The Idiocy of Apple

2026-07-31 The Idiocy of Apple

I bought some Apple AirPod “tips” yesterday. That’s their name for the little rubber bits that you stick in your ear. You won’t believe how long it took me to find them, given that they call them “tips” - it’s not the first word that comes to mind, is it. Anyway… I digress.

This evening, the invoice for them arrived in my email - addressed to a friend in America, with her private address as the billing address (which I didn’t know previously, and she definitely didn’t tell me).

After an hour digging a sizeable hole in the digital firmament with Google Gemini as my trusty pickaxe, and explainer of everything, I found out what happened - and it’s going to shock you.

I filled in the Apple Store order form on the web - logged in as myself - and clicked the “Pay with Apple Pay” button. A few moments later my wrist watch vibrated - asking me to confirm the purchase. I tapped the button on the side of the watch a couple of times, and the form on the monitor updated - telling me my order was on it’s way.

Here’s what happened behind the scenes - as far as I can tell - or as far as Gemini thinks…

Apple charged my card. It then checked the billing details, and found none. And this next bit defies any logic that I can come up with. Having found no billing details on my account (because I’ve never filled any in), it looked for anybody in my contacts that I had recently interacted with - and found the friend that I had shared Apple Fitness data with about a year ago - while playing with the app, and wondering how it worked. So the billing mechanism took her name and personal address, and filled my order out with it - all without asking me - or her.

It gets worse. It didn’t just fill out the billing details - it set the details as the default payment details in Apple Wallet for the card used for the transaction - so any further transactions on that card would have her name on the invoices too.

It’s crazy, isn’t it.

Anyway.

Normal programming is resumed now. I’ll go back to flying pretend aeroplanes, writing idiot blog posts, eating terrible pizza, and avoiding buying a Commodore Amiga.

I might have ordered some noise cancelling headphones today. Proper big ones that make you look like a Star Wars extra. I looked at the Apple “Beats” headphones, almost passed out when I saw the price, then looked at their studio headphones, actually did pass out, then finally headed to Amazon and looked at sensibly priced headphones. Why am I doing it? Because even with the largest “tips” on the damn AirPods, the noise cancelling doesn’t work - apparently I have the biggest ear-holes in the known universe.

Oh - one more thing - started watching the movie of “Masters of the Universe” while my other half was out last night. She got home in the middle of the movie, plonked herself down on the sofa, and said “was just talking about this - {insert name of lovely friend} said it’s worth watching - it’s so bad it’s good”. She wasn’t wrong. I gave up half-way through, after Jared Leto’s fake English Skeletor accent wound me up too much. I’ll give it another go at the weekend, I suppose.

Dammit - I really wanted Masters of the Universe to be good. I had the toys. I remember them coming out - and playing with them. I got He-Man and Skeletor for my 9th birthday. I’ve looked them up on the internet - you can’t buy the original versions any more - not without visiting eBay and spending a small fortune on them.