Apple Store 4+

A critical part of the Apple experience beyond elegance in design, beyond product reliability, and beyond integrity in handling those rare occasions when support is needed, is simple thoughtfulness. The facility of use, the intuitive UI, and the ease and simplicity of discovering more and more commands effortlessly is what makes the Apple experience what it is. This is at the root of the deeply held loyalty of Apple customers.

This app is an extension of the Apple experience for purposes of buying from Apple. Nothing bad, nothing surprising, it just works as you would expect it to. Perfectly.

I unfortunately have 2 Apple IDs that I use all the time and many years later Apple provides no way to combine them. I had an Apple ID years ago with all of my iTunes purchases on it, then was able to get a free .Mac account when those came out, which became iCloud later. All my syncing goes through iCloud but my purchases go through my old Apple ID. I would absolutely love to combine them but you can’t.

Why do I bring this up? Well for some reason they built this app to sign in to your iCloud account automatically. You can’t change it, it’s just whatever iCloud is signed in to your device. The phone lets you sign in to iCloud with one account and the stores with another Apple ID but this app doesn’t care. You can’t manually sign out and sign in to another account or anything like that.

This is particularly an issue when you get a gift card. It will automatically apply the gift card when you tap on it from an email or something like that to your Apple ID used for App Store purchases on your phone. But this app isn’t tied to that. And it is nearly impossible to move gift cards too. It has caused multiple headaches, because they don’t think of any edge cases (or don’t care).

I bought a keyboard here for a delivery. Delivery was delayed so called and was told by apple rep to wait until evening. Spent all day waiting nothing arrives. Then next morning I get an email saying that this was cancelled. I call and they said they cannot refund the full amount and I have to pay for sales tax for an item I did not even see. I tell them to cancel it and get me the full refund but they refused to until a team lead reviewed which requires 72 hours. Waiting period begins and following day I get an email stating the item was shipped when I did not want it now! I call again and they said now I have to return the item to get my refund. No credit, no admission of fault, just a hard stance on what needs to be done.

Conclusion is just go to your local retailer instead of depending on their service. If something goes wrong, it is pretty much impossible and requires so much effort and time on the customers end. You would think these guys and have ways to take care of their customers. Nope!