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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
