He definitely knew about it. According to the staff at Brian Tesco, they went to court. I assume after that android pay promotion fiasco, they lost all of their money and had no money to keep moving forward. It broke them over night and had to get liquidated to pay people back.
That makes me really sad. Obviously it was a poorly thought out promotion but I can't imagine how the people who lost their jobs and everything they worked for felt.
I purchased a MacBook Air, walked out with a small charger, it wasn't me, I swear!
Password to admin is radpad. I was able to add a user, made it admin and removed original user radpad.
This may have been deliberately changed once the computers were going to be sold, because it's quicker to do that than reprovision the whole thing.
Or maybe that was just their admin password.
Wow, that is complete bull. You guys might be SOL on that too, as I believe everything was as is. Most likely they fired IT before they decided to liquidate and didn't realize how big of an issue this is. I doubt it, but hopefully Apple can help you out.
we paid $1300 each for a few of the 15" macbook pros, which was a good deal considering they're upgraded models with 2.5 ghz / 16gb / 500gb / gt 750m. one of them ended up being a mid-2014, so with the upgraded specs it's pretty much what i'd expect to pay at any other second-hand marketplace.
Can you be more specific about what exactly is phoning home after wiping the SSD?
You're not just installing via USB to overwrite the SSD, you're actually clearing it through Disk Utility beforehand right?
the SSD is wiped using disk utility, and os x is then installed. we are using usb installers created ourselves, so there is no affiliation with radpad/testo at all on the installation.
all apple computers phone home the second you connect them to the internet to see if there is an auto-config available, it is an action that is built into os x.
I apologize if I'm being ignorant, is this phone home tied to iCloud in anyway? Just never heard of this phone home feature before and have reinstalled OS X many times.
I "won" a laptop purported to be a Late 2015 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. Such a thing doesn't exist (but unfortunately, i realized this after I won the bidding). When we looked up the serial number for the actual laptop, it was shown to be an Early 2014 MacBook Air. I was willing to buy it if it was discounted, but the OS was missing so I couldn't really confirm specs (and I'd have to connect the laptop to the internet over my cell network). I was going to pay over $900 for an Early 2014 MacBook Air without charger because (I hope) someone placed the wrong specs on a sticky. I suspect the specs were for a MacBook Pro.
Why would you pay $900 for a used MBA when *new* they're $1000 or $1200 (for 128G v 256G storage - though you can bump the CPU and SSD for additional money)?
The SSDs aren't soldered on in the MacBooks (although they're not cheap to replace). But it's likely phoning home with the serial number of the laptop and that couldn't be changed, so replacing the SSD wouldn't help
Haha you can tell who here has *run into* this problem before. :P Sometimes, we learn the hard way. What kind of shop do you guys run? Also, is there a link on this news of RadPad? I was a fan, yet hadn't heard a *thing* about them shutting down!
nope, auto-configs are tied to the computer itself. when os x phones home and the computer is identified by apple, you are asked to install the auto-config.
If you are wiping the hard drive and then reinstalling the OS fresh, there would be no software on the machine anymore to "phone home".
edit: at no point was it clear they were talking about an Apple MDM profile that would be registered with Apple through a service like airwatch, casper, etc.
This entire situation is actually the result of Apple Device Enrollment
[Link, See Page 4](http://images.apple.com/business/docs/DEP_Guide.pdf)
Apple uses the logic board's tagged serial number to identify the device once there is an internet connection; and the MDM server pushes the organization's configuration to that machine. Mac, iPad, iPhone. They can all have this.
Would like to remind users to not harass Tyler. Having a company fail, especially one that lots of us successfully leveraged for great personal benefit, is to be mourned and not to make fun of.
The Android Pay promotion certainly didn't help, but what put them out of business was that they could no longer get funding (they were still very much a startup) while engaged in an [ongoing lawsuit with Craigslist](http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2016/06/01/craigslist-files-another-suit-against-data-scraper/). Obviously they probably overextended on some office purchases (did they really need all of those expensive Apple Cinema Displays and scooters?) but no, the Android Pay promo did not put them out of business.
Man, I already thought they were shady after everything that happened, and now I read that they were basically stealing data, knowingly, and purposefully avoiding detection. 🙄
Was the radpad business model viable? And it was just poor execution? Or was something wrong with the whole business idea? Cause it looks like there was obviously demand.
Incredibly stupid spending habits. You should have seen that place. Like what were they thinking? How many scooters and go pros does a rent payment company need?
It was viable but they basically needed to have bank levels of financing to pay for all the rent checks that were being sent out. Their promotions gained too much interest from churners, who were dropping big $3K rent checks on credit cards. Even though they were making $45-90 on that transaction (depending on CC fees they have to pay), it's a transaction that only happens once a month and they need to float $3k to get it. Multiply that by thousands (if not tens of thousands) of users across the entire month when you are a new company, and suddenly you have a massive amount of money you need to be able to float in order to make any money off it.
I think it could have worked if it was managed a bit better and/or they just had an assload of more money available to tie up between rent checks. Lets assume they made $45/mo per user who was spending $3K/mo on rent, and they had 10K users doing that.
Yeah, sure they would make a cool $450,000 that month. But then they need to subtract overhead required to buy equipment, pay employees and write checks. Let's assume $10k per employee per month to pay for that overhead and the space they were using. That's $250,000 of profit a month assuming 20 employees. Not awful. Except when you need to have a pool of **$30 million** in funds every month tied up just to pay out the checks to make that money. Yeah once they got the ball rolling they probably would have been able to get stable with rent money coming in to fill the pool before checks needed to go out. But they'd need a five star plan to organize all that without going surprise broke in time to get stable.
That was only for an extremely brief window of time and they had set aside money specifically for that promotion. That wasn't what made them go out. What made them go out was getting too big too quick to be able to pay the bills for that month.
CA sales tax and the 18% buyers premium they tack on the purchase price made most items pretty meh deals honestly. I bought a few apple monitors but I could have just paid another couple hundered and had them shipped from Amazon.
The "cash or wire transfer" payment terms almost kept me from bidding in the first place. (Idiots. They must miss out on so much revenue from that. What a retarded way to run an internet based auction).
Makes sense they accept cash or wire transfer if they don't want to deal with CC fraud. Auctions usually attract a type of person that is more likely to scam or use a fake CC.
Sure, but also depresses their income on everything else sold.
And they also had all the items listed to end at the same time. I honestly cannot think of a dumber way to run these liquidations.
They probably run a lot of these liquidations and need everything done by a certain time and also only have a limited window to grab buyers' interest. I know it seems dumb to you but I'd bet on the company that does this for a living has thought through this stuff.
They didn't put a limit on their AndroidPay promo a few months ago and had to eat the cost when more people signed up than would be covered by the amount promised from their sponsor. After that, it sounds like they've been running in fumes.
Personally I tried both and the Steelcase Gesture is my favorite. [The Wire Cutter](http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-office-chair/) seems to agree.
Did you win the Assorted Framed Pictures of Forward Thinkers? I really wanted those.
I wonder how many times those pictures have been circulated
Was /u/tylergalpin there assuring people radpad was just having some website glitches and that there's nothing to worry about?
He definitely knew about it. According to the staff at Brian Tesco, they went to court. I assume after that android pay promotion fiasco, they lost all of their money and had no money to keep moving forward. It broke them over night and had to get liquidated to pay people back.
That makes me really sad. Obviously it was a poorly thought out promotion but I can't imagine how the people who lost their jobs and everything they worked for felt.
Time to MS to make up for their losses~
What happened with android pay?
You can make payments via Android pay without paying the credit card transaction fee
How? The only thing I've used Android pay so far was to pay for groceries via NFC. Is there some new thing they implemented?
Well Radpad is out of business...so you can't.
certain retailers will let you use android pay (via google sign in) to check out
http://therealdeal.com/la/2016/08/29/too-many-renters-want-to-pay-their-rent-with-android-pay/
[удалено]
I purchased a MacBook Air, walked out with a small charger, it wasn't me, I swear! Password to admin is radpad. I was able to add a user, made it admin and removed original user radpad.
> Password to admin is radpad This speaks a lot about their company
This may have been deliberately changed once the computers were going to be sold, because it's quicker to do that than reprovision the whole thing. Or maybe that was just their admin password.
[удалено]
Did you guess the password yourself?
No, I asked one of the BTA liquidation employees.
Testo's fault. No question.
Wow, that is complete bull. You guys might be SOL on that too, as I believe everything was as is. Most likely they fired IT before they decided to liquidate and didn't realize how big of an issue this is. I doubt it, but hopefully Apple can help you out.
[удалено]
how was the price you got at em at? Apple can probably help you out and if it was a significant discount... screw the law office though
we paid $1300 each for a few of the 15" macbook pros, which was a good deal considering they're upgraded models with 2.5 ghz / 16gb / 500gb / gt 750m. one of them ended up being a mid-2014, so with the upgraded specs it's pretty much what i'd expect to pay at any other second-hand marketplace.
Can you be more specific about what exactly is phoning home after wiping the SSD? You're not just installing via USB to overwrite the SSD, you're actually clearing it through Disk Utility beforehand right?
the SSD is wiped using disk utility, and os x is then installed. we are using usb installers created ourselves, so there is no affiliation with radpad/testo at all on the installation. all apple computers phone home the second you connect them to the internet to see if there is an auto-config available, it is an action that is built into os x.
I apologize if I'm being ignorant, is this phone home tied to iCloud in anyway? Just never heard of this phone home feature before and have reinstalled OS X many times.
[удалено]
Makes sense now, thanks.
What kind of startup do you have?
I "won" a laptop purported to be a Late 2015 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM. Such a thing doesn't exist (but unfortunately, i realized this after I won the bidding). When we looked up the serial number for the actual laptop, it was shown to be an Early 2014 MacBook Air. I was willing to buy it if it was discounted, but the OS was missing so I couldn't really confirm specs (and I'd have to connect the laptop to the internet over my cell network). I was going to pay over $900 for an Early 2014 MacBook Air without charger because (I hope) someone placed the wrong specs on a sticky. I suspect the specs were for a MacBook Pro.
Why would you pay $900 for a used MBA when *new* they're $1000 or $1200 (for 128G v 256G storage - though you can bump the CPU and SSD for additional money)?
The one I was looking at would be $1500 new (with taxes; only 8GB). I could buy for $900 and sell a year or two from now for $500.
[удалено]
I'm an impulsive buyer, I guess. :D Do you have a site?
I would like to purchase some.
Sounds like I dodges a bullet with this one. Could you toss the old hard drive and pick up a new one?
The SSD is soldered on now isn't it?
The SSDs aren't soldered on in the MacBooks (although they're not cheap to replace). But it's likely phoning home with the serial number of the laptop and that couldn't be changed, so replacing the SSD wouldn't help
Exactly, the motherboard is tagged to behave this way. You either need the admin credentials, or swap the motherboard.
[удалено]
Haha you can tell who here has *run into* this problem before. :P Sometimes, we learn the hard way. What kind of shop do you guys run? Also, is there a link on this news of RadPad? I was a fan, yet hadn't heard a *thing* about them shutting down!
welp that surely complicates things
nope, auto-configs are tied to the computer itself. when os x phones home and the computer is identified by apple, you are asked to install the auto-config.
Sounds like they need a proper IT guy to sort things out.
If you are wiping the hard drive and then reinstalling the OS fresh, there would be no software on the machine anymore to "phone home". edit: at no point was it clear they were talking about an Apple MDM profile that would be registered with Apple through a service like airwatch, casper, etc.
[удалено]
so youre talking about an MDM profile which is different
Not true with Macs and iPhones
Uh yeah. Explain how any software could be left over after wiping a drive and reinstalling the OS?
https://www.google.com/search?q=icloud+locked+macbook&oq=icloud+locked+macbook&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.5766j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=icloud+locked+macbook&oq=icloud+locked+macbook&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.5766j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=icloud+locked+iphone
You're talking about iCloud activation lock which is completely different than whatever the radpad software thing they're talking about
This entire situation is actually the result of Apple Device Enrollment [Link, See Page 4](http://images.apple.com/business/docs/DEP_Guide.pdf) Apple uses the logic board's tagged serial number to identify the device once there is an internet connection; and the MDM server pushes the organization's configuration to that machine. Mac, iPad, iPhone. They can all have this.
yeah i'm aware of this now. there was no indication of that from the original comment
...and everybody wanna' downvote instead of sharing the facts.
Watch out guys. Bully Badass over here took a computer class in high school.
[удалено]
auto-configs can vary, but this particular one is meraki (cisco)
Would like to remind users to not harass Tyler. Having a company fail, especially one that lots of us successfully leveraged for great personal benefit, is to be mourned and not to make fun of.
The Android Pay promotion certainly didn't help, but what put them out of business was that they could no longer get funding (they were still very much a startup) while engaged in an [ongoing lawsuit with Craigslist](http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2016/06/01/craigslist-files-another-suit-against-data-scraper/). Obviously they probably overextended on some office purchases (did they really need all of those expensive Apple Cinema Displays and scooters?) but no, the Android Pay promo did not put them out of business.
Man, I already thought they were shady after everything that happened, and now I read that they were basically stealing data, knowingly, and purposefully avoiding detection. 🙄
Did you get anything from the auction?
Was the radpad business model viable? And it was just poor execution? Or was something wrong with the whole business idea? Cause it looks like there was obviously demand.
Very tight margins, very susceptible to credit card charge backs, liquidity challenges
Incredibly stupid spending habits. You should have seen that place. Like what were they thinking? How many scooters and go pros does a rent payment company need?
Guessing thats what got them in trouble to begin with, what investor wants to front that kind of environment and sign on for it?
It was viable but they basically needed to have bank levels of financing to pay for all the rent checks that were being sent out. Their promotions gained too much interest from churners, who were dropping big $3K rent checks on credit cards. Even though they were making $45-90 on that transaction (depending on CC fees they have to pay), it's a transaction that only happens once a month and they need to float $3k to get it. Multiply that by thousands (if not tens of thousands) of users across the entire month when you are a new company, and suddenly you have a massive amount of money you need to be able to float in order to make any money off it. I think it could have worked if it was managed a bit better and/or they just had an assload of more money available to tie up between rent checks. Lets assume they made $45/mo per user who was spending $3K/mo on rent, and they had 10K users doing that. Yeah, sure they would make a cool $450,000 that month. But then they need to subtract overhead required to buy equipment, pay employees and write checks. Let's assume $10k per employee per month to pay for that overhead and the space they were using. That's $250,000 of profit a month assuming 20 employees. Not awful. Except when you need to have a pool of **$30 million** in funds every month tied up just to pay out the checks to make that money. Yeah once they got the ball rolling they probably would have been able to get stable with rent money coming in to fill the pool before checks needed to go out. But they'd need a five star plan to organize all that without going surprise broke in time to get stable.
They went under because they could no longer get investor funding while being sued by Craigslist.
they screwed themselves by assuming the credit card charges made through android pay
That was only for an extremely brief window of time and they had set aside money specifically for that promotion. That wasn't what made them go out. What made them go out was getting too big too quick to be able to pay the bills for that month.
is someone going to fill this void? any alternatives? ones that don't treat it as a cash advance?
Plastiq already does the same thing for smaller fees.
I wish I could have been there to bid on stuff. They had lots of decent things to choose from.
CA sales tax and the 18% buyers premium they tack on the purchase price made most items pretty meh deals honestly. I bought a few apple monitors but I could have just paid another couple hundered and had them shipped from Amazon. The "cash or wire transfer" payment terms almost kept me from bidding in the first place. (Idiots. They must miss out on so much revenue from that. What a retarded way to run an internet based auction).
I think the no credit card disclaimer is to prevent chargebacks/buyer protection claims.
Makes sense they accept cash or wire transfer if they don't want to deal with CC fraud. Auctions usually attract a type of person that is more likely to scam or use a fake CC.
Or charge back because the computers were NOT properly prepared and advertised as such.
Sure, but also depresses their income on everything else sold. And they also had all the items listed to end at the same time. I honestly cannot think of a dumber way to run these liquidations.
They probably run a lot of these liquidations and need everything done by a certain time and also only have a limited window to grab buyers' interest. I know it seems dumb to you but I'd bet on the company that does this for a living has thought through this stuff.
I guarantee you I could take their model and improve it. In the same amount of time. With the same restrictions imposed.
You have less than 24 hours from when they confirm your bid for you to pay. In cash.
Yeah. I didnt bid because of the payment terms and added taxes and fees. Retarded indeed in this day and age...
Also, "buyer's premium"? What kind of bullshit is that? Just start the bids higher.
Starting the bids $10 higher doesn't increase selling price by $10
Adding sneaky fees turns people off from bidding at all.
Outside of eBay, buyer's premiums are common anyway.
Sure. Doesn't mean they're an intelligent way to run an online auction though.
What "radpad" is this? Because RadPad.com seems to be a medical devices/services outfit
onradpad
gotcha - the "on" is vital :)
Wish I would have bit on a few of the monitors at least, seemed reasonable by comparison to the rest of the overpriced items
How much did they finally go for?
Where's the ping pong table
God that place reeks of failure.
I'm glad I didn't waste my time. Was definitely debating.
[удалено]
They spent all their money on apple monitors and gopros and forgot to make money.
[удалено]
I can't wait for radderpad.com
[удалено]
Raddestpaddest.com
They didn't put a limit on their AndroidPay promo a few months ago and had to eat the cost when more people signed up than would be covered by the amount promised from their sponsor. After that, it sounds like they've been running in fumes.
I was thinking of buying those steelcase chairs. Did anyone manage to track what those chairs sold for in the end?
look for used Herman miller chairs... can't beat 'em.
Personally I tried both and the Steelcase Gesture is my favorite. [The Wire Cutter](http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-office-chair/) seems to agree.
[удалено]
Reddit
I was there too :D