Apple forgot how to be customer-first
Apple Account credit won't buy physical products easily on the Apple Store. This isn't a bug -- it happens when control scales faster than empathy. Read:"Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #271
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: A video generator that makes up reality and includes your favorite licensed characters - that’s Sora from Open AI. Edition 271 of this newsletter is here - it’s October 6, 2025.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Apple forgot how to be customer-first
I am a firm believer in the vertical technology ecosystem. I love the idea that you can use multiple devices or account surfaces from a company like Apple or Google and feel that you move seamlessly through different use cases without figuratively stubbing your toe.
This looks like seeing your preferences on multiple devices, or handling off a phone call from one device to another, or simply not having to orient yourself to a new environment when you login to a new device. I’ve come to expect the same seamlessness of product in other products that Apple sells, especially the linkage between physical and digital products.
Yet something seems broken in their ecosystem when you try to purchase goods and services from them using their “Apple Account credit” - a way to store gift card value and redeem it for digital or physical purchases.
You can tell a company has gotten too big when even giving it money feels like work. From a product and operational perspective, I am sure that enabling Apple Account credit to be used as a purchase method for anything Apple sells is a heruculean effort. From a customer perspective, it’s a no-brainer that this should be possible.
Here’s a small example of this customer journey breakdown. I tried to buy an AirTag. The order was simple: one item, one address, one payment method. My Apple account had more than enough balance from a recently redeemed Apple Gift Card. But at checkout, the system refused the transaction:
“Your payment authorization failed. Please verify your information and try again, or try another payment method.”
Huh. That’s weird. Maybe it’s a problem with some obscure combination of things, like “you must have a valid payment method to cover any other cost for this transaction.” Except I do have a valid payment method already on the account.
Being the ex-QA professional, I got pretty interested in solving this problem:
I tried it on the same device with a split payment (leaving $1 to be covered by the valid payment method) --> same result
I tried it on a different device (maybe the mobile device was the culprit)
I checked the billing address of the payment method (yep, valid) and the expiration date
None of these methods word. The balance was still there -- I just couldn’t spend it on products from the online Apple Store.
Apple makes it easy to contact support, so I told them what was happening. Apple Support had no clear answer, except to suggest that I should talk to another department to learn more. A quick online search suggested I’m not the only person who has run into the problem of trying to use Apple Account credit on the Apple Store.
The friction wasn’t technical. It’s structural, and not designed for the customer.
The bureaucracy of perfection
Apple didn’t design a system where you can’t use their store credit to buy physical products in their online store to intentionally frustrate customers. This example happens when a company’s operating system is more important than customer empathy.
Apple’s biggest concern with online sales today isn’t making sure every sale is seamless. Of course they want you to have a frictionless transaction when they can guarantee that you’ve already paid them. But they also want to protect against online loss.
Digital payments are easy to abuse, and Apple gift cards are clearly a prime target. Apple’s response is to raise walls high enough so that legitimate customers can’t use the payment method to make certain types of purchases. Allow digital purchases, and place friction on hardware sales. These safeguards make sense in isolation on a spreadsheet. They feel pretty lame as a customer experience.
In a small company, losing a few dollars online is a risk worth taking to preserve goodwill. At Apple’s scale, even a 0.01% fraud rate means millions in exposure. So the system evolves toward zero loss, not zero friction.
That’s why it’s not broken. It’s working exactly as intended, just not for the customer.
The gravitational pull of ecosystems
There’s a bigger picture here. With ecosystem lock-in, the deeper truth is that Apple doesn’t have to fix this customer paper cut.
Every product you use in tandem deepens the likelihood that you will make all of your interactions inside the system. And once you live inside the system, you start accepting some pretty weird outcomes.
You tolerate the broken gift-card system because everything else still works. The rest of the product works, so the cost of doing something different is higher than the cost of frustration.
That’s the dark side of “it just works”: you stop noticing when it doesn’t.
Ecosystem lock-in doesn’t just trap your data. It limits your options to leave the system.
When a system assumes that customer support means “go to a store, they can fix it there”, it’s quietly excluding everyone outside a metro radius. The irony is that the promise of a digital storefront is that any problem can be solved remotely. It turns out that’s not the case.
The empathy gap
Ecosystem lock-in slowly erodes the incentive to care. When customers have nowhere to go, you stop having to listen. Bugs become policies. Friction becomes governance.
Apple isn’t alone in this. Airlines, banks, streaming services — once a system owns your data, your history, your community, it can afford to be indifferent. Your loyalty becomes inertia.
The AirTag story isn’t about payment logic. It’s about what happens when a brand’s internal systems stop feeling the heat of customer pain.
How it can get better
This is not intended to be a Blade Runner-style screed about the inevitable loss of customer power in a monopolistic world dominated by a few companies. The point here is that as customers:
we do deserve (and can demand) to know the intended customer journey
it’s ok (and expected) to point out when it’s not working
products get stronger when you identify the process breaks that prevent them from being delightful.
Dear Apple: if you wanted to keep this experience mostly the same, the smallest of changes here would be to either document what kind of purchases are covered by Apple Account credit or identify the support path for this problem. A generic message might stop fraudsters from gaining a toehold, but it’s super annoying to read.
The lesson for builders
If you’re designing your own ecosystem — product, API, or workflow — remember that control scales faster than empathy.
Every integration, every dependency, every “stickiness feature” is a potential empathy tax. The more trapped your users feel, the less pressure you feel to improve. That’s the moment your simplicity starts hardening into captivity.
Design for earned loyalty, not forced retention. Make it easy to stay because people want to — not because they’ve already sunk too much into staying.
What’s the takeaway? When a company can’t spend its own currency, that’s not a bug; it’s a worldview. Ecosystems that prioritize loss prevention over trust eventually forget what serving the customer feels like.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ How do you measure AI improvements? - Here are the metrics that leading companies are using to measure progress made with AI. Spoiler: they look a lot like other operational metrics, so making AI outputs deterministic is a key.
2/ Which 20% of your product? - Most users don’t care about all of the use cases of your product. They care about the ones that work for them.
3/ It’s October Baseball - Appreciate the simplicity of this retro terminal package for your coworkers who want to keep up with the MLB playoffs and don’t feel comfortable watching YouTube TV.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon