Today is a day about reporting how Silicon Valley continues its downhill slide.

This article deals with Apples Creator Studio, which they promoted to the hilt yesterday. Since I'm a creator, and I use Macs and iPads, I thought to myself, "sure, let's see what's up." After all, Apple promises a free one-month trial (three-months if you've got a new device).

Click App Store. Click Creator Studio. Click View. Click Get. Clickity clack went the keyboard, ding ding went my bells.

You see, doing that ends up with a screen that shows what was clicked, what account is active (and even what payment method if you've got Apple Card sitting at the top of your account). But alas, all I get is a big blank space underneath and a Cancel button on top. Nothing else is happening.

Well, I'm a big techie girl, so I pulled up Console. Hmm. "Persistent store service connection invalidated: Connection init failed at lookup with error 159 — Sandbox restriction."

Further curious, I did an Internet search to see if anyone else is seeing hangs trying to get Creator Studio. Nope.

Okay, so what does Apple Support say? And here's where the downhill course got really steep: you can't get an answer to that question in Apple's current circular support mechanisms. There is no number to call, no chat window to pull up, no email portal to send a question to. It's almost as if Apple doesn't want to talk to you.

Now before you tell me (as Apple's support documents tried to) that there's something wrong with my Apple account payment settings, I went to my Apple account and checked. Everything seems fine there. Indeed, I can buy things on my iPhone, but not on my Mac.

So if Apple's CEO wants to cook up more Services revenue this quarter, he might want to take a closer look at what's happening in that App Store that everyone complains about. It might cost him US$130 from me.

Update: Since HP (see other article today) put me in a Sherlock mode, I decided to unleash Sherlock against Apple for a change (see what I did there?) and find out what happens. Turns out that there is a lock race condition in the App Store, where if something is pending but not completed and you try to start something else, they race and lock each other out and nothing happens.

Once I figured that out, it was just a matter of figuring out what the heck was pending. Turns out that there was an app trying to update, but not being able to because it was "open" because it was loading into the menu bar on restart. So that app was also locking the store. Once I figured out which app was causing the lock/unlock race, it was just a matter of quitting the app, allowing it to complete updating, and lo and behold, now Apple will accept my money again!