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MacBoobsPro

macrumors 603
Jan 10, 2006
5,114
6
I've got three IDs because they keep changing services!

To set up iCloud I had to convert them all to iCloud but I only really use the one for purchasing. MobileMe I have to keep for mail etc even though I rarely use the mobileme mail. And the other is .mac from the iTools days.

I dont even know what i can and cant do with all these accounts anymore. My main one doesnt have all the services of MobileMe, MobileMe has just had a swathe of services taken away and after updating everything last night. I dont see any evidence that iCloud actually did ANYTHING?!

Im confused!
 

photographypro

macrumors regular
Jul 7, 2010
219
77
American in Pisa (Italy)
Read the directions first people!

If people would read the directions, you would know to use your .me account as your iCloud login. If you had a .mac email, which I did, that should have been changed to .me years ago. Then, use your Apple iTunes store account Apple ID under Store.

For most people, this solves most problems.

The biggest problem is that many impulsively go ahead and enter into iCloud the Apple ID they use the most, the one from the App store.

Since I had a MobileMe account, and didn't want to screw things up, I carefully read the instructions from Apple.

That said, it would be nice if Apple would allow merging of Apple IDs. I don't understand why there is now a 90 day hold on using an Apple ID on an IOS device (I actually have a new one for the Apple Italy store, since I'm moving to Italy next year).
 

Confuzzzed

macrumors 68000
Aug 7, 2011
1,630
0
Liverpool, UK
Is all this mess partly due to licensing T&Cs with content providers in iTunes so people can't share libraries that easily? It's a real pain and recently, my iTunes started telling me that some music was asigned to my .mac email address which has been defunct for 5-6 years and I couldn't load it up to a new iPod! MESS
 

OllyW

Moderator
Staff member
Oct 11, 2005
17,196
6,799
The Black Country, England
Unacceptable. It's Apple's flawed system that lead individuals to adopt multiple Apple IDs in the first place. Any MobileMe customer of 3 years has at least two: email@mac.com and email@me.com. Three if they had an Apple ID prior to joining (most probably did).

Apple employees, therefore, have at least four (their company email address). In addition to that, I had one given to me by iTunes Store support for iTunes, and one prior to the usage of email addresses (if I recall correctly, back then it was just a username, but later they required an email address which became your Apple ID).

At last count I have 6 Apple IDs. It's ridiculous. It's probably only a matter of time before Apple gives me another.

I seem to have gained another one overnight but still can't use the one that should work with iCloud.

It's a bloody mess. :(
 

chenks

macrumors 65816
Oct 23, 2007
1,187
489
UK
the problem i have is that i had an appleid long before i had a mobileme account.

my appleid is blah123 (and used to purchase all apps, music, video etc)
my mobileme account was blah123@me.com

now that i have migrated mobileme to icloud, it seems that apple is not able to be sensible and merge these 2 account together.

i now can't use "find my friends" as it uses the icloud account and i can't verify the email address attached to the icloud account (which is the @me.com address) as it is already in use with the original appleid account!
 

NightFox

macrumors 68040
May 10, 2005
3,234
4,456
Shropshire, UK
So I have a MobileMe account and my iTunes account Apple IDs. I found a loophole that worked for me.

I contacted MobileMe live chat support, had them completely close and cancel my account. They said in 24 hours the email will be available for me to choose for use with iCloud.

I backed up all of my emails to my Mac, synced all of my contacts, calendars, etc. to my mac and removed them from my iPhone and iPad. Implemented iCloud syncing for everything but notes and email until my email is available tomorrow.

Does it suck to be without my email for a day? Maybe... but it will all be nice neat and tidy tomorrow :D.

A potential solution, until someone snipes your email address. Not likely a problem if you're rupert.monkeyface43096@me.com, but a big one if you're dave@me.com.
 

wwchris

macrumors regular
Nov 13, 2009
154
164
Atlanta, GA
I have to say, this is one of the poorest product rollouts I have ever seen. They are changing far too much all at the same time with multiple ID's. I am still unable to figure out how to get iCloud working and I consider myself a pretty advanced user. So once I have set up iCloud on my mac, how do I for example get a Mac Numbers files to appear there so I can open it on my iPad? Do I need to save it someplace special? Also, I accidentally mistyped my "you can never change this email" trying to use my old .me email and it accepted the mistyped one with no "are you sure" and now it is "forever linked" to a misspelling of my name.
 

vitzr

macrumors 68030
Jul 28, 2011
2,765
3
California
This is absolutely unacceptable. All my purchases are on an email that will be going away in a few months, I have a me.com email that I want to use as my appleID. I WILL have all my purchases associated with that me.com account, I AM THE CUSTOMER AND THE CUSTOMER IS ****ALWAYS**** RIGHT. Come on Apple give the customer what they want!

It is fact that Apple has a long history of resisting many common sense solutions. They like to "Think Different" even if it means upsetting their loyal customers. It's Apples way of showing who's boss. A bit juvenile, but very "Apple". They've always maintained they know better than the customer. Sadly many fanboys buy into that line of thinking and turn over their power to Apple.
 

mackiwilad

macrumors member
Sep 21, 2007
69
4
Ask the Goverment!
I'm in the same boat. iTunes account is different to my MobileMe account. I have iTunes accounts from many countries as well as I have moved around a lot.
I hope Apple will do something positive about this....
 

MiataMac

macrumors member
Nov 24, 2008
68
0
If people would read the directions, you would know to use your .me account as your iCloud login. If you had a .mac email, which I did, that should have been changed to .me years ago. Then, use your Apple iTunes store account Apple ID under Store.

For most people, this solves most problems.

I agree and I tried this as well, but this meant I had to change my primary (oldest) AppleID, the one I use for purchases, to an e-mail address nobody knows, otherwise I can't add it to my MobileMe-iCloud account for iMessages, since it already belongs somewhere else.

Of course the same problem applies the other way around, if people knows your MobileMe address and are likely to message you that way around, they won't be able to, unless you use your MobileMe as iCloud.

----------

So I have a MobileMe account and my iTunes account Apple IDs. I found a loophole that worked for me.

I contacted MobileMe live chat support, had them completely close and cancel my account. They said in 24 hours the email will be available for me to choose for use with iCloud.

I backed up all of my emails to my Mac, synced all of my contacts, calendars, etc. to my mac and removed them from my iPhone and iPad. Implemented iCloud syncing for everything but notes and email until my email is available tomorrow.

Does it suck to be without my email for a day? Maybe... but it will all be nice neat and tidy tomorrow :D.

I've just tried this, but the MobileMe live chat guy wasn't very helpful at all, said it couldn't be done. At the end, I gave him a direct link to your post (above) and told him that was exactly what I was trying to do, and he replied:

Thank you for that link. I can't comment on rumors about products that Apple hasn't officially announced. We don't comment because we hope to protect customers from making decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete information. Once this process is passed down to us a an official document then everything will be ok to do. But until then this cannot be done.

So I've given up, hoping that AppleID merging may come eventually :)
 

Žalgiris

macrumors 6502a
Aug 3, 2010
934
0
Lithuania
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/9A334)

I activated iCloud on my current gMail Apple ID but they won't let me change my primary login email to the new iCloud @me.com address, even though they are the same Apple ID! Ridiculous!

Same here, though i can ignore this for now, but in the near future they should do something about it.
 

danckwerts

macrumors regular
Jun 7, 2008
147
102
Richmond upon Thames
When you think of all the criticism of RiM...

When you think of all the criticism which RiM have received over a couple of outages, it's amazing how little flak Apple have taken for this. It is a complete mess which could have been avoided if they'd put any thought or resources into it. As far as I can see, I've got to junk either my mobile me email address or all my purchases. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
 

KALLT

macrumors 603
Sep 23, 2008
5,355
3,375
I currently have two Apple IDs, one from an old MobileMe address and one for iTunes. The problem I encountered was that I enabled iCloud on my Apple ID, but could not add my old MobileMe address, to which I still have access, although I haven't used it for three years. Instead, I should have created a new MobileMe address. What I did now is the following. I enabled iCloud on my Apple ID without using e-mail. I added another iCloud account with my MobileMe address and only enabled e-mail. Thus now I have two iCloud accounts, one of which uses all iCloud features and one that only uses e-mail. So far, it works perfectly well. Although I definitely would prefer to have one unified account.
 

vitzr

macrumors 68030
Jul 28, 2011
2,765
3
California
Many people fail to see that Apple is asserting it's power and control. It's an ego thing thats not about to change. Apple is always right, and they're gonna show you.

In today's climate, Apple can do no wrong.

In the rare event there is a problem, Apples already got a fall guy to blame it on, with thousands of Apple apologists to back them.

Someone's got to win, and that someone is Apple.

Now get out your wallet & pay up. LOL :)



(without humor everyone loses)
 

jshort

macrumors regular
Jun 8, 2009
127
15
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

This really really sucks. It's the biggest downfall in their whole iEcosystem. How does this encourage anyone to use iCoud, Apple's @me.com emails, etc. Now in iOS 5 they've really a light on how frustrating this is!
 

mm1250

macrumors 6502
Sep 3, 2007
327
43
A really simple fix would be to change your email in iTunes Store account to your new @me.com email account but when I tried to do that it wouldn't let me. I'm sure if Apple just changed that by allowing a @me.com under the iTunes account we would be all good.

I must say, I had to read the FAQ to make sure I was doing everything right, but I really like to have 1 account vs. 2. Really sucks, this whole process goes against Apple's policy of simplicity.
 

mr.johnnyboy

macrumors newbie
Oct 13, 2011
12
3
So I have a MobileMe account and my iTunes account Apple IDs. I found a loophole that worked for me.

I contacted MobileMe live chat support, had them completely close and cancel my account. They said in 24 hours the email will be available for me to choose for use with iCloud.

I backed up all of my emails to my Mac, synced all of my contacts, calendars, etc. to my mac and removed them from my iPhone and iPad. Implemented iCloud syncing for everything but notes and email until my email is available tomorrow.

Does it suck to be without my email for a day? Maybe... but it will all be nice neat and tidy tomorrow :D.

So after being on the chat for about three hours (for a full hour I was waiting on the advisor to get online with me) they said it is NOT possible and they completly denied that someone was able to do such a thing. So yeah wasted two hours for nothing, stuck with 2 @me.com accounts and an apple ID. Thanks Apple you're (NOT) the best!! :mad:
 

dlimes13

macrumors 6502a
May 3, 2011
744
13
Perrysburg, OH
Well, this is making me clean out the apps I don't want (or can't have since I paid for them!). Loss of about 13 apps (7 games) for me. Oh well.
 

vvebsta

macrumors 6502a
Sep 27, 2006
505
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

This article doesn't mean they can't or aren't considering to do this eventually. We all need to send them feedback soon as possible...

http://www.apple.com/feedback/icloud.html
 

Optheduim

macrumors regular
Jun 9, 2011
196
279
NYC
whats annoying about it, is, say i get married or have a death in the family... i can't take my wife's music or inherit a part of an estate...

hopefully nobody dies in my family tho :cool:
 

Sbrocket

macrumors 65816
Jun 3, 2007
1,250
0
/dev/null
Unacceptable. It's Apple's flawed system that lead individuals to adopt multiple Apple IDs in the first place. Any MobileMe customer of 3 years has at least two: email@mac.com and email@me.com. Three if they had an Apple ID prior to joining (most probably did).

I'm not sure about your third one, but the first two are not separate Apple IDs. They're just aliases for the same account. You can use either to log in with the same Apple ID. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to access any developer assets if I logged on from xyz@me.com rather than xyz@mac.com.
 

blevins321

macrumors 68030
Dec 24, 2010
2,768
96
Detroit, MI
What happens if I change my email address in my iTunes account to the same address used for iCloud? Will updating my apps purchased with the current iTunes ID require logging in using this address?

Essentially, can I change my iTunes loin email and just update apps as normal?

I don't think you could change to your iCloud mail specifically, because it would be "in use." If you switch to something else though, you'll notice when you sync with a computer for the first time that some apps aren't "authorized." It'll prompt you to login with the address that purchased it. However, login with the current information for that account and it'll authorize all the previous addresses too.

I did this when I left university and about 90% of my music purchases (pre-iPhone apps) were under that address. Still pops up occasionally if I ever reformat my system.
 
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