Apple Support wasted 2–3 hours of my day over a basic pickup change

just spent 2–3 hours with Apple Support trying to do one ridiculously simple thing: add my friend as the alternate pickup person for an iPhone that was already ready for pickup.

It was endless “just to confirm,” transfers, long waits, and reps clearly not reading the transcript. At one point I told a new rep to scroll up, they said they would, and then immediately asked if I wanted to add the alternate pickup person — which had already been resolved.

Eventually they confirmed my friend could pick it up today, but holy ****, this should have taken 5 minutes.

Is Apple Support really this bad now, or did I just get insanely unlucky?

Posted on Sep 18, 2026 12:49 PM

1 reply

VikingOSX

Level 10 (131,878 points)

Sep 18, 2026 3:44 PM in response to shoz90

There are no Apple employees participating in these public, fellow user-supported communities. I was in and out of the Apple store this morning in 15 minutes and that includes 10 minutes waiting in a very short, pre-order pickup line.

It might seem like it was "ridiculousy simple" to you but today was an extremely busy day for Apple, and perhaps their process isn't set up to be 5-minute simple for the Apple employee that had to make that last minute change for you.

We are not permitted to speculate about internal Apple issues.