> This is a weird case, because it was a retroactive charge not explicitly authorized by the card holder. That kind of thing rarely happens

And that is a feature of the trade-in buy flow and not how the purchaser chose to pay. Which is my point exactly which you have been trying to dispute.

> The whole thing was explained in the article, we know exactly what happened.

No we don’t. The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.

> The article simply says their balance was not being paid. It’s possible that the trade in charge put them over their credit limit and that’s why it was declined. They never confirm otherwise.

It's all spelled out very clearly: "As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card."

His Apple Card was paid from his bank account. His bank account changed. He failed to update the bank info. Simple as that, no mystery whatsoever.

If my auto pay information changed for my Apple Card today and became invalid, I would still be able to charge my card a year from today because I have no outstanding balance to pay. Failure to have valid auto pay is necessary but not sufficient.

In addition, you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.

> you still seem to overlook the fact that every other credit card on the market can also fail to post a transaction even if it authorizes, given sufficient time between the two events.

I don't even know what you're talking about. The transaction was posted. And then the transaction was billed to the card holder. The credit card bill didn't get paid, because the autopay had the wrong bank info. And that's when all the problems occurred. Again, this was all spelled out in the article.

There was no authorization failure. This was a simple case of a missed credit card payment.

The post simply does not have enough information to distinguish between:

Apple Retail in mid-February decided to authorize a charge for the difference and reached out to me when the charge did not post.

and

Apple Retail decided to force me to resolve my credit card balance because I was revolving.

In both cases, Dustin would see a transaction appear on his card transaction history before the merchant learns that the payment won’t post. In your terminology, pending and posted transactions can both be “billed” but they are very different for the merchant in terms of liability.

Furthermore, credit cards aren’t an unregulated Wild West. A minimum payment must be delinquent for 90 days before banks can start moving towards collections. Goldman Sachs is not cavalier enough to risk having the state of New York investigating their bank over a very creative definition of what isn’t collections. In addition, Apple Card offered extremely generous payment terms during the pandemic - there is no reason to believe they’d start aggressively collecting now.

In addition, if the email from Apple was about collections on a credit card, it is required to have a host of disclosures before the contents which are not present in the complete excerpt posted on the blog. Even more evidence that this action had nothing to do with the credit card balance.

Finally, a poster reported the same experience with a PayPal payment method gone bad.

There is no reason to believe this issue stemmed from Apple strong-arming people into paying off their Apple Card revolving credit balance.