Apple card disabled my iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts (2021)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

It’s a good thing that Google doesn’t have a credit card (or does it?)

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.

Is that implying Musk got distracted away from SDC and waving around his proverbial reverse pointing gun on Twitter property again?

Or simply read your emails from them if you do.

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.