I was so excited about Apple’s HideMyEmail feature, part of its basic 50GB plan iCloud+. I noticed it also includes Custom Domain.
Then I went around checking information about these products and features.
As usual Apple found it insulting to provide sufficient documentation, so they haven’t.
Naturally I approached customer care which is essentially phone only. At least in India. There used to be a chat option but the last time I tried I couldn’t find it. Besides I always had to go on phone from chat to get anything worthwhile.
Then the Apple support pingpong started. Very polite, very earnest executives. Giving irrelevant, conflicting answers. Always promising to callback with more information, never doing that. Had to explain the question to every new executive. Rinse repeat.
Can I escalate? “I’m afraid there’s no way.”
Can you send me a mail stating what you’ve said on phone? Because you didn’t provide any publicly available documentation so I need this on email. “Sorry, can’t send email”.
Can you connect me to someone who can say this on email? “Sorry there’s no way to do that”.
Can I talk to your supervisor? Senior? “I am a senior advisor”.
Someone above you? “Sorry that’s not possible”
Can I get an email address where I can ask this question and they can answer? “Sorry support portal and phone is the way to connect with Apple Support”
After lots of head-banging and shouting (Yup! They finally managed to get it out of me) they provided me an email where I could request recording of these customer care calls. I was also told I may or may not get those recordings. Anyway I wrote to that mail from my @icloud.com email account. After two weeks I got a response asking for lots of information about me, including some documents and IDs to prove it was me. I gave up.
It was frustrating to say the least.
But after this I got my answer. That Apple is not a company I should trust. Its anti-consumer behaviour is well known and documented (if one wants to look at it as anyone but a fan) and I realised I was doing what moved me out of Google’s ecosystem.
I was locking myself down into Apple’s ecosystem even further down and worst part of it is they have quite inferior online products and services.
I moved all those HideMyEail and Apple Login accounts to throwaway emails on my secondary domain and cancelled iCloud+.
Their Custom Domain feature is anyway useless from any standards, besides HideMyEmail is not available on Custom Domain (why would Apple do something that’s not locking you down!).
This also reinforced my decision to make my next laptop a non-Apple. I can get a laptop at probably the same price that I will have to spend to get 2 years extended warranty for an Apple laptop (and that costly service provided by shitty third party here).
The last thing I wanted to do was keeping all eggs in one basket. Because at this point I don’t even know whether I will be able to access the @icloud.com account if I have no Apple devices with me. I don’t even want to find out.
Comments
It’s a long rant of an experience sharing.
I was so excited about Apple’s HideMyEmail feature, part of its basic 50GB plan iCloud+. I noticed it also includes Custom Domain.
Then I went around checking information about these products and features.
As usual Apple found it insulting to provide sufficient documentation, so they haven’t.
Naturally I approached customer care which is essentially phone only. At least in India. There used to be a chat option but the last time I tried I couldn’t find it. Besides I always had to go on phone from chat to get anything worthwhile.
Then the Apple support pingpong started. Very polite, very earnest executives. Giving irrelevant, conflicting answers. Always promising to callback with more information, never doing that. Had to explain the question to every new executive. Rinse repeat.
Can I escalate? “I’m afraid there’s no way.”
Can you send me a mail stating what you’ve said on phone? Because you didn’t provide any publicly available documentation so I need this on email. “Sorry, can’t send email”.
Can you connect me to someone who can say this on email? “Sorry there’s no way to do that”.
Can I talk to your supervisor? Senior? “I am a senior advisor”.
Someone above you? “Sorry that’s not possible”
Can I get an email address where I can ask this question and they can answer? “Sorry support portal and phone is the way to connect with Apple Support”
After lots of head-banging and shouting (Yup! They finally managed to get it out of me) they provided me an email where I could request recording of these customer care calls. I was also told I may or may not get those recordings. Anyway I wrote to that mail from my @icloud.com email account. After two weeks I got a response asking for lots of information about me, including some documents and IDs to prove it was me. I gave up.
It was frustrating to say the least.
But after this I got my answer. That Apple is not a company I should trust. Its anti-consumer behaviour is well known and documented (if one wants to look at it as anyone but a fan) and I realised I was doing what moved me out of Google’s ecosystem.
I was locking myself down into Apple’s ecosystem even further down and worst part of it is they have quite inferior online products and services.
I moved all those HideMyEail and Apple Login accounts to throwaway emails on my secondary domain and cancelled iCloud+.
Their Custom Domain feature is anyway useless from any standards, besides HideMyEmail is not available on Custom Domain (why would Apple do something that’s not locking you down!).
This also reinforced my decision to make my next laptop a non-Apple. I can get a laptop at probably the same price that I will have to spend to get 2 years extended warranty for an Apple laptop (and that costly service provided by shitty third party here).
The last thing I wanted to do was keeping all eggs in one basket. Because at this point I don’t even know whether I will be able to access the @icloud.com account if I have no Apple devices with me. I don’t even want to find out.
You can go to iCloud.com in any web browser.