And the response from apple linked in that thread: https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/03/apple-card-apple-id-unrelated...

Allegedly unrelated to the apple card, your appleid just gets locked if you don't fulfill a trade-in.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310817 - March 2021 (302 comments)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

I can understand the problem from the viewpoint of the big companies. How do you provide personalized support to such a huge customer base? The solution of course is to charge for it! Say for instance, I got kicked of of "ogle", but its critical to all my billing etc because of email. Its free email, there are going to be cases when you get locked out (happened to me before with another email provider, THEY got hacked so locked ME out haha, only sentimental things were lost thankfully).

But what about a $100 recovery fee? Then the problem becomes "how do you prove its your account"? There's a wide variety of jurisdictions and id mechanisms, can "ogle" manage all that? I don't know, I'm not close to even talking about "faang" or whatever let alone work at one. So many transactions happen nowadays with these systems that are long strings of rube goldberg machines helped by "AI" that is actually not that intelligent. Is it financially possible to even run these megacorps without the ability to discard problem "customers"? Can you build customer support processes and staff at this sort of scale? Even setting up new billing for what was previously a free account seems sort of daunting.

I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that these megacorps "have the money to spend on better customer support," except in the apple case, their customer base is so "unfree" and high margin that I don't understand why they would have a problem, even if repairing an account required a fee for some sort of id verification which seems to be the crucial thing here. They are obviously well positioned with their per customer costs and apple id stuff.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, it could’ve been subtitled “Apple finds this one weird trick to get debtors to pay their bills”.

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.

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.

> 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.

Have you never been on a 3 week vacation? Or even just a 2 week one with a day before/after where you didn't sit down to read your email? Apple apparently started their freakout after 15 days