Apple Support 4+

First time, I think, in about 20 years of Apple ownership that I’ve needed to ask for telephone support (to find three weeks’-worth of archived emails that had vanished from iCloud). I instantly got a very polite and calm helper, who tried everything, then referred me up to a manager in Ireland. She swiftly went through a dozen very clear steps, then undertook to do a full recovery - images came to mind of vast server farms in California all working overtime to find my lost messages... She also gave me her contact details and said she would call back to check progress - which she duly did. By then the lost emails had started trickling in, and continued to do so for several hours.

I’m worried that iCloud somehow lost the data, but the support from Apple was first rate.

Recently I made a purchase online using Apple Pay, at the end of the transaction I was told that the payment was unsuccessful, knowing that I had sufficient funds and that I had used Apple Pay many times in the past I tried again and again but without success so I tried to pay just with my visa direct but it still would not go through, I then checked my credit cards to discover that the card tied to Apple Pay had authorised FIVE payments without any secondary checks with me, as the payments were shown with my card provider as pending I tried to cancel them only to be told that this couldn’t be done as payment with a credit card was a guaranteed payment, so Apple Pay let me down, my card provider let me down and it was left to me to sort out, eventually I got the store to reimburse me it seemed that there was a problem with their modem going offline but at the end of the day an unsuccessful payment is exactly that and if I was told it had not gone through then I should have been safe in the knowledge that my money was safe when in fact it was far from it thanks to the incompetence of Apple and my card company.

This is how it always goes with this app in my experience. (1) Hope you are having a good day. (2) Are you using a VPN? Delete it (3) Can you reset network settings? Just do it (4) Can you reset the entire phone and setup again even though this takes hours? (5) Can I get a senior support staff member to call you? (6) Call goes to voicemail. (7) Begin again. If you do get past stage 5 successfully, you find the problem isnt actually fixable so it gets ignored; or they tell you its your fault, or they pass it to engineering and it disappears forever. Im sure Apple's support load is enormous and they need something to smooth the flow of calls into their helplines. But why not try developing less buggy software. Its getting worse in my experience not better. The Settings on iOS are becoming so byzantine we will all soon need a PhD to navigate them. Why not focus on making the core more robust rather than adding what seem to me utterly marginal features that introduce bugs and issues? That would be to convince us to buy another better iPhone I assume? I can see now that its really me thats the fool in this game.