Trapped in Apple Hell

When Trillion dollar corporations make blanket rules with unintended consequences

Let me first start by saying, I’m an Apple Fan-boy - I have two Apple laptops, an Apple desktop, an AppleWatch (which I can honestly say saved my life), an iPad, two cellphones, an Apple VisionPro in regular use, and a pile of old retired Apple hardware.

I’m also probably what you’d call an Apple power user: I like pushing Apple products to their limits and I have Apple TV, Apple News, a 2TB Apple iCloud Account, iTunes Match and the rest.

Not only have I been to Apple HQ several times on tech junkets, but I’ve even met Steve Wozniak and hung out on more than one occasion.

However, the last few days, Apple has rolled out some kind of payment location rule change, and I found myself in an impossible loop of madness trying to figure out how to fix my Apple account without losing access to a ton of my own content and other problems.

Is it my credit card?

A few days ago, my regular credit card stopped working on Apple, all I got was “Card Declined” and so I started getting messages that my subscriptions were failing. I stopped being able to use ApplePay, which inconvenienced me, as I often only carry my cellphone around and use PayWave to access all my credit cards on my phone.

I wasn’t able to call an Uber, as that was linked to ApplePay, and I had to manually type in my credit card and address on an Xmas shopping website instead of just “one click” Apple Pay, and general other headaches.

It was interesting to see how one issue with my Apple Account had so many flow on effects. I made a mental note to make sure my Apple password is updated, strong and that I’ve double checked all my 2Factor Authentication security, as clearly losing access to your Apple account could wreck your life!

I tried to contact my Credit Card company - AMEX - but they’ve made it hard to call, and kept re-directing me to download their App, rather than call. I didn’t have the AMEX app, so I tired to download it. But Apple wouldn’t let me download the AMEX app without updating my credit card details - Argh around in a circle!

Eventually I got hold of Amex, and they said that it wasn’t anything their end and to call Apple.

Trying to get hold of Apple

As you’ll be aware, trying to talk to a Trillion-dollar corporation is generally not fun, even one with customer service as good as Apple.

I wanted to be able to use my American Express card for Apple services, rather than another card, so I thought I’d try and sort it out.

After trying to get hold of someone at Apple for an hour or so, I gave up, and figured I’d just use another one of my half dozen credit cards and forget about it.

After trying six credit cards one after the other, and having Apple say “declined” to all of them, I figured it must be: a serious issue with my account, an Apple payment outage, or a region problem.

After doing some Googling, I found some information that said that “using a credit card with Apple not from the region your country is set to, is not supported”.

Ah-ha - I kind of knew this, and this this triggered a memory from long ago when I first set up my Apple account as a US account all the way back in 2008.

Region issues

If you’re old enough to remember DVDs, you might remember that DVDs used to be “Region Coded”. There were four different global regions, and DVD’s from one region wouldn’t work in a DVD player from another region. Sometimes you could change your DVD player’s region once or twice if you moved country with it, but then you could never change it again, to prevent people from changing regions back and forward.

It was a horrible, horrible system - designed to limit the copying of DVDs in say Asia and sale of them to westerners, it probably prevented hardly any piracy, and drove numerous consumers like me, insane.

I actually used to have a US DVD player an NZ DVD, and an Asian DVD player so I could play DVDs from any region.

Anyway, when I first set up my Apple account, way back in the dawn of time in 2008 when the App Store first launched, I noticed that the NZ Apple App store had hardly an apps or content and was pretty barren compared to the US store.

So I decided to set up my iTunes account as a US iTunes account. Now, when I tried to use my NZ credit card, even back then, they wouldn’t let me, but I had an Amex card, and even thought it was issued in NZ, it worked fine.

So I’ve had a US iTunes account and content ever since. These days, there is barely any difference between the NZ and US iTunes stores, so it’s much less of an issue.

My Content Archive

Now, before there was iCloud and a region coded Apple account, there was iTunes. iTunes was the software that allowed you to rip and organise your CD music collection to your computer, and initially sync it with your iPod (I had every single iPod including the U2 limited edition red one, and then later on, starting in 1997, the iPhone.

Since the first iPod launched in 2001, I had been ripping my gigantic collection of over 2,000 CDs, as well as Music that no-one else has (such as CDs of my Father’s music), and putting them into iTunes. I own this music, and it used to sit on my hard drive, and sync to my Phone.

At some point, I don’t know when, Apple decided to move my thousands of songs and CDs that I’d owned and ripped into the Cloud - into my now US iCloud account. They launched a service called “iTunes Match”, that allowed you to store all your music in the cloud, and instead of paying $1.99 for a song, All the songs that you owned (including my father’s music) could live in the cloud for $24.95 a year. Fine - I was happy to pay $24.95 a year for some additional convenience for music I already owned. Then if my computer crashed or got stolen my gigantic music collection would still be safe.

Can’t Change Region

After spending two days with my Credit Card company and Apple trying to sort the issue, it seemed that I’d just have to change my Apple region - as per the “Can’t add payment method” image from Apple above.

However, Apple doesn’t let you change regions with any active subscriptions to anything at all.

So, I set about cancelling all my subscriptions - I cancelled my iCloud account which was my backups, I cancelled Apple News, I cancelled various apps that had active subscriptions - all in all, a pain in the ass, and a risk, because without an iCloud backup account active, if my iPhone suddenly died, I’d then lose everything.

Anyway, once I got to the final subscription to cancel - iTunes Match, it wouldn’t let me. iTunes Match cannot be cancelled before the renewal period, and it renews for one year at a time. So based on my account, I’d have to wait until next March to actually change my region

Ruling out a region change

After doing more research, it seems a region change would entail too much risk for me.

I would likely lose access to my iTunes Match library (2,000 CDs and 20,000 songs that I’m supposed to OWN but I no longer have the physical media for)

Also, people changing regions have lost access to all their Apple TV, and other iTunes purchases such as Movies (I’ve purchased more than 100 from Apple which sit in my library), as well as non-region apps (Some apps might get deleted, and then I’d have to set the App up again or lose data.

Not only does it seem an iTunes region change would lose all my data, but apple doesn’t actually allow me to change regions until my iTunes Match subscription runs out, as per above.

The messy solution

Increasingly desperate, I tried to top up my Apple account with my PayPal account instead of Credit Cards and iTunes gift cards. Unfortunately, some how Apple knows what region a pay-pal account is from, and blocked me - I’m trying to give you money god dammit Apple!

So, I figured I’d change my Pay-Pal account to be a US account, and then maybe that would work. No luck, PayPal doesn’t allow you to change countries

So, in the end, I opened another PayPal account, told them I was a US citizen, signed up with my friends US address, used my US phone number that I have for roaming for verification, and finally got a US PayPal account. Then tried adding my NZ credit card. No luck.

So - the super messy solution, is that I have a US PayPal account, I’ve linked that to my US iTunes account, I send money from my NZ Credit card to my NZ PayPal account, and then I send that money from my NZ PayPal account to my US PayPal account, and then they pay Apple.

If Apple keeps closing the door on my solutions, then eventually I might have to:

• Pay someone to add my 2,000 Owned CDs in Apple Music to my Spotify Music collection,

• back up my Fathers music somehow,

• wait until March 2025 when my iTunes Match subscription expires

• Turn off all my Apple subscriptions

• Change my Region from USA to NZ

• lose all my access to my old Apple music and purchased content.

• Add an NZ Credit Card

and then not have to deal with this again in the future!

Summary

• Apple seemingly recently rolled out a change recently that prevented people with US iTunes accounts from using non-US AMEX cards or Pay-Pal accounts, which stopped my regular payments from working.

• I have had a US iTunes account since 2008, because it used to give much better access to apps and content than the regional New Zealand iTunes and App stores, although now it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

• With no way to pay for my Apple services because all NZ credit cards and payment services are blocked, I considered changing my region from US to New Zealand, however I was unable to do this with active Apple services such as iTunes Match. It just won’t let you.

• If I disabled iTunes Match and cancel other Apple services, then there was a risk of losing all my 2,000 CD’s worth of music that Apple has marked as music that “I own”, including my Father’s music.

• In addition, Changing regions often loses purchased Apple TV Movies (of Which I have many), other content, and other issues.

• So…Apple won’t let me pay for Apple services with a credit card that doesn’t correctly match my iTunes region, however they won’t let me change my region without losing access to all my years of content and music, which is an impossible situation.

• Therefore, I am having to string together a complicated work-around, passing money between two PayPal accounts - one USA, one NZ, in order to make my apple world work.

• Tiny decisions that Trillion-Dollar companies make can crush the time, energy, content ownership and rights of small time consumers under foot, with no recourse!

• 2-3 days of my time and effort later I’ve finally out-smarted the system, but only until next time some rule is made or changed at Apple which boxes me into a corner once more.