Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts
I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.<p>Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in  <i>different</i> ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.<p>The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.<p>It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery&#x2F;secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&amp;D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).<p>But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID&#x2F;iTunes&#x2F;FindMy&#x2F;etc ... today ... not next year).<p>And, in my opinion, their monopoly&#x2F;oligopoly&#x2F;[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.<p>We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.<p>It’s the case at all Big Tech companies. Time to break them up. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paygo.media&#x2F;p&#x2F;25171" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paygo.media&#x2F;p&#x2F;25171</a><p>[ ... or if not that, can I at least get USB-C on my iPhone so I can stop carrying two cables? :’( ]