maybe even a year, considering it goes beyond just the card itself.
Or just not have it affect other services at all.
Not same as Apple ID.
You're saying "it stands to reason that a widely used product would have already hit this corner case by now." The problem with your argument is that it's a tautology. If in fact the statement by dcurtis is the first efflorescence of the problem, your line of thinking would reject it anyway.
That's why it's useless to say "this feels wrong" or even "surely we would know by now." The guy who wrote the tweet has already said here in HN comments that he will substantiate what he wrote, so it seems unnecessary to dogpile the skepticism and "feelings" in the interim.
You don't have to accept a logical proposition in order to consider/entertain it.
No its not; it's defining a probability. This report is most likely false, because it would be unlikely for this to be the first instance of it. It's not defining a logical proposition -- that's just you extracting more gaurantees from the statement than what was actually specified. It's not if this then that, it's if probably this, then probably that.
And it's valid to state it "feels false", if only because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- the same way it's valid to not significantly consider the claim "I saw an alien" stated on its own. Yes, there is a possibility it's true, and yes, its not valid to declare it false only on the basis that aliens are involved, but it would be unreasonable to assume that possibility it is true is significant based on the claim alone.
It is perfectly valid to assume it's false, because the likelihood of the alternative is low. It is not valid to declare it false for the same reasoning; but no one in this chain did such a thing.
If you think something "feels false" but you have no evidence for it, that's not a particularly strong basis for reasoning.
>it's defining a probability.
This is not true. It's classifying the first instance as false.
This is true, but we have to take it in context. How likely is it that this is the policy, and we’ve never heard about it before now?
The card has been our for a couple of years. Millions of people are using it. This implies 10s of millions of payments. At a conservative estimate this would mean there must have been thousands of missed payments, and therefore thousands of locked Apple accounts.
It therefore seems unlikely we wouldn’t have heard about it. I could of course be wrong as could the GP, because this is just a probability estimate. But that’s all the GP is saying.
Me personally, Apple repeatedly locked (not disabled) my account earlier this year when they weren't able to process a payment. PayPal had authorized but not charged an M1 laptop I had ordered with a non-English keyboard, and somehow the order hung. My bank and PayPal showed the authorization, but Apple showed it as "hold" due to unsuccessful payment. Customer service wasn't able to push the order through without taking credit card information directly, and I ended up canceling the order, which means I lose my place in the order queue.
Based on my recent experience, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had some issues with payment processing. The reason that I care about this particular topic is that I'm considering doing the re-order of the M1 laptop with Apple Card financing. That's why chaff like "it feels false lol" is not useful information for me.
That's true, but an extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence is also not a particularly strong basis for reasoning.
and from the original post...
>I consider it worrying that a claim wholly lacking evidence is getting so much attention.
That is, the conclusion reached by twitter is not well-reasoned, which gives kevindong the well-reasoned conclusion: it's probably false.
>It's classifying the first instance as false.
>This *FEELS* (not saying it is) like a false claim.
I'm not clear how you can read this as anything other than a probability. It says nothing about the premise, and it clearly specifies that the conclusion has not been [definitively] classified.
Otherwise, if that ain't the money-quote, I don't know what you're reading but it's not what I'm reading.
We can’t determine that.
Whether it is a strong basis for reasoning depends on the person’s priors, which may be very strong.
Until we ask them about their priors, we simply don’t know.
I don’t hear about it much anymore but for years was terrified of making a cell data mistake and ending up with a 40k+ bill.
If you're worried about funds disappearing unexpectedly, many major U.S. banks wave checking account fees with direct deposits setup. It's trivial to setup a bank account with multiple checking/savings accounts, where one account is funded as necessary with expected spending, and have the excess go into the other checking/savings account(s).
That's a best practice anyway, since having a debit card hacked into is a much bigger ordeal than a credit card, so keeping that checking account with minimal funds is optimal.
Au contraire: every time I have had a large bill it has been because the biller stuffed up.
Water utility couldn't read the water meter because of the dog so they estimated based on past usage. I don't have a dog. They estimated using someone else's meter. They overcharged me by an order of magnitude.
Electricity utility couldn't read the meter because of the dog, so they too estimated based on past usage. Again, I don't have a dog and they estimated based on the average usage of a house my size (typically a family of 4 to 8). They overcharged me by a factor of three or so.
At one point I changed my mobile phone plan to one that had a special offer going. It took three months for the company to get the amount right, and then it took another three months to get my money back for the first three months they billed incorrectly.
With any system that has variable costs (such as usage fees) I far prefer to receive a bill and pay it by hand because it only takes one error to completely wipe me out financially.
Note about the dog above: at one point the utility company wanted access to my yard to perform some maintenance on the electricity transmission lines (in my town the aerial electrical services are in the back yard to improve the street aesthetic). I asked them to please call me so I can lock up my chickens. The person I talked to didn't have a box to tick for "chickens" so they ticked the box that said "dog". Since then I have not had a meter reader actually read my meters, every bill is "estimated because of dog." I have to take a photo of the meter and send it in to them because they're too lazy to read it themselves.
With autopay that error can propagate into draining your account and then all your other autopay accounts that come later get rejected and you'll get penalties and late charges on those.
The first provider, the one who made a mistake, can be talked into correcting it (hopefully anyway). But all the other penalties you'll be responsible for since your account was indeed empty.
So there are real risks to autopay. Maybe not too frequent, but good to be aware.
One day I got a text that my balance was low. As I picked up my phone I got another saying balance was 0. While I was opening the app to add funds I got another text saying my service would be turned off if I didn’t pay.
While on the confirm payment screen my power went out.
All happened in about 10 seconds.
So you think any of the resized how absurdly high market rates can get.
What does that matter?
But for example, if your autopay bills with direct access to your checking account total 2k/mo then it makes sense to limit the funds of that checking account to roughly that much, maybe a bit more incase of variance. If a utility tried to withdraw 17k from an account that only has 2.5k in it, it will not be able to do so (Overdraft "protection" can be turned off).
If there's a small buffer in the checking account, other bills should not cascade from one large anomaly in that case, because the bank won't hand out partial payments.
Yes, there are still risks with autopay, but they're greatly mitigated with a dedicated checking account for that specific purpose. Furthermore, forgetting to pay one of the several bills manually is a risk in and of itself. I'm just pointing out that setting up autopay doesn't necessarily mean giving unlimited access to one's funds.
What I didn’t realize was she canceling and redoing the tickets over and over again, each charging me for them. A grand each time. So I ended up in a foreign country penniless. Airline company said it was fine since my funds would be returned in a week.
Yes, but it’s a not a fair conversation to start by spreading a false statement.
If we’re just speculating about the policies, headlines like the one on this post are simply not true.
Right now, that may be exactly what has happened. We don’t know yet but we do know it’s not as simple as the tweet and headline claim.
I wanted to know if the comment was just a pontification or if there was actually a reason to dismiss what dcurtis said. As I explained earlier, I have a direct reason (a purchase) to care,
If you actually think I speculated about anything, please quote where I did so.
There is clearly reason to doubt what Dcurtis said, as you have agreed.
I’m referring to this overall conversation which is a discussion of a statement by Dcurtis, which we already know is not what it originally sounded like, and may turn out to be false.
https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account
Turns out his issue is also related to an M1 purchase. Go figure.
They were just saying that it was highly unlikely to be true.
This is his original statement:
> If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
It turns out that as writing it is complete and utter bullshit.
Also, Apple Card provides a lot of notifications of due payments if you don’t have autopay.
Somehow he doesn’t mention those.
The fact that he made a bullshit statement thar would have been cause for great concern if true, to a much more complicated story of compounded errors that would affect very few people and doesn’t explain how he missed the warnings, undermines his credibility.
Seems like he screwed up and is just trying to save face.
The comment thread on the more accurate blog post he wrote later seems like a very reasonable discussion of the issue itself.
This comment thread is a reasonable discussion about how it seemed like he made a false statement, because that’s what he did.