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!

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.

* 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?

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.

For example, you can choose not to take the plane because you do not feel it is safe. -> Statistics show that it is safe but there are some rare catastrophic events, and these are really bad -> Though these are NOT supposed to happen (exactly like with Gmail, Apple, etc).

Nobody wants to have such terrible issues, so you take the most reasonable operator and hope that the millions who shaped the path before helped to make the system reliable, but yes, at the end, you are at their mercy and their technology.

Of course, yes, you can go the other route, take the train, the bus, your feet.

Keep in mind, it is more inconvenient, is way slower, and has different type of dangers (losing backups for example, getting attacked on the way: the machine hacked for example if the webmail was running React, arriving too late for a meeting, etc).

Plus all that time you wasted, you will never get it back. Nobody is going to be impressed if you spent 45 hours in a bus versus 5 hours in a plane.

What you (ideally) need is to take the plane, and pack a parachute (the backups); not actually avoid the plane.

This way you get the benefits of both worlds.

Billions of people fly without parachute by the way, and this is perfectly normal and is still a very reasonable choice. What matters the most is the track-record of the operator and the service the offer.

I guess you rolled the dice hoping to post this on a day without a mass shooting, and you failed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CreditCards/comments/1hb6rnj/rumors...

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.

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.

This could include a "real" cash discount of ~8-10% (eg, buy a $100 card for $92), or loyalty points.

Our supermarkets often have a "20x" bonus points promotion, which is effectively 10% off a future shop - eg, buy a $100 Apple gift card, get $10 off a future shop in loyalty points. Buy $1000, get $100 off, etc.

Or, if you're a frequent flyer, earn Qantas points - buy a $2000 gift card, get 20,000 in QFF points - that on its own is some one way/return domestic flights, or halfway to Honolulu (one way), if you were going to spend $2000 on a new iPhone, Mac, iCloud etc anyway.

https://gcdb.com.au/gc/apple/ has been documenting all the recent offers for Australia.