I'm not even given the option to sign up for Apple One, when I go to subscription only my Apple TV+ shows up nothing else, do you have to be on IOS14 for it to work?
Never understood the need or desire for multiple Apple IDs. I have had the same, single Apple ID since day one. To this day users login to their iPhone or Mac with a different Apple ID than the one they used to purchase music or videos and wonder why that content is not showing up. The bitching is constant.
Read the article. I started with an Apple ID for iTunes purchases. Apple then offered iCloud email addresses and iCloud storage plans that ended up creating a different Apple ID. Problem is that all my purchases are under the iTunes ID and my primary email (and backups) are under the iCloud account.
I'd be happy to merge my iTunes account into my iCloud account, but Apple won't let you do that, even though both are MY accounts.
This, precisely. I'm in the same boat and would love to merge my Apple ID's. There's really no good reason for Apple not to allow this.
This fora demonstrates that Apple’s plan is not intuitive enough, the offers are confusing and are un-Apple. I for one won’t sign up till it’s as simple as a one click upgrade for all my existing Apple services and storage. Sharing files with anyone and any platform needs to be a thing too.
I tend to be the "tech support" person for Apple stuff amongst my friends and relatives and an ongoing frustration is the confusion they get into with the Apple IDs.
More than a few of them now have iPhones, and typically from carriers rather than the Apple Store. If they don't have an existing AppleID, the store typically creates a "branded" one for them, such as "[email protected]".
That's OK until Jane decides that she wants to switch to, say, T-Mobile at which point her verizon.net email account disappears. But You can't change an AppleID, so she is stuck with AppleID [email protected] for FaceTime and Messages, but email is [email protected]. Friends get really weirded out by this.
In some instances you can keep the old email even though you've switched carriers, but in other cases you can't. The case I have in mind is where my friend had Verizon land-line and an iPhone (with AppleID [email protected]). He moved house and transferred the landline, but VZ had no cell coverage so he switched to AT&T. Still no problem. But a year or so later Verizon sold their landline business in that region to Frontier, and there was NO possibility to retain the verizon.net email.
tl;dr - when setting up a friend who's new to iPhone, MAKE SURE that they create an icloud.com AppleID AND the [free] email address that matches it. It doesn't have to be their primary, they don't have to switch, but they should ALWAYS have the iCloud ID available.
The AppleID thing has been a mess since Apple tried to get rid of the .mac email. I switched to gmail for iTunes and have fought to keep my .mac AND the .me. Finally got all devices iTunes and other accounts under gmail. I signed up for AppleOne and everything went smooth. Made the .me account part of the Family. I’m just curious what will happen to my Apple Music account I just renewed at the 1st of October. I wish they had given more lead time with better instructions. But Right now I’m rather pleased.
Email for .mac never went away. It's still there and working fine for me as it has done since it started.
What Apple did - poorly I agree - is add ".me" and then later ".icloud" to the mix. But they're all valid email addresses and mail comes to a single mailbox. For most purposes you can treat them as aliases.
The "poorly" part (one of them, at least) was a decade or more ago when you had to upgrade [free] your .mac account for some bizarre reason. If you did, you retained .mac and also had .me (I think I have it right). If you didn't "upgrade" then your .mac account went into limbo, and is still there. You can't recover it, but nor can you create a iCloud account using that account name, because the .mac still blocks the creation.
A rare issue, I guess, but indicative of the poor execution and poorer follow-up from Apple on this. They really need to spend some time figuring out how to resolve these myriad issues. Band-Aids aren't enough.
Never understood the need or desire for multiple Apple IDs. I have had the same, single Apple ID since day one. To this day users login to their iPhone or Mac with a different Apple ID than the one they used to purchase music or videos and wonder why that content is not showing up. The bitching is constant.
Never mind my earlier comment. I misunderstood your usage of the Apple ID. I get why you only had one. My issue was that I used the Yahoo! email for my Apps and Music purchases and the iCloud ID for everything else.
Never understood the need or desire for multiple Apple IDs. I have had the same, single Apple ID since day one. To this day users login to their iPhone or Mac with a different Apple ID than the one they used to purchase music or videos and wonder why that content is not showing up. The bitching is constant.
I have had a US Apple ID since the very beginning and all my emails, movies and TV shows are there. In order to be able to use Apple Pay with my French credit card, I had to use a French Apple ID for iCloud. So I now use the French Apple ID for iCloud with 2TB storage, and the US Apple ID for everything else: movies, music, apps etc., and 50GB for my emails.
Ah .... this is a DEATH SENTENCE for me ever being able to subscribe to Apple One. My iCloud Storage is on a different Apple ID than my Apple TV+, iTunes Match, and Apple Music. I have more than 160 GB sitting in my iCloud drive that I cannot afford to lose any of it.
I've been locked in an ongoing battle with Apple concerning the multiple Apple ID issue and they refuse to budge an inch. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple Support trying to fix this and they absolutely refuse to do anything. I actually got one "senior" support person who came up with a harebrained scheme to try to make one of my Apple IDs a family member of my other Apple ID. This turned out to a total clusterf*** and I ended up having to restore my account and my family members had to repurchase all of the shared family purchases that they had installed on their devices. Yes, Apple Support's f-up cost me cold hard cash and they don't give a flying f*** about it.
A side effect of having multiple Apple Ids is that you can get caught entering the wrong password in response to a password request because it's not always obvious which account is asking for the password. After too many inadvertent failed attempts - your account is locked. My solution, no matter how obviously stupid, is to use the same password for all of your Apple Ids unless you like living life on the phone with Apple Support. Does this make sense? Hell no, but Apple has inserted a flaming hot poker into an uncomfortable place on your body and anything you can do to reduce the suffering is worth the effort.
Sorry to peel the scab off a long standing dispute that I have with Apple, but their unwillingness to fix a problem that THEY created as a consequence of me having had a MobileMe subscription is something that I will never forgive them for. They didn't have to make this a problem. They could have fixed it years ago, but they didn't. They left me with a half-baked solution and in the case of Apple One, the inability to benefit from a cost-saving opportunity due to the mess that they created and perpetuate.
There are so many things I like about Apple, and I'm a open supporter of Apple, but this is the one thing that I would bring up if I could sit down with Tim Cook for 5 minutes. Just fix this Apple, you own this problem, you own the code, you own the system, you created this skeleton in the closet, and you owe it to your customers to do the right thing for them and fix this once and for all. This is totally inexcusable and senseless bullshit of Apple's own making and to let it fester for years on end is beyond logic and reason.
I guess this extinguishes any enthusiasm I previously had about Apple One.
Fair enough, but I’m curious. Why don’t you copy the 160GB to a portable hard drive and then copy it back to the account with your AppleTV+ etc …?
And if you can’t afford to lose it then why are you storing it in the cloud?
Uploading 160 GB of data to a new iCloud Drive would literally take weeks on the slow connection I have. This data has slowly accumulated over several years. It’s something Apple could fix by editing account information on their end without having to move data over the Internet at all. When Apple changed over to Photos being stored in the cloud it took about two weeks for a much smaller collection at the time to get pushed up to the cloud, during which time my internet connectivity slowed to a crawl and the machine became unresponsive. Due to the latency and retries I ended up with duplicates which in turn got pushed back down to my machines. My Apple Music library is still littered with duplicates from the sync process, but I believe it’s due to other issues, like album title names not matching exactly. You would assume that every unique item or collection of items that Apple manages in any sort of data store would have a globally unique, i.e., GUID, identifier and not be thrown into turmoil by issues with text strings, like the word “and” being represented as “+” in a song title. Again, you’d be wrong.
If I had a fiber connection or even fast internet service I would take the plunge and move everything myself. Unfortunately, I happen to live in an area where about 70% of the population do not even have telephones, or electricity for that matter. Pushing big data around is very time consuming. It’s gotten better with cable access versus a 4G hotspot being my only access point.
I do have local backups. I also have several, more than 10, devices that are synced to the same iCloud data. The permutations of possible sync errors that could occur if I was to suddenly delete all of this data from all of these attached devices and point them to a new iCloud drive that would take a couple of weeks to upload is mind boggling. Granted, iCloud Drive has gotten much better over the last couple of years, and not every device I own actually downloads every bit of content (only downloads on demand), I see a huge opportunity for so many things to go so wrong.
The least disruptive thing for me may be to have two iCloud Drives, keep the one that’s stuck on one Apple ID by itself and buy an Apple One plan that comes with another iCloud Drive attached to a different Apple ID. If I can do this it may be an acceptable workaround. Can you have multiple iCloud drives?
I tend to be the "tech support" person for Apple stuff amongst my friends and relatives and an ongoing frustration is the confusion they get into with the Apple IDs.
More than a few of them now have iPhones, and typically from carriers rather than the Apple Store. If they don't have an existing AppleID, the store typically creates a "branded" one for them, such as "[email protected]".
That's OK until Jane decides that she wants to switch to, say, T-Mobile at which point her verizon.net email account disappears. But You can't change an AppleID, so she is stuck with AppleID [email protected] for FaceTime and Messages, but email is [email protected]. Friends get really weirded out by this.
In some instances you can keep the old email even though you've switched carriers, but in other cases you can't. The case I have in mind is where my friend had Verizon land-line and an iPhone (with AppleID [email protected]). He moved house and transferred the landline, but VZ had no cell coverage so he switched to AT&T. Still no problem. But a year or so later Verizon sold their landline business in that region to Frontier, and there was NO possibility to retain the verizon.net email.
tl;dr - when setting up a friend who's new to iPhone, MAKE SURE that they create an icloud.com AppleID AND the [free] email address that matches it. It doesn't have to be their primary, they don't have to switch, but they should ALWAYS have the iCloud ID available.
I had an Apple ID that was associated with an email address from an ISP provided account, windstream.net in fact. I was able to change it to a different email account, a gmail.com one in fact. What I could not do was to change it to an iCloud or MobileMe email address or any of the 5 aliases that you are able to use with an iCloud account.
So yes you can change your Apple ID but you can never consolidate multiple Apple IDs into a single Apple ID. This is like “crossing the streams” and based on Apple’s refusal to do this it must trigger some sort of global mass extinction event of humankind, crack the core of the planet, or zero out Tim Cook’s entire equity stake in Apple. We probably should not even speak of it, if you know what I mean.
Ah .... this is a DEATH SENTENCE for me ever being able to subscribe to Apple One. My iCloud Storage is on a different Apple ID than my Apple TV+, iTunes Match, and Apple Music. I have more than 160 GB sitting in my iCloud drive that I cannot afford to lose any of it.
I've been locked in an ongoing battle with Apple concerning the multiple Apple ID issue and they refuse to budge an inch. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple Support trying to fix this and they absolutely refuse to do anything. I actually got one "senior" support person who came up with a harebrained scheme to try to make one of my Apple IDs a family member of my other Apple ID. This turned out to a total clusterf*** and I ended up having to restore my account and my family members had to repurchase all of the shared family purchases that they had installed on their devices. Yes, Apple Support's f-up cost me cold hard cash and they don't give a flying f*** about it.
A side effect of having multiple Apple Ids is that you can get caught entering the wrong password in response to a password request because it's not always obvious which account is asking for the password. After too many inadvertent failed attempts - your account is locked. My solution, no matter how obviously stupid, is to use the same password for all of your Apple Ids unless you like living life on the phone with Apple Support. Does this make sense? Hell no, but Apple has inserted a flaming hot poker into an uncomfortable place on your body and anything you can do to reduce the suffering is worth the effort.
Sorry to peel the scab off a long standing dispute that I have with Apple, but their unwillingness to fix a problem that THEY created as a consequence of me having had a MobileMe subscription is something that I will never forgive them for. They didn't have to make this a problem. They could have fixed it years ago, but they didn't. They left me with a half-baked solution and in the case of Apple One, the inability to benefit from a cost-saving opportunity due to the mess that they created and perpetuate.
There are so many things I like about Apple, and I'm a open supporter of Apple, but this is the one thing that I would bring up if I could sit down with Tim Cook for 5 minutes. Just fix this Apple, you own this problem, you own the code, you own the system, you created this skeleton in the closet, and you owe it to your customers to do the right thing for them and fix this once and for all. This is totally inexcusable and senseless bullshit of Apple's own making and to let it fester for years on end is beyond logic and reason.
I guess this extinguishes any enthusiasm I previously had about Apple One.
Fair enough, but I’m curious. Why don’t you copy the 160GB to a portable hard drive and then copy it back to the account with your AppleTV+ etc …?
And if you can’t afford to lose it then why are you storing it in the cloud?
Uploading 160 GB of data to a new iCloud Drive would literally take weeks on the slow connection I have. This data has slowly accumulated over several years. It’s something Apple could fix by editing account information on their end without having to move data over the Internet at all. When Apple changed over to Photos being stored in the cloud it took about two weeks for a much smaller collection at the time to get pushed up to the cloud, during which time my internet connectivity slowed to a crawl and the machine became unresponsive. Due to the latency and retries I ended up with duplicates which in turn got pushed back down to my machines. My Apple Music library is still littered with duplicates from the sync process, but I believe it’s due to other issues, like album title names not matching exactly. You would assume that every unique item or collection of items that Apple manages in any sort of data store would have a globally unique, i.e., GUID, identifier and not be thrown into turmoil by issues with text strings, like the word “and” being represented as “+” in a song title. Again, you’d be wrong.
If I had a fiber connection or even fast internet service I would take the plunge and move everything myself. Unfortunately, I happen to live in an area where about 70% of the population do not even have telephones, or electricity for that matter. Pushing big data around is very time consuming. It’s gotten better with cable access versus a 4G hotspot being my only access point.
I do have local backups. I also have several, more than 10, devices that are synced to the same iCloud data. The permutations of possible sync errors that could occur if I was to suddenly delete all of this data from all of these attached devices and point them to a new iCloud drive that would take a couple of weeks to upload is mind boggling. Granted, iCloud Drive has gotten much better over the last couple of years, and not every device I own actually downloads every bit of content (only downloads on demand), I see a huge opportunity for so many things to go so wrong.
The least disruptive thing for me may be to have two iCloud Drives, keep the one that’s stuck on one Apple ID by itself and buy an Apple One plan that comes with another iCloud Drive attached to a different Apple ID. If I can do this it may be an acceptable workaround. Can you have multiple iCloud drives?
To be honest, I wouldn’t do anything to make your setup any more complicated than it already is. The problem is the more this data set grows then the more painful it’s going to be to fix the problem. You really need to swallow the hit and just do it. Unless you can leave it until you can sort out a better connection. Without a fast internet service I wouldn’t sign up to any cloud storage or backup
I suspect the problem Apple has with changing things on their end is that if they start hacking away at this sort of thing without a proper investigation and plan then they have no idea of the side effects, and if they do it for you then they’ll have to do it for about half a million other people.
I’ve been bitten by two different issues — maybe three.
I have two different Apple ID accounts. My iCloud account goes back even before the “mobile me” days when Apple first had developer accounts under an AOL system. When iTunes first came out you couldn’t use that account so I used one under my personal domain. Later when Apple moved things along from me.com to Mac.com to iCloud.com my “Apple” account followed. I used the iCloud account because you received more services from Apple than if you had a non-Apple account (mail, notes). But I had a lot of content bought under my personal domain and things worked fine.
- Logged into my Apple devices with my iCloud account. This account also has 2TB of shared iCloud storage. - Logged into purchases with my personal domain account. Family sharing setup with this account and sharing these purchases and subscriptions. I’m subscribed to all previous Apple services. Apple Music family (renews mid-November), Apple news (renews early November), Apple TV + (renews in February), and Apple Arcade (year subscription expires in January).
I used my personal domain and signed up for the trial of Apple One yesterday. I saw that on my subscriptions things looked ok, showed the other subscriptions being replaced at the end of November with Apple One when it switched to a pay model.
Issue #1. Sometime today my Apple Music family was automatically cancelled because I’m told it was treated as an upgrade to Apple One. I was supposedly given a credit for a half month. The problem is that while Apple’s system show me active with Apple One, Apple Music says I need to subscribe. I spent hours today on the phone with Apple and nothing fixed it. They escalated the issue to the engineering department.
Issue #2. In order to try and fix #1 Apple support had me log out of my personal domain under family sharing. Then we tried switching back to the same account. Apple blocks you from doing that for 90-days. Apple support said they frequently clear that flag for people. No matter what they tried they could not get it to work. The system said I need to wait 89 days to reshare the content with my family. So that has been escalated to engineering as well.
The third issue was a charge (or was it a credit) when I signed up for the trial of Apple One. Ideally it should be no charge because it is a trial but a $16.56 transaction occurred to my Apple Card. Trying to figure that out after they above items are fixed.
Not fun. I wonder how many others will have similar issues moving to Apple One.
The need for 2 Apple ID’s was very obvious. Before family sharing it was the only way to share app acquisitions between family members. My wife and I shared the same iTunes/App Store account to purchase music and apps, while having separate iCloud (me.com) accounts for personal files and book purchases and reading history.
With family sharing this became obsolete, but we’re (at least I am) stuck with a separate iTunes/Apple Music/Music Library account.
Sharing app/music acquisitions wasn't allowed back then, obviously. So your situation is sorta self-inflicted.
The need for 2 Apple ID’s was very obvious. Before family sharing it was the only way to share app acquisitions between family members. My wife and I shared the same iTunes/App Store account to purchase music and apps, while having separate iCloud (me.com) accounts for personal files and book purchases and reading history.
With family sharing this became obsolete, but we’re (at least I am) stuck with a separate iTunes/Apple Music/Music Library account.
Sharing app/music acquisitions wasn't allowed back then, obviously. So your situation is sorta self-inflicted.
Never understood the need or desire for multiple Apple IDs. I have had the same, single Apple ID since day one. To this day users login to their iPhone or Mac with a different Apple ID than the one they used to purchase music or videos and wonder why that content is not showing up. The bitching is constant.
For us, it's been a way to manage multiple identities, as well to create a shared identity (just an email address that we share) -- but I set all this up back in the .Mac era, so all the associated IDs began then and have migrated forward. Basically, there's my personal life which includes my work (I'm a college professor) [iMac, iPad Pro, iPhone]; our financial life [MacBook Pro]; my wife's personal life (her work is Windows-based, now handled through Microsoft Remote Desktop) [MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone]. So four .Mac addresses (three Apple IDs and the shared email address). Each of these three constellations of devices has its own set of bookmarks, passwords, and so on, all tied to that Apple ID. With Family Sharing, most software and apps are shared, also our Apple subscriptions (Music, News+, and tv+).
So Apple One makes sense for us, but I won't take the plunge until I'm confident it won't bork my whole setup, which works well. So this article is very helpful. The secret for me is that the iCloud and family sharing is managed from my personal Apple ID, while everything that used to be part of iTunes is managed through our financial Apple ID (originally my personal ID).
For what it's worth, separating out our family financial life and moving it all to a dedicated computer, removing all of it from the device constellation where I work and play, really changed my life -- when it was all together it was harder to keep it separate, to set it aside and focus on what I was doing.
Ah .... this is a DEATH SENTENCE for me ever being able to subscribe to Apple One. My iCloud Storage is on a different Apple ID than my Apple TV+, iTunes Match, and Apple Music. I have more than 160 GB sitting in my iCloud drive that I cannot afford to lose any of it.
I've been locked in an ongoing battle with Apple concerning the multiple Apple ID issue and they refuse to budge an inch. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple Support trying to fix this and they absolutely refuse to do anything. I actually got one "senior" support person who came up with a harebrained scheme to try to make one of my Apple IDs a family member of my other Apple ID. This turned out to a total clusterf*** and I ended up having to restore my account and my family members had to repurchase all of the shared family purchases that they had installed on their devices. Yes, Apple Support's f-up cost me cold hard cash and they don't give a flying f*** about it.
A side effect of having multiple Apple Ids is that you can get caught entering the wrong password in response to a password request because it's not always obvious which account is asking for the password. After too many inadvertent failed attempts - your account is locked. My solution, no matter how obviously stupid, is to use the same password for all of your Apple Ids unless you like living life on the phone with Apple Support. Does this make sense? Hell no, but Apple has inserted a flaming hot poker into an uncomfortable place on your body and anything you can do to reduce the suffering is worth the effort.
Sorry to peel the scab off a long standing dispute that I have with Apple, but their unwillingness to fix a problem that THEY created as a consequence of me having had a MobileMe subscription is something that I will never forgive them for. They didn't have to make this a problem. They could have fixed it years ago, but they didn't. They left me with a half-baked solution and in the case of Apple One, the inability to benefit from a cost-saving opportunity due to the mess that they created and perpetuate.
There are so many things I like about Apple, and I'm a open supporter of Apple, but this is the one thing that I would bring up if I could sit down with Tim Cook for 5 minutes. Just fix this Apple, you own this problem, you own the code, you own the system, you created this skeleton in the closet, and you owe it to your customers to do the right thing for them and fix this once and for all. This is totally inexcusable and senseless bullshit of Apple's own making and to let it fester for years on end is beyond logic and reason.
I guess this extinguishes any enthusiasm I previously had about Apple One.
Fair enough, but I’m curious. Why don’t you copy the 160GB to a portable hard drive and then copy it back to the account with your AppleTV+ etc …?
And if you can’t afford to lose it then why are you storing it in the cloud?
Uploading 160 GB of data to a new iCloud Drive would literally take weeks on the slow connection I have. This data has slowly accumulated over several years. It’s something Apple could fix by editing account information on their end without having to move data over the Internet at all. When Apple changed over to Photos being stored in the cloud it took about two weeks for a much smaller collection at the time to get pushed up to the cloud, during which time my internet connectivity slowed to a crawl and the machine became unresponsive. Due to the latency and retries I ended up with duplicates which in turn got pushed back down to my machines. My Apple Music library is still littered with duplicates from the sync process, but I believe it’s due to other issues, like album title names not matching exactly. You would assume that every unique item or collection of items that Apple manages in any sort of data store would have a globally unique, i.e., GUID, identifier and not be thrown into turmoil by issues with text strings, like the word “and” being represented as “+” in a song title. Again, you’d be wrong.
If I had a fiber connection or even fast internet service I would take the plunge and move everything myself. Unfortunately, I happen to live in an area where about 70% of the population do not even have telephones, or electricity for that matter. Pushing big data around is very time consuming. It’s gotten better with cable access versus a 4G hotspot being my only access point.
I do have local backups. I also have several, more than 10, devices that are synced to the same iCloud data. The permutations of possible sync errors that could occur if I was to suddenly delete all of this data from all of these attached devices and point them to a new iCloud drive that would take a couple of weeks to upload is mind boggling. Granted, iCloud Drive has gotten much better over the last couple of years, and not every device I own actually downloads every bit of content (only downloads on demand), I see a huge opportunity for so many things to go so wrong.
The least disruptive thing for me may be to have two iCloud Drives, keep the one that’s stuck on one Apple ID by itself and buy an Apple One plan that comes with another iCloud Drive attached to a different Apple ID. If I can do this it may be an acceptable workaround. Can you have multiple iCloud drives?
To be honest, I wouldn’t do anything to make your setup any more complicated than it already is. The problem is the more this data set grows then the more painful it’s going to be to fix the problem. You really need to swallow the hit and just do it. Unless you can leave it until you can sort out a better connection. Without a fast internet service I wouldn’t sign up to any cloud storage or backup
I suspect the problem Apple has with changing things on their end is that if they start hacking away at this sort of thing without a proper investigation and plan then they have no idea of the side effects, and if they do it for you then they’ll have to do it for about half a million other people.
I completely understand and appreciate your points regarding using cloud storage.
In fact, if you read Apple's service level agreement for iCloud (and pretty much all other Apple services) you'd soon discover that iCloud storage and iCloud Drive are not something that anyone who really values their data would ever consider using other than for convenience purposes. Yes, Apple makes no guarantees about anything, and yes, you should take them at their word - as spelled out in their service level agreements. If you need transaction level integrity on your data, i.e., passing the ACID test, you should not be using iCloud or likely any other inexpensive or convenience oriented cloud storage service. The fact that Apple (and all the others) offer no availability guarantees (e.g., four nines, etc.) or quality of service agreements around their services, and pay no penalties for inflicted outages and downtime, tells you all you really need to know about where Apple will be should you suffer a loss. Actually, if you read the SLA you'll see it clearly spelled out, i.e., you're up crapper creek without a paddle and Apple bears zero responsibility at all. It's all there in the SLA, in black & white and often in all-caps.
That said, my issues are probably more about convenience and minimizing the time investment needed to sync a big hunk of data across several devices. Since my upload speed for cloud based storage (or more accurately cloud based caching) is so pathetic I really need to double down on building out my own local storage cloud, possibly with an off-premise cloud based second layer of backup to something like iDrive, and minimize my use of iCloud.
While this is still an issue, it’s not quite the issue it used to be...
I have the same type of setup others describe - an iCloud services AppleID, and an iTunes/App Store AppleID, and like others, this was so my email could be private, and apps and music could be shared with my family before Family Sharing existed.
For the first few years of family sharing, there wasn’t much of a change, but at some point I believe I was allowed to add my iTunes ID to my family sharing group. At that point all the apps and subscriptions assigned to that account were shared to the other Apple IDs in the family sharing group.
Now it really doesn’t make much of a difference who does what, it seems like everything is being shared like it should. I think the only thing that could prevent you from doing this is if somehow your iTunes ID was added to a different family sharing group somehow.
Ah .... this is a DEATH SENTENCE for me ever being able to subscribe to Apple One. My iCloud Storage is on a different Apple ID than my Apple TV+, iTunes Match, and Apple Music. I have more than 160 GB sitting in my iCloud drive that I cannot afford to lose any of it.
I've been locked in an ongoing battle with Apple concerning the multiple Apple ID issue and they refuse to budge an inch. I've spent hours on the phone with Apple Support trying to fix this and they absolutely refuse to do anything. I actually got one "senior" support person who came up with a harebrained scheme to try to make one of my Apple IDs a family member of my other Apple ID. This turned out to a total clusterf*** and I ended up having to restore my account and my family members had to repurchase all of the shared family purchases that they had installed on their devices. Yes, Apple Support's f-up cost me cold hard cash and they don't give a flying f*** about it.
A side effect of having multiple Apple Ids is that you can get caught entering the wrong password in response to a password request because it's not always obvious which account is asking for the password. After too many inadvertent failed attempts - your account is locked. My solution, no matter how obviously stupid, is to use the same password for all of your Apple Ids unless you like living life on the phone with Apple Support. Does this make sense? Hell no, but Apple has inserted a flaming hot poker into an uncomfortable place on your body and anything you can do to reduce the suffering is worth the effort.
Sorry to peel the scab off a long standing dispute that I have with Apple, but their unwillingness to fix a problem that THEY created as a consequence of me having had a MobileMe subscription is something that I will never forgive them for. They didn't have to make this a problem. They could have fixed it years ago, but they didn't. They left me with a half-baked solution and in the case of Apple One, the inability to benefit from a cost-saving opportunity due to the mess that they created and perpetuate.
There are so many things I like about Apple, and I'm a open supporter of Apple, but this is the one thing that I would bring up if I could sit down with Tim Cook for 5 minutes. Just fix this Apple, you own this problem, you own the code, you own the system, you created this skeleton in the closet, and you owe it to your customers to do the right thing for them and fix this once and for all. This is totally inexcusable and senseless bullshit of Apple's own making and to let it fester for years on end is beyond logic and reason.
I guess this extinguishes any enthusiasm I previously had about Apple One.
Fair enough, but I’m curious. Why don’t you copy the 160GB to a portable hard drive and then copy it back to the account with your AppleTV+ etc …?
And if you can’t afford to lose it then why are you storing it in the cloud?
Uploading 160 GB of data to a new iCloud Drive would literally take weeks on the slow connection I have. This data has slowly accumulated over several years. It’s something Apple could fix by editing account information on their end without having to move data over the Internet at all. When Apple changed over to Photos being stored in the cloud it took about two weeks for a much smaller collection at the time to get pushed up to the cloud, during which time my internet connectivity slowed to a crawl and the machine became unresponsive. Due to the latency and retries I ended up with duplicates which in turn got pushed back down to my machines. My Apple Music library is still littered with duplicates from the sync process, but I believe it’s due to other issues, like album title names not matching exactly. You would assume that every unique item or collection of items that Apple manages in any sort of data store would have a globally unique, i.e., GUID, identifier and not be thrown into turmoil by issues with text strings, like the word “and” being represented as “+” in a song title. Again, you’d be wrong.
If I had a fiber connection or even fast internet service I would take the plunge and move everything myself. Unfortunately, I happen to live in an area where about 70% of the population do not even have telephones, or electricity for that matter. Pushing big data around is very time consuming. It’s gotten better with cable access versus a 4G hotspot being my only access point.
I do have local backups. I also have several, more than 10, devices that are synced to the same iCloud data. The permutations of possible sync errors that could occur if I was to suddenly delete all of this data from all of these attached devices and point them to a new iCloud drive that would take a couple of weeks to upload is mind boggling. Granted, iCloud Drive has gotten much better over the last couple of years, and not every device I own actually downloads every bit of content (only downloads on demand), I see a huge opportunity for so many things to go so wrong.
The least disruptive thing for me may be to have two iCloud Drives, keep the one that’s stuck on one Apple ID by itself and buy an Apple One plan that comes with another iCloud Drive attached to a different Apple ID. If I can do this it may be an acceptable workaround. Can you have multiple iCloud drives?
To be honest, I wouldn’t do anything to make your setup any more complicated than it already is. The problem is the more this data set grows then the more painful it’s going to be to fix the problem. You really need to swallow the hit and just do it. Unless you can leave it until you can sort out a better connection. Without a fast internet service I wouldn’t sign up to any cloud storage or backup
I suspect the problem Apple has with changing things on their end is that if they start hacking away at this sort of thing without a proper investigation and plan then they have no idea of the side effects, and if they do it for you then they’ll have to do it for about half a million other people.
I completely understand and appreciate your points regarding using cloud storage.
In fact, if you read Apple's service level agreement for iCloud (and pretty much all other Apple services) you'd soon discover that iCloud storage and iCloud Drive are not something that anyone who really values their data would ever consider using other than for convenience purposes. Yes, Apple makes no guarantees about anything, and yes, you should take them at their word - as spelled out in their service level agreements. If you need transaction level integrity on your data, i.e., passing the ACID test, you should not be using iCloud or likely any other inexpensive or convenience oriented cloud storage service. The fact that Apple (and all the others) offer no availability guarantees (e.g., four nines, etc.) or quality of service agreements around their services, and pay no penalties for inflicted outages and downtime, tells you all you really need to know about where Apple will be should you suffer a loss. Actually, if you read the SLA you'll see it clearly spelled out, i.e., you're up crapper creek without a paddle and Apple bears zero responsibility at all. It's all there in the SLA, in black & white and often in all-caps.
That said, my issues are probably more about convenience and minimizing the time investment needed to sync a big hunk of data across several devices. Since my upload speed for cloud based storage (or more accurately cloud based caching) is so pathetic I really need to double down on building out my own local storage cloud, possibly with an off-premise cloud based second layer of backup to something like iDrive, and minimize my use of iCloud.
Yes the lack of an SLA in these services is notorious. I don’t see iCloud as anything other than a syncing service for my Apple kit. I use a separate backup service to make sure I don’t lose anything. Oh, and I check the backups once a month because the backup service also doesn’t make any guarantees.
Never understood the need or desire for multiple Apple IDs. I have had the same, single Apple ID since day one. To this day users login to their iPhone or Mac with a different Apple ID than the one they used to purchase music or videos and wonder why that content is not showing up. The bitching is constant.
Some of us had .Mac service from way back and used that as our initial iTunes account. Then along came MobileMe and another account- later renamed iCloud.
A lot of us did not intend to end up with multiple accounts- it just worked out that way. Those of us who kept using our .Mac email still have the service and address. If you stopped using it for email it no longer functions for email, but remains in use as an Apple ID.
Some of this could have been avoided by Apple. I am sure the staff at AWS, who Apple uses for many things, could figure it out for them.
While this is still an issue, it’s not quite the issue it used to be...
I have the same type of setup others describe - an iCloud services AppleID, and an iTunes/App Store AppleID, and like others, this was so my email could be private, and apps and music could be shared with my family before Family Sharing existed.
For the first few years of family sharing, there wasn’t much of a change, but at some point I believe I was allowed to add my iTunes ID to my family sharing group. At that point all the apps and subscriptions assigned to that account were shared to the other Apple IDs in the family sharing group.
Now it really doesn’t make much of a difference who does what, it seems like everything is being shared like it should. I think the only thing that could prevent you from doing this is if somehow your iTunes ID was added to a different family sharing group somehow.
Comments
I'm in the same boat and would love to merge my Apple ID's. There's really no good reason for Apple not to allow this.
More than a few of them now have iPhones, and typically from carriers rather than the Apple Store. If they don't have an existing AppleID, the store typically creates a "branded" one for them, such as "[email protected]".
That's OK until Jane decides that she wants to switch to, say, T-Mobile at which point her verizon.net email account disappears. But You can't change an AppleID, so she is stuck with AppleID [email protected] for FaceTime and Messages, but email is [email protected]. Friends get really weirded out by this.
In some instances you can keep the old email even though you've switched carriers, but in other cases you can't. The case I have in mind is where my friend had Verizon land-line and an iPhone (with AppleID [email protected]). He moved house and transferred the landline, but VZ had no cell coverage so he switched to AT&T. Still no problem. But a year or so later Verizon sold their landline business in that region to Frontier, and there was NO possibility to retain the verizon.net email.
tl;dr - when setting up a friend who's new to iPhone, MAKE SURE that they create an icloud.com AppleID AND the [free] email address that matches it. It doesn't have to be their primary, they don't have to switch, but they should ALWAYS have the iCloud ID available.
Email for .mac never went away. It's still there and working fine for me as it has done since it started.
What Apple did - poorly I agree - is add ".me" and then later ".icloud" to the mix. But they're all valid email addresses and mail comes to a single mailbox. For most purposes you can treat them as aliases.
The "poorly" part (one of them, at least) was a decade or more ago when you had to upgrade [free] your .mac account for some bizarre reason. If you did, you retained .mac and also had .me (I think I have it right). If you didn't "upgrade" then your .mac account went into limbo, and is still there. You can't recover it, but nor can you create a iCloud account using that account name, because the .mac still blocks the creation.
A rare issue, I guess, but indicative of the poor execution and poorer follow-up from Apple on this. They really need to spend some time figuring out how to resolve these myriad issues. Band-Aids aren't enough.
In order to be able to use Apple Pay with my French credit card, I had to use a French Apple ID for iCloud.
So I now use the French Apple ID for iCloud with 2TB storage, and the US Apple ID for everything else: movies, music, apps etc., and 50GB for my emails.
If I had a fiber connection or even fast internet service I would take the plunge and move everything myself. Unfortunately, I happen to live in an area where about 70% of the population do not even have telephones, or electricity for that matter. Pushing big data around is very time consuming. It’s gotten better with cable access versus a 4G hotspot being my only access point.
I do have local backups. I also have several, more than 10, devices that are synced to the same iCloud data. The permutations of possible sync errors that could occur if I was to suddenly delete all of this data from all of these attached devices and point them to a new iCloud drive that would take a couple of weeks to upload is mind boggling. Granted, iCloud Drive has gotten much better over the last couple of years, and not every device I own actually downloads every bit of content (only downloads on demand), I see a huge opportunity for so many things to go so wrong.
The least disruptive thing for me may be to have two iCloud Drives, keep the one that’s stuck on one Apple ID by itself and buy an Apple One plan that comes with another iCloud Drive attached to a different Apple ID. If I can do this it may be an acceptable workaround. Can you have multiple iCloud drives?
- Logged into purchases with my personal domain account. Family sharing setup with this account and sharing these purchases and subscriptions. I’m subscribed to all previous Apple services. Apple Music family (renews mid-November), Apple news (renews early November), Apple TV + (renews in February), and Apple Arcade (year subscription expires in January).
I used my personal domain and signed up for the trial of Apple One yesterday. I saw that on my subscriptions things looked ok, showed the other subscriptions being replaced at the end of November with Apple One when it switched to a pay model.
The third issue was a charge (or was it a credit) when I signed up for the trial of Apple One. Ideally it should be no charge because it is a trial but a $16.56 transaction occurred to my Apple Card. Trying to figure that out after they above items are fixed.
So Apple One makes sense for us, but I won't take the plunge until I'm confident it won't bork my whole setup, which works well. So this article is very helpful. The secret for me is that the iCloud and family sharing is managed from my personal Apple ID, while everything that used to be part of iTunes is managed through our financial Apple ID (originally my personal ID).
For what it's worth, separating out our family financial life and moving it all to a dedicated computer, removing all of it from the device constellation where I work and play, really changed my life -- when it was all together it was harder to keep it separate, to set it aside and focus on what I was doing.
In fact, if you read Apple's service level agreement for iCloud (and pretty much all other Apple services) you'd soon discover that iCloud storage and iCloud Drive are not something that anyone who really values their data would ever consider using other than for convenience purposes. Yes, Apple makes no guarantees about anything, and yes, you should take them at their word - as spelled out in their service level agreements. If you need transaction level integrity on your data, i.e., passing the ACID test, you should not be using iCloud or likely any other inexpensive or convenience oriented cloud storage service. The fact that Apple (and all the others) offer no availability guarantees (e.g., four nines, etc.) or quality of service agreements around their services, and pay no penalties for inflicted outages and downtime, tells you all you really need to know about where Apple will be should you suffer a loss. Actually, if you read the SLA you'll see it clearly spelled out, i.e., you're up crapper creek without a paddle and Apple bears zero responsibility at all. It's all there in the SLA, in black & white and often in all-caps.
That said, my issues are probably more about convenience and minimizing the time investment needed to sync a big hunk of data across several devices. Since my upload speed for cloud based storage (or more accurately cloud based caching) is so pathetic I really need to double down on building out my own local storage cloud, possibly with an off-premise cloud based second layer of backup to something like iDrive, and minimize my use of iCloud.
I have the same type of setup others describe - an iCloud services AppleID, and an iTunes/App Store AppleID, and like others, this was so my email could be private, and apps and music could be shared with my family before Family Sharing existed.
For the first few years of family sharing, there wasn’t much of a change, but at some point I believe I was allowed to add my iTunes ID to my family sharing group. At that point all the apps and subscriptions assigned to that account were shared to the other Apple IDs in the family sharing group.
Now it really doesn’t make much of a difference who does what, it seems like everything is being shared like it should. I think the only thing that could prevent you from doing this is if somehow your iTunes ID was added to a different family sharing group somehow.
Are others not having this same experience?
Then along came MobileMe and another account- later renamed iCloud.
A lot of us did not intend to end up with multiple accounts- it just worked out that way. Those of us who kept using our .Mac email still have the service and address. If you stopped using it for email it no longer functions for email, but remains in use as an Apple ID.
Some of this could have been avoided by Apple. I am sure the staff at AWS, who Apple uses for many things, could figure it out for them.