| ▲ | quinncom 3 days ago |
| I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed? |
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| ▲ | jasode 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| >, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed? To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: >, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account. I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers the option : "Check out with your Apple Account" So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their Apple account at risk. Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these days... Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the gift card balance for itself after locking accounts. In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit card! |
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| ▲ | markus_zhang 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time. So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations. Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read. | | |
| ▲ | user____name 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's maddening. Currently having to migrate to Win11 and thinking I spent 3k on new hardware just to be able to run some absolute clusterfuck of an OS. I regret not spending it on overpriced Apple hardware, at least it runs all my Adobe crap which I'm 100% dependent on. But then I read joyous stuff like this. Oh but you say, ""just"" run it on a VM in Linux, like all us rural folk, because big tech evil. Yeah thanks pointdexter, like I didn't know that. And oh look it's running like a complete slideshow on my 4k color calibrated monitor because now you apparently need two fucking GPUs. One for the host and one for the guest just to have hardware acceleration and CUDA video encoding. And I only have room for one GPU so I sell my current CPU and buy a CPU with iGPU. And now apparently I have to run these 10 ducktaped together shell scripts and there's like three guides to achieving a clean passthrough and they're all 50 pages and each is completely different and omg I have other shit to do please kill me already. Death by mutually incompatible walled gardens, welcome to our fully automated high tech utopia. | |
| ▲ | igor47 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand, can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things are always bad. A few examples: * My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet * My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes * My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great How do you distinguish between things that are actually bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to disagree? | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something. Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward. The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people. Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution. | | |
| ▲ | igor47 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time). | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | econ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | By using a service you also chose to support it. This is how one should make the choices. You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep. When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere. It's how we are suppose to keep people honest. | | |
| ▲ | user____name 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > By using a service you also chose to support it.
> This is how one should make the choices. Well yeah, but there're not the only choices. The full opportunity cost is finding and paying and learning alternatives when you have decades of vendor lock-in to overcome. Maybe "keeping people honest" is a bigger ask than you think while you're busy meeting all kinds of other requirements which take priority. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | wmertens 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why even bother with apple at that point. There are so many better and/or cheaper Android phones out there | | |
| ▲ | mvanbaak 2 days ago | parent [-] | | things that work better for you, might not work better for someone else. |
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| ▲ | quickthrowman 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself? I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps. A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card. Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift card and loaded it into my account. I do this all the time and I've done it for years. I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards, $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points that could be spent like cash at a couple of select retail stores for 2X their points value. It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and generally get resolved after follow up (however inconvenient). Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough to do that entire process, though. Having the money loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need some significant upside before I'll do it. | |
| ▲ | wpm 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially giving g you a discount at the cards’ store. $100 Apple gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple for $20 off if it is less than $100. | | | |
| ▲ | floam 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I buy gift cards often - if I know I’m going to spend money on Uber, why not give myself 25% off $100 before even any actual promotions are applied? | | | |
| ▲ | loloquwowndueo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card. I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer. | | |
| ▲ | dbtc 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you sell it directly to another human, or even use something like ebay, you'll get more and they'll pay less. | | | |
| ▲ | nullfield 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract, but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this… but still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a while to send back with my trade-in. | | |
| ▲ | loloquwowndueo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ah but you told them at the time of purchase that you were going to do the trade-in. As I said. It’s different if you want to do the trade in later, which at that point looks more like “sell an old random phone back to Apple for some credits” |
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