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.

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.”

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.

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.

Food for thought:

Always room for disagreement

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"

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.

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