Earlier quoted context omitted.
How important is it exactly? I have had iPhones for more than a decade, and I never leveraged any "feature" of having an Apple ID on any of them. I've never bought an app or spent money on one, and I don't use iCloud, so the Apple ID for me is literally just a gateway to downloading free apps that I can always redownload with another one.
If your device is associated with the "Find my Mac" "Find my iPhone" stuff, losing your Apple ID is the same as possibly (only possibly because you can still have user accounts with separate passwords and use the OS, but there will be limitations) bricking your device. You can't even wipe the hard drive and reinstall macOS without access to the associated Apple ID. This is a good measure to dissuade thieves from want…
Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
501–510 of 548 posts
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#502One frustrating thing about Apple is that if you try to get help, there isn’t really any way to do it. There isn’t any way to open a real support ticket that will be seen by an engineering team there. The store staff can only do basic things. And if you go to their forums, you will get bot-like responses telling you to follow some useless generic steps that do nothing for your specific problem, or weird replies justi…
Not trying to excuse their behavior, but my best friend and roommate was a part time phone support in college so I learned a few tricks… 1. They get a lot of dumb questions. If you want a “talk to an engineer” bug report, you really need to prove competency to the support staff. Obviously be nice because they’re not the source of your problems they’re just trying to do their job. 2. Chat staff aren’t able to do much,…
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your device is associated with the "Find my Mac" "Find my iPhone" stuff, losing your Apple ID is the same as possibly (only possibly because you can still have user accounts with separate passwords and use the OS, but there will be limitations) bricking your device. You can't even wipe the hard drive and reinstall macOS without access to the associated Apple ID. This is a good measure to dissuade thieves from want…
Hmm I have a Mac for work and it doesn't have any Apple ID associated...
I said "if your device".
**IF**
Is it difficult to understand?
If it isn't associated (with "find my" turned on) there's no issue. If it is, and you lose your apple ID, you are SOL. Turning on "find my" with an associated apple ID is the same as making Apple the only entity that can truly control and own your computer. You can no longer reinstall macOS without your apple ID if there's an issue.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#504Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple doesn’t really “let”, the law demands.
Interesting, is that in the US? I’ve never heard of that being required by law in the UK. I think it’s just an Apple thing here. I mean we obviously have laws about refunds etc but I don’t think we have any law saying you can open any product and start using it and then return it even if you have no complaint with it.
But even the more permissive laws have many exceptions, like not applying to perishable goods, underwear, lipstick, etc. and it's heavily tilted for unused products or very light us that doesn't affect the value of the product when re-sold.
When the product doesn't work like in the case of this Apple situation, it's not even a question. As long as the hardware is not damaged and everything is return, "the law" completely sides with the consumer.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends. In the app we have released, we use an email (we don’t care which one, as long as it can receive email) as the login ID. The main reason is to limit the data we require be stored on the server. We only have one required PID item: the login ID. The user also enters a display name, but that can be anything, and does not need to be unique. Since we need the email anyway, we would need to have it stored sep…
Would it not be better to allow arbitrary login IDs? Then you don't even have to store email addresses?
That's a requirement of the app, and why we need to store emails.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#507Only tangentially related, but I have been trying to enroll for Apple's developer program for almost 3 months now. Understanding what the problem is is essentially impossible. Going to a physical store doesn't help, calling their customer service has them telling you to go to www.apple.com/support (???), and writing for support has them rotate you through 4 different, and decreasingly useful, representatives. The las…
A friend and I spent a month or so building an iOS app we were hoping to release and monetize, but we're also entirely unable to get a developer account created. Corporate entity, DUNS number, American, extremely boring people, and just a generic "Error creating developer account" on the signup form. Apple's support was hopeless in helping. We gave up and re-built it as a web app. The thing that convinced me was the…
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black swan events can happen to you. Recently I traveled to a European country from my base (Middle East). I normally take my phone and laptop with me and they are synced. I forgot the laptop charger and could not get one locally not at least for about a week and then dropped my phone and it got damaged. I bought another phone (Adroid) and tried to log in to by google accounts. It recognized the email and the pswd bu…
Don't bind your online identity to Apple or Google or Microsoft, in particular not the email addresses you use for accounts. That at least limits the damage they can do.
(And to be fair to apple here - they didn’t do anything wrong here, strong end-to-end security inherently means allowing these states. Otherwise the cops could order apple to unlock it too, and apple wouldn’t have a moral ground to object if they’re regularly performing the task in other circumstances. Otherwise people could social-engineer apple support to unlock a stolen device, or their partners. To a certain mindset, google and apple not having any real support is a strength because there’s no way to social-engineer your way past the actual security. But people want both the idea of E2E security and the convenience of being able to remotely un-register a laptop from someone else's account...)
Anyway, that failure mode wouldn’t exist if they were logged in to their account, and e2e encryption makes that a very low-risk thing overall.
Apple can’t see where to it devices are anyway, without doing a song-and-dance to authorize the session on a pre-authed device. Airtags and iphones have a rolling hardware identifier for bluetooth and wifi based on a cryptographically strong pseudorandom sequence, and apple can't correlate the identifiers back to an actual device without a pre-authed device relaying the sequence from your account. Etc etc.
Apple have actually done the legwork to make sure they can't see anything (or be forced to reveal anything) if you don't want them to (by enabling E2E), and that actually does drive a lot of "user-unfriendly decisions". And sure, android people will say "that's awfully convenient", but, the end state is still a lot stronger than any other major offering regardless of why you think they're doing it.
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#509Apple 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…
"IX. DUTIES IN THE EVENT OF LOSS You must report the Loss promptly to Our Authorized Representative not later than sixty (60) days from the Date of Loss. If You do not report the Loss within sixty (60) days, You will have forfeited Your claim."
https://www.apple.com/legal/sales-support/applecare/applecar...
Re: Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
And unlike, say, Samsung Ultrabooks or even Microsoft Surfaces, Macs last a really long time. My kids are using my 2011 MacBook Air and 2009 iMac and they still work, even the battery still kinda hangs in. They've had a few rough years 2016-2019 with the butterfly keyboards but I don't know many current manufacturers with products as solid long term.
My Surface Pro 3 still gets 90% battery life. My HP hybrid tablet, now over 15 years old, still works (when plugged in). My dad's IBM Thinkpad, older than most people currently on this website, still works. Apple people like to claim that Apples last longer than their competitors, but that simply isn't true. Most people, myself included, can't tell you what Dell or HP support is like because we've never had to use th…
I have used lots of HPs, Dells, Lenovos. They do last, until they don't and you have to reinstall everything from scratch because the hardware is different.
I did run mine pretty hard, and my HPs, Lenovos and Dells did go into warranty pretty regularly. I never saw it as purchasing a laptop as much as purchasing the guarantee of a laptop.
Apple got me because it would reasonably copy one laptop onto the next.
Apple used to make their devices to be too thin, and they could not thermally handle themselves. Especially 2017-2019 Macbook pros. Before then, most were pretty reliable. Hoping the new ones are.