[jjtheblunt]

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.

[homefree]

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]

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]

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]

I don’t see how that happened in this case. They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed.

[kennywinker]

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.

[homefree]

Based on this post, I doubt Apple failed to send a trade in kit.

[kennywinker]

Why would you accuse them of lying? If the author wanted to lie why would they include their mistakes like missing the email?

Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.

[jjtheblunt]

Trade in kits have in the past come from a third party; that’s unrelated to the person having a bank account number on file for recurring charges that’s invalid, and having not seen the email traffic explaining such.

[jjtheblunt]

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]

> 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.

[josephcsible]

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.

[jjtheblunt]

How does that apply here?

[josephcsible]

He bought a new iPhone, and payment didn't go through. As a result, Apple did a lot more than just disabling the new iPhone.

[kstrauser]

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