The metric to beat isn't "is self driving dangerous, yes or no?"
The metric to beat is "is self driving on average substantially safer than human driving?". Once you beat that metric, it would be insane not to allow self driving. This won't take 100 years.
> The 9to5Mac article says, "if the item is not received, Apple communicates with the customer over email and phone." Yet Dustin reported no phone call from Apple,
It's possible Dustin had silence unknown callers turned on.
> My understanding is that it's not common practice in the credit card industry for cards to stop working after one late payment.
Missing a payment and a failed attempted payment are two separate things that result in different outcomes. Autopay failed which likely set off red flags.
> Why did this happen so fast
The locked Apple ID and iCloud shutdown only happened on the M1 MacBook he purchased. Which makes sense. If I were to abuse the instant credit system and sold the essentially-stolen M1 MacBook on Ebay, the buyer should be able to know quickly if there were any issues with the device so they can rectify appropriately.
"No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card."
After looking into it more, I see that the instant credit system is the culprit.
1. Apple instantly gave Dustin the credit (because he opted into paying monthly). From Apple's site: "If you pay monthly: We’ll apply the value as an instant credit to lower your monthly payments."
2. Apple failed to send the box
3. Apple tried to get its credit back by charging the value to the Apple Card
4. Dustin didn't update the bank info, so Apple couldn't get its money back as the card denied the charge.
5. Apple's fraud alarm went off.
Apple gives you instant trade in credit if you pay monthly. While that's unique to the Apple Card here in USA, other countries that don't have Apple Card offer financing too. It's not out of the question that instant trade in credit is offered to countries that don't have Apple Card but also offer financing on Macbooks too.
Everyone is at fault it seems (more on Apple than Dustin). Dustin failed to update the bank info, Apple failed to send the box, and Apple failed to communicate properly.
I did the same with the Apple Watch. I bought my last Apple Watch using monthly payments, so I got instant trade in credits. I was sent a trade in box, but my cousin wanted to buy the Watch off of me so I never sent in the trade in. Apple simply charged the trade in credit on my card after not receiving the trade in.
> That's not exactly what happened. "they give you a credit at purchase time"
That would still be a refund on the Apple Card. "amount of the credit [...] to my Apple Card balance." means Apple refunded a portion of the balance.
> Anyway, the important point you're missing is that if Apple was dealing with a Chase card, Apple would not be out any money
They sure would if they accidentally credited your Chase card. Apple's site says
"Once we receive it, we’ll inspect it and verify its condition. If everything checks out, we’ll credit your original purchase method and send you any remaining balance on an Apple Gift Card by Email."
If they erroneously "credit your original purchase method", they would, in fact, be out of money. Dustin was erroneously credited. I don't see how it would be any different, other than it seems Dustin got his credit instantly, if his tweets were accurate.
If they instantly credited me and I sent them a lump of coal in the trade in, they would be, in effect, out of money, regardless if it was an Apple Card or a Chase card.
I think you missed the point where Dustin mentioned this:
"Very soon after, it seems that Apple simply added the amount of the credit I received when I purchased the M1 MacBook Pro to my Apple Card balance."
Timeline is as follows: Dustin bought the MacBook in mid January, he mentioned he never received a trade in kit after 2 weeks, then received a reminder in mid-February to send the item in, and "soon after" received credit on his Apple Card. This tells me Apple refunded a portion of the M1 purchase to the credit card erroneously. This can happen with any credit card, not just Apple Card.
As I've already established, if Apple thinks you owe them any amount of cash, they'll lock your account. In this case, Apple thinks Dustin owes them money because Apple accidentally refunded a portion of the M1 purchase.
Chargeback is to establish that Apple can shutdown your services if Apple thinks you owe them money.
Dustin was erroneously credited for something from Apple, and now Apple shutdown his account because they want the money back. This would have happened if it was a Chase card which would prove this statement wrong (which is my whole point):
" the main issue is that Apple shut down his other Apple services because of non-payment. This presumably wouldn't happen if the charge was on a non-Apple card."
SIWA will still work for two weeks should Apple decide to "terminate all related functionality". Apple did not decide to "terminate all related functionality".
Today I can put an App Store charge on my Chase card and do a chargeback making up some stupid reason that I never got my app in which the chargeback would be successful. It's not entirely out of the question that Apple would lock my account until that charge is resolved.
Similarly, Dustin could have used a Chase card to buy the M1 Mac, supposedly "tradein" without sending the device back, Apple erroneously crediting that CC, and then Apple locking down the account until that's resolved.
Both situations result in owing Apple and both are totally plausible situations.
> That's not what happened though. His credit card didn't expire
I didn't say that's what happened. I'm saying it's entirely possible Apple can shutdown your account for owing money even if you don't have an Apple Card.
I had an iTunes account back in 2012 linked to my Paypal. One time I accidentally unlinked my Paypal and Apple wouldn't let me access my iCloud email unless I typed my password. When I typed in my password, it would ask me to verify my CC/Paypal details. When I clicked cancel, the entire process would just happen again.
"Within rights to terminate [...] all related functionality" is completely different than "Apple HAS TERMINATED [...] all related functionality". Upon terminating "all related functionality", SIWA will still work for two weeks, but no where in the letter said they have "terminated all related functionality". Apple chose to keep it alive.
Tim Sweeny took this and misled the public saying "oh yeah, Apple is terminating it for sure" which is not the case.
> the main issue is that Apple shut down his other Apple services because of non-payment. This presumably wouldn't happen if the charge was on a non-Apple card.
Not entirely true. If you owe money on the App Store because maybe your non-Apple card expired and you never updated it, Apple will shut down your account still.
If you read Tim's tweet, it says in the policy "Ability to ENABLE Apple services [like] Sign in with Apple". This makes sense as Epic no longer has the ability to enable SIWA on new apps.
Says nothing about termination of SIWA on current apps as SIWA will continue to work on existing Apps.
> The disabling of iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts
My understanding is that the Apple Card policy is referring to "account" as "Apple Card Account is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA", and not the iCloud account issued by Apple.
I've setup auto-pay on several accounts and left it running for over a decade. whatever issue I may have in the future would not exceed the amount of time wasted in manually paying each account.
How do you know Uber and Grab? (Grubhub?) were never rejected? You're assuming they passed every single review which I think it's highly unlikely.
Considering 40% of all submissions in the past week (shown on Apple's website) get rejected, it's entirely possible they were rejected using phone number input and after explaining to Apple their purpose, they were finally accepted. You're bound to get 1 or 2 apps erroneously rejected considering they go through 100k submissions every week.
It also says the app store team takes 1000 calls every week to discuss the rejections. It's not just you or small devs.
Judging from the screenshots in your tweet, your first rejection was failing to follow the rules that stated if you have a third party sign in, you're supposed to use Sign In with Apple too. That's not on Apple.
Regardless, I don't see how this is Apple trying to "bully" small developers. They're trying to enforce guidelines. That's all.
Title is clickbait and not very objective. Apple isn't "bullying". It sounds like reviewer was convinced a phone number was not needed. That's why you simply reply back to the reviewer or get it appealed.
Reviewers aren't 100% perfect. I've had apps that violated rules pass the review only to be rejected a few updates later. One app I had forced users to use their birthday (at the client's request) as the password. 1.0.0 passed the review, but 1.0.1 was rejected because birthday is not an acceptable form of a password.
Apple could absolutely do better with reviewers, but it's likely they had to lower the quality of reviews in some way to reduce the amount of time it takes to review an app (from 5-7 days to 24 hours). Regardless, I rather take the 24 hour app review time since any rejection can be quickly re-assessed again.
The metric to beat is "is self driving on average substantially safer than human driving?". Once you beat that metric, it would be insane not to allow self driving. This won't take 100 years.