In my experience, the best way to get Apple to listen is to get legal involved. I spent hours on the phone trying to resolve a laptop that was damaged by a certified service provider. Apple support was rude, they lied to me, they bounced me between departments. So I wrote one email requesting all the recordings for the calls with support. Immediately someone from legal contacts me, apologizes, and 2 weeks later I have a brand new laptop 2 generations newer in hand.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Impressive. And perhaps also clever, depending on whether that was what you predicted would happen! :)
And you never mentioned anything related to litigation, it was just a polite recording request? Maybe you mentioned the dishonesty, or kept it generic...
Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if it was actually public relations and not legal. This was back when M1 was just coming out. Regardless, just ask them for all the call recordings and make them think you’re gonna do something with those recordings (sue, go to the press, etc.). It was crazy how their tone shifted immediately from we’re not gonna give you anything to how can we make this right.
But maybe it doesn’t always work, as your Apple ID story was obviously published. Maybe it depends on who you get it maybe Apple is different today 🤷
Maybe reach out to Apple with a link to the blog post, and ask if they would like to comment before you reach out to Gizmodo or something. I’m not a lawyer so don’t sue me if it goes badly.
I feel bad for them and hope they get their access back. Besides losing data that could have been backed up elsewhere, to some degree, having your hardware made useless and losing access to your digital purchases is expensive as heck.
Something like this shouldn’t happen. Period.
Food for thought:
![Hacker News comment thread: rvnx: "Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. […]" | Waterluvian: "I’ve interpreted it as a sort of head-in-sand coping mechanism for those low-likelihood, high-consequence events people feel powerless over. It’s less distressing to be powerless if you decide that the real issue was a fault by the victim and not a powerlessness you have in common with the victim."](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/221333f8-60cc-4eed-a1a1-837c99f6f996.jpeg)
Always room for disagreement
This is actually a known psychological phenomenon called the Just World Fallacy
I'm quite prone to this. Even as I'm consciously resisting slipping into this fallacy, I can still feel that there is a pernicious and persistent kernel at my core that clings to the idea of a just world. For me, it is less about a moral kind of justice, more like a deep belief in some sense of underlying, teleological order to the world.
I know that this is silly, in every way that it is possible to know a thing. And yet, I can't seem to sway that deep down part of me that devoutly believes that actually, everything makes sense.
I mean I’m not in any danger of losing my personal documents because I have 3 copies stored on various media/services.
I’m also not so heavily invested into any one media or software distribution ecosystem that I would be devastated if lost access to it.
You aren’t powerless unless you make the choice to be. (Either intentionally or just out of not knowing the alternatives)
Not everyone can afford to have a back up plan.
If you can afford apple products you can afford a back up plan.
That’s a terrible take, one you wouldn’t use if this was Google or Samsung.
I would actually, that's the point. A backup plan is cheap. If you can afford a modern smartphone you can afford a backup plan.
That seems to be a very North American point of view, as it ignores the fact that many people worldwide cannot afford not to own a smartphone.
There are billions out there who must use smartphones because entire economies run on apps like WeChat, WhatsApp, or Line, from government appointments to QR based payments. Slowly but surely, many countries are moving towards smartphone centric societies. Not saying it is good or bad, just the way it is.
A sizeable part of those societies have to weight the price of a backup plan, which is, let’s say, $2 a month forever, or else they will lose access to their backup data. And when they have spent $300-$500 on a device that will have to last them for 7 to 10 years, $24 a year is hard to justify.
I'm not suggesting anyone gets a recurring subscription at all. You can buy the most dogshit pc or even something like an off brand raspberry pi and a $10 microsd card with hundreds of gigabytes of storage and have a permanent data backup solution. You can even skip the device if you're really struggling. Microsd cards are dirt cheap.
Combine that with grabbing several free tiers of data storage like Google, Proton, mega, filen, etc, you can rack up hundreds of gigabytes of storage, each with its own account so if one goes down or you lose access you can have the same data on the others. This can be for maximum priority data but even for low priority you can fit a lot of data on 15gb if it's not all high quality photos and videos.
And if I can reach a bit, even a 2nd phone is viable. Many phones are under $100 and they, at the bare minimum, "work" so one such phone can be kept as a backup.
There are many, many ways to have a very cheap backup plan. It's more about logistics than storage, and only requires a little bit of thinking and planning.
I was once in a place where I couldn't afford an extra $2 a month, like you mentioned. But I ALWAYS had a backup plan, and sometimes it was completely free.
Now you are assuming that most people are literate enough to do any of those things.
If that was true, repair stores making money off dirty phone USB connectors wouldn’t be a thing.
Okay I think you're intentionally missing the point. If someone isn't literate enough to make a Google drive account they are going to have a hard time with more things than a backup plan. They might not even be able to use a smartphone at all. We can nitpick the reasons why someone can't make a backup plan all day. What if they have a learning disability? What if they're in prison? What if they have no arms?
It doesn't matter. My point is if you can use a smartphone at a below-average level, without assistance, you can easily and affordably (free) have a data backup plan. If you can't use a smartphone at a below average level without assistance, you have much bigger problems than a backup plan and a backup plan shouldn't be one of your worries.
I think you are missing the bigger point here.
Most smartphone users cannot operate a local backup using a RPi. In fact, most users worldwide cannot afford to buy and run a RPi 24/7.
Most smartphone users are not able to afford a Google Drive plan that holds all their pics.
Most smartphone users are just not literate enough to even understand where they pics are, or that they may need a backup plan at all.
You cannot apply your life experiences to quite literally a billion people for whom smartphones are likely the only thing with a screen they own. And yeah, among those, plenty of iPhone users who bought it for cheap or got it for free with their cellular plan.
Yeah, we get it, you know what is needed and how it needs to be done, and you have the cash to do it. But maybe you should realize that you are the exception, a tiny minority.
I brought up the google drive plan because I know many people can't afford to buy a 2nd device. Not being literate enough to know you need a backup plan is beside the point.
And I'm not talking about pictures here. Before smartphones (or digital cameras I guess) nobody had backups of their pictures. You got the one copy and if it was destroyed that's it. Unless you used film and bought/made 2 copies but that's beside the point. That's a very low priority backup item. I'm talking about documentation, paperwork, important information in text form, passwords, etc. Things that literally everyone who has feasible access to a smartphone likely has or needs. All of that can be stored on a 15gb free plan. Anyone who is literate enough to use a random smartphone can do that. Pdfs and text files are tiny. Even pictures of documents can be tiny.
Not knowing you can or should do that is another problem entirely. I was once one of those people who was so poor the only screen I owned was a phone (and it wasn't even a smart phone). If you do not understand that you need to keep a 2nd copy of important information, whoever gave you that documentation or the government that created it is at fault. If someone ever says "do not lose this", it should be clear you might want to make a copy of some sort, physical or digital.
Anyone who is literate enough to use a random smartphone can do that
You clearly live in a different world from most of us. I’ll leave it here.
I'm not sure we're on the same page here.
If someone can:
- Create an email address
- Check and read emails
- Create accounts necessary to obtain a phone number
- Create accounts necessary to install apps on a smartphone and use those apps
- Navigate the smartphone UI
- Navigate web pages to do all of the above ...then they can absolutely figure out how to use a free online account to upload important documents in case they lose their primary storage (i.e. their phone).
Like I already said, if they don't know they NEED to do that, that's another problem entirely, and not really their fault. But I haven't met many people who don't realize those documents are important and need protecting. And I'm not talking strictly about affluent, educated, privileged people.
Alternate headlines:
“I put all my data in the cloud without creating a local backup, then complained when something went wrong.”
“I could have emailed Tim Cook to possibly get this fixed, but wrote a blog post instead.”
“I claim to be a programmer and Apple expert but for some reason don’t know how to create a local backup of my photos or important data.”
Look this must really suck for them but god this is some peak leopard-on-face-action. Like yeah, this is the issue with the apple ecosystem; you're completely at the mercy of one uncaring amoral megacorp. It happening to someone who's shilled so hard for them, for so long, is a perfect demonstration of this concern.
I don’t think this is exclusive to Apple.
Sure, but this article is about apple, hence talking about apple.
I get that. I’m just saying that the sentence “this is the problem with apple ecosystem” isn’t accurate, since all mega corps behave the same.
... This is the problem with the apple ecosystem, though? It isn't a problem unique to the apple ecosystem (though apple is the worst about tying features and services into a single ID) but you realize you're doing a whattaboutism in defense of a megacorp right?
The topic here is apple, not google or M$ or samsung or etc, hence why I'm not discussing them. It doesn't devalue the other companies and their contributions to shitty business practices to not bring them up in every discussion about shitty business practices.
It is worth highlighting that this sort of thing is not just an Apple issue. It happens frequently to peoples Google accounts, and probably Microsoft accounts, as well.
The only sane advice to anyone is always have another copy of the data. Preferably locally, but in another cloud provider at least.
If it only exists in one place you might as well be using the recycling bin to store you important data.
@flop_leash_973 @brbposting Best advice you can give. I've got stuff in iCloud, OneDrive and locally. Never keep your data in just one place.
Escalation to their buddies inside the company failed, that’s the wild bit in a huge way.
Most interesting speculation was probably someone saying something about anti-money laundering laws more or less including gag order-style provisions. So if the gift card thing tripped a filter, then maybe no one at the company would be able to help, and at that point, I suppose they’d need to take it to the courts(?)
After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer
This is why loyalty to companies is stupid and weird.
Cause they don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about what you spent. You are a meaningless blip to them.
Stop putting your eggs in one basket, and tying your entire on and offline life to a single corporate ID/Username/Account/Whatever.
This is the price you pay for your laziness and "convenience"
I'm most shocked that at the time of this posting, you have 2 downvotes. Wtf?
Corporate loyalists don't like when you point out how dangerous/dumb/weird their blind loyalty to multi-billion dollar companies is.
I can imagine a world where big tech is proud of being so enticing, so invaluable, that a country codifies a right to use their kinds of services into law. - My two cents there on a different HN comment talking about regulating some service providers like utilities.
I use cloud services but I also have everything vital backed up in 3 places. It would suck to get locked out but I won’t lose everything because I don’t trust anyone that much.
Dumbshit