All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Apple Disaster Scenario

TL;DR: Mac power users vet apps carefully and then hand their entire digital life to Apple without a second thought. Apple can close your account on suspicion alone, keep your unspent balance, and never tell you why; a federal judge confirmed all of that in 2023 and threw the case out. An Apple Account is simultaneously an authentication system, cloud-storage account, software license repository, device-activation credential, communications identity, and payment account. A full lockout can therefore affect data, purchases, services, and hardware management at once.This post covers how accounts get closed, what you lose when it happens, why getting back in is so hard, and eleven things to do about it now. All Your Eggs in One Basket, The Disaster Scenario When the conversation turns to abandoning third party apps in favor of using Apple's default stack, I keep waiting for someone to mention the huge red flag that should instantly discourage making that move without taking some intense…