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thomasec

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 15, 2011
71
20
Apologies for the long post, but I'm not sure where to go next with this. Any help is appreciated, since Apple Support said there's nothing they can do at this point:

I purchased a 14" MacBook Pro when they were first announced, and used around $700 that was in my Apple Account Balance for the purchase. In between when the purchase was placed and shipped out, $5 was deducted from my Account Balance to cover my monthly iCloud fee. I received a call from Apple saying there was insufficient funds to process the order, and told me over the phone that I was short $5. No problem, I said - go ahead and charge my credit card $5.

Fast forward to a few days later, and I see a charge on my credit card for ~$700, and nothing has been deducted from my Apple Account Balance. I called to try and get this squared away, and they told me there was nothing they could do since the laptop had been shipped and all payments processed.

They said my only option was to return the laptop, and buy another one - which is exactly what I did.

When I purchased this next laptop, I initiated a trade-in with my old intel MacBook. With this purchase, they did indeed take money from Apple Account Balance, however, after the trade-in was processed, guess what happened - instead of putting that money back on my credit card, they put the money back into my Apple Account Balance!

So now, after purchasing the same laptop twice, I still have the exact same amount of money in my Apple Account Balance. I called their billing department and the first person said they would put in a request to get the money back on my credit card. I called to follow up a few weeks later, and the guy said (I am not making this up), the other person must have been "lying", because they couldn't do anything.

I guess my only option now is to buy a third laptop, but who knows how that would go, especially considering there was a trade-in with my second order.

If anyone has suggestions for what to do, please let me know. Worst case is I'm sure I'll use the $700 in my Account Balance at some point, but the fact that this happened over the holidays (when I could have used that extra money), is really frustrating.
 
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wilberforce

macrumors 68030
Aug 15, 2020
2,890
3,163
SF Bay Area
I had a similar situation when I ordered Airpods. when I ordered it, $25 of the payment was to come from Apple account balance (from a gift card), and the remainder from CC. However, before it shipped, I had a autopay payment of $4.99 automatically deducted from my Apple account for Apple TV. This meant the payment would not go through (as the Apple account balance was $4.99 short) and the shipment was put on hold.
After chatting with Apple support, the simplest solution was that I added $4.99 to my apple account (paid using Apple Pay in "Manage Balance"), whereupon the payment went through and the shipment was released.
For some reason it was impossible to add $4.99 to the CC charge without reordering.
So if you run into the same issue again: don't add funds by a CC charge, instead add funds to the apple account (easy to do online).
 

fa8362

macrumors 68000
Jul 7, 2008
1,571
498
Why don't you just go to an Apple store, do everything there, and walk out with the new computer?
 

DMG35

Contributor
May 27, 2021
2,295
7,223
Wow that totally stinks. For as big as Apple is, they aren't always the best when it comes to how to use online credits. I recently had a similar experience where I ordered something for online pickup and used the $150 I had in Apple online credit as well as $400 from my credit card. I ended up getting what I wanted from somewhere else that was a little cheaper and they refunded the $400 back to my credit card but the $150 online credit is just gone. Apple is telling me that they don't know why it didn't go back on and they can't just give me $150. It was escalated over a week ago and still isn't fixed.

Didn't mean to hijack your thread but to say that these types of problems seems to be regular with them. I'd just keep calling them until you get it straightened out, that's what I'm going to do.
 
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