This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.

Paris Buttfield-Addison (Bluesky, Hacker News, John Gruber): My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years (it was originally a username, before they had to be email addresses; it’s from the iTools era), has been permanently disabled. This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity. It holds terabytes of […]

Paris Buttfield-Addison:

A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. [...]

I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional life. We had an app on the App Store on Day 1 in every sense of the world.

I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case. I suspect an automated fraud flag regarding the bad gift card triggered a nuclear response that frontline support cannot override. I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success.

I am desperate to resolve this and restore my digital life.

The triggering event, as best he can determine, was his failed attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift card purchased from a major retail chain. There’s a very active thread on Hacker News about his plight, where Buttfield-Addison himself is commenting. That thread pointed to this description of one form of gift card thievery, in which thieves tamper with the cards in-store to steal the codes, tamper with the code, and then some unsuspecting victim buys the tampered card and the thieves get the credit.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

After a solid run in the second half of 2025 with sponsorships sold out weeks, if not months, in advance, we’ve arrived at the end of the year with the last three weeks still open — starting this coming Monday. I’m offering those weeks at a discount.

• December 15–21 (next week)
• December 22–28
• December 29–January 4

Traffic at DF tends not to ebb over holidays, and while I slow down, I don’t stop posting. If you still check DF when you’re bored over the holidays, think about how many other people do too.

I’m also booking sponsorships for Q1 2026, and six of those weeks are already sold.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week:

Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple ecosystem to adoption by millions of developers around the world building apps for everything from devices to data centers.

(Graviton is AWS’s ARM-in-the-cloud initiative.)

Nothing earth-shaking in this brief presentation, but it’s not often you see an Apple VP on stage at another company’s keynote, or see Apple so very publicly declare their reliance on someone else’s infrastructure. It speaks to Apple and Amazon being more allies than competitors amongst the big tech companies. And of course, you even less often see anyone from Apple speak live on stage at Apple’s own keynotes, which, alas, are no longer live nor on stages.