Apple support is useless. My partner lost her phone with AppleCare loss & damage coverage. She hadn't synced to iCloud in quite a while, so she delayed reporting it lost/stolen (as that flow wipes the phone). After ~4 months she gave up on finding it, and reported it stolen. This started a Kafkaesque process where the Apple site for reporting your phone lost and initiating a claim with AIG failed to work because the…
Reporting the phone as lost does not wipe the phone. That is a separate step.
Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
471–480 of 548 posts
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying a domain is not difficult, nor is configuring it with a mail service like Fastmail. Yes, it’s slightly more involved than signing up at GMail, but it’s less complicated than doing your taxes (YMMV). The more people do it, the more helpful resources and service would appear for it. The problem is most people don’t care until they get unlucky and their account gets cancelled for inscrutable reasons. It would be…
The risk of an average person forgetting to update their credit card details and irrecoverably losing a personal domain is almost certainly thousands of times higher than them being accidentally and permanently locked out of a Google or iCloud account.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#473Lol and I got some pushback here for saying Apple ID was not a serious product and that I wouldn't trust Apple to use Apple Pay even if they let me as a lowly Android user. I mean, ffs, the only 2fa option for an Apple ID is SMS auth. Just not a serious company when it comes to actual services.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
One in a thousand wouldn't yield anything. Because it's such an unusual experience (just a few of these happening around the same time would create a news cycle), one in ten million is probably closer since there are around a billion active Apple accounts. That's similar to the odds of dying in a non-Boeing plane ride. Even if the odds were one in a million, that's about the odds of being struck by lightning over a l…
This is a reasonable point of view I guess. But there's not really a reliable way for the consumer to get the real probability. If it happened to me, it's likely enough to consider. Maybe there's a hidden variable about my usage pattern that makes it more likely. Since it's totally opaque, there's no way to know.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#475Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk of an average person forgetting to update their credit card details and irrecoverably losing a personal domain is almost certainly thousands of times higher than them being accidentally and permanently locked out of a Google or iCloud account.
Where I live, the most common payment method for such services is direct debit from your bank account, where the details never change unless you switch banks; and in the rare event that you switch, you can make use of a service that banks are legally required to provide for transferring debit mandates to the new account. I bought my first domain about twenty years ago and never had to change anything regarding paymen…
Losing your entire online identity because you didn’t pay on time is an absolute show stopper for an enormous number of people.
Most people are not tech people. They do not know or car, or even care to know, about the details and importance of maintaining and protecting an online identity. They won’t remember to update payment details until things start failing. They won’t check their email frequently enough to notice before this happens. They will ignore text messages, either assuming they’re scams, spam, or unimportant.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying a domain is not difficult, nor is configuring it with a mail service like Fastmail. Yes, it’s slightly more involved than signing up at GMail, but it’s less complicated than doing your taxes (YMMV). The more people do it, the more helpful resources and service would appear for it. The problem is most people don’t care until they get unlucky and their account gets cancelled for inscrutable reasons. It would be…
Although I can and have managed domains and mail services, I don’t agree that what you described is for the majority. Do you really think that’s true?
The biggest impediment is probably that most people aren’t willing to pay (say) $10 per month for a domain and email hosting like they do for streaming services, because they’re used to email being free. So they remain at the mercy of the big providers.
But I can at least encourage the HN crowd here to move to independent services and to use their own domain.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#478Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where I live, the most common payment method for such services is direct debit from your bank account, where the details never change unless you switch banks; and in the rare event that you switch, you can make use of a service that banks are legally required to provide for transferring debit mandates to the new account. I bought my first domain about twenty years ago and never had to change anything regarding paymen…
A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. I’d wager even more people on average would lose their domains with this approach either by forgetting to or being unable to put the necessary funds in their account, and having the payment declined. Losing your entire online identity because you didn’t pay on time is an absolute show stopper for an enormous number of people. Most people are not tech people. They do not know…
People also have a mobile phone number with a plan they have to pay for. I don’t see why a domain should be any different, and it isn’t actually that different in my country.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any change to the status page requires at least VP sign-off. They declare outage or a problem only when hiding it any longer becomes impossible.
Do you think systems reliable themselves? It takes real leadership to drive organizations to five nines.