Apple Not Offering Apple ID Merging

[tardegrade]

I have a slightly different problem.

I have only ever had one Apple ID, my store ID. Never had .mac or .me or any of that.
I setup iCloud with my one and only Apple ID which is just fine. Then logging into iCloud in the browser to use the webmail aspect is tells me that I need to create a .me.com email address. Fine that's no problem. So I do that and use the webmail to send an email.

Now how do I get that .me.com email address on to my iPod touch?

If I try to set it up as a mobileme address it tells me that mobileme has been migrated to iCloud. If I try to set it up as iCloud it tells me that iCloud is already in use with my Apple ID.

That's not very well thought out, unless I'm missing something. A little help?

[MTShipp]

Well my situation is odd too with a gmail.com and a @me.com account.

During BETA, I went through the mobileme.com/move site and migrated my mobileme to iCloud.

Then from iTunes (where I use a gmail.com for AppleID) I purchased the Match service.

When everything went live yesterday, I configured iCloud on my iPhone and iPad devices to be my new iCloud account (converted from mobileme).

Somehow, everything carried over and I have 25GB of iCloud storage now.

Though complicated for me to keep up, I seem to have a functioning iCloud account and a functioning iTunes account that is using a gmail.com address.

The only thing not working is iMessage to my iCloud account.

[JRoDDz]

When does this end? I have too many damn appleID's. Pretty soon I'm going to need a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them.

[vrillusions]

I'm thinking they will let you use your icloud @me.com address as your primary apple id at some point. Right now I use the same apple id for itunes and icloud. But then I had to create a @me.com for I think notes sync. Have no intention of using my @me.com email. I could see one point in the future where you can choose which is your "primary" email (the address you used for apple id or the new me.com email) so you could then use your @me.com address as your main email and also as your apple id.

Merging multiple apple ids (eg: john.doe@gmail.com has some itunes purchases and jane.doe@gmail.com has others) probably won't happen given the response thus far.

[mrboult]

ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE MOBILE ME BUT DO NOT USE THAT EMAIL ADDRESS AND HAVE ANOTHER EMAIL USED FOR THEIR 'APPLE ID' (related to store purchases)

Disable/delete MobileMe from all devices (computers and iOS) your info/account will remain active online (MobileMe.com)

Now create a new iCloud account (in system preferences / Settings) using your Existing Apple ID email address (gmail for me, the one I already used for all store purchases)

Once you have created an iCloud account (using your Apple ID/email address associated with store purchases) log into your new iCloud account on all devices (system preferences / settings)

Now all your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photo stream etc etc should sync with iCloud.

Now. If you still want to use your iDisk & Gallery. . . . .
It is time to convert your MobileMe to iCloud (www.mobilme.com/move/)
You have to do this in order to use iDisk & Gallery alongside iCloud.

Once you have done this you will have another iCloud account (with your MobileMe email as the 'log in' Apple ID)
Simply forget about this as you have already setup iCloud with your regular email address (the one used for your Apple ID associated with store purchases)

Having done the 'move' you can now sign in to mobileMe again and continue to use iDisk & Gallery alongside iCloud until MobileMe finally expires next year.


This advice is for people like me who have been using MobileMe for sync purposes but never used the @me email and have no desire to continue using that @me email as an 'Apple ID' after MobileMe is gone.
Now both iCloud and store purchases are both linked to the same Apple ID (my gmail account)

[Kid A]

Ahem... cough*Qwikster*cough, cough... Excuse me. Something caught in my throat.

This is dumb. Has been dumb for years. But now it's double-dumb. They'll back off. They can't let this continue. In 20 years there will be 5 times more Apple IDs than people on Earth.

[maxmiles]

And what about those who have moved to another country? I couldn't use my old apple ID for purchases, given I live in Canada now and can't use any American payment methods. So I've been forced to use a new ID and now this issue. Thanks to those who have posted workarounds, I'll be attempting them..

[arilev]

Don't know if it means anything but https://appleid.apple.com hasn't been working for a while now nor am I able to change account info from iTunes.

For the record I'm in the same boat as most of you, with an old iTunes account (firstlast) and a mobileme/icloud account with (firstlast@mac/me.com) where the primary email address of my iTunes account is firstlast@me.com and cannot be changed.

Currently on iOS 5 I'm using firstlast to log into the store and firstlast@mac.com to log into iCloud and as an additional method of contact on Facetime.

But I'm unable to use Find my Friends because it only let's me log on with firstlast@mac/me.com but then tells me that I must verify my firstlast@me.com which I can't do because it's tied to my old iTunes account which makes it (for some insane reason) unverifiable.

Something has to be done and I hope this downtime is that something.

[Old Muley]

<sigh> I miss eWorld...</sigh>

[NAG]

Originally Posted by EricNau

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.

You do realize that @me and @mac are aliases, right? They're not distinct AppleIDs. As far as the AppleID prior to iTools/MobileMe, guess I'm lucky that I adopted iTools so early that the only thing on that old AppleID is a QuickTime Pro and QuickTime MPEG2 license (both of which are now essentially useless).

On the other end though, there are people that just were reckless with how many AppleIDs they created (and have more email addresses than you can count).

In the middle are a lot of people that don't have the time to make sure their AppleID situation is okay (took me months for them to fix data associated with my AppleID across the entire database after a social engineering hack someone did to my account when talking to a support representative...I repeat, they didn't "hack" me, they "hacked" Apple support). Most people won't put up this stuff to have a pristine AppleID situation.

Originally Posted by tardegrade

I have a slightly different problem.

I have only ever had one Apple ID, my store ID. Never had .mac or .me or any of that.
I setup iCloud with my one and only Apple ID which is just fine. Then logging into iCloud in the browser to use the webmail aspect is tells me that I need to create a .me.com email address. Fine that's no problem. So I do that and use the webmail to send an email.

Now how do I get that .me.com email address on to my iPod touch?

If I try to set it up as a mobileme address it tells me that mobileme has been migrated to iCloud. If I try to set it up as iCloud it tells me that iCloud is already in use with my Apple ID.

That's not very well thought out, unless I'm missing something. A little help?

How you logging in (i.e. what username)? Additionally, iCloud mail has been down for me basically all morning.

[John.B]

Then I probably made a mistake setting up iOS 5 on my 3GS last night...

I created a new (iCloud) @me.com account during the iOS 5 setup on my iPhone that I will eventually want to use for the bulk of my email traffic. I also want to use it for syncing calendars/contacts/etc. to my Mac mini running Snow Leopard, but I don't have that set up yet.

I still have the old @me.com account from MobileMe that is what is currently syncing contacts/calendars between my Mac and iPhone. I use that email account sparingly.

Can't I just reconfigure the mini and my iPhone to sync with the new iCloud account instead of the old MobileMe account? It should all sync up to the data on my mini, right?

(FWIW, my iTunes account is currently still setup to use an @yahoo.com account I've had for ages. I don't even know whether I can port that over to a different account...)

The upside is that I did manage to reserve the @me.com ID that I'd like to use for the future, before someone else claimed it...

[ade2bee]

I've just been onto Apple from 8 this morning, it is now 15.19

A: sorting out being locked out of my iTunes account

B: My iPad has slowed down to half the speed, despite reinstalling iOS5.

C: My bluetooth headphones aren't working properly with my music player on the iPad

D: All my clipping shortcuts for Evernote AND Springpad no longer work on the shinny new safari

F: My Mac takes twice as long to boot as it did do post updates last night, has starting stalling when opening software and I've had force quit open more times than I care to mention... their answer... Upgrade


and that's just the beginning, what gets me is the fact that my mother using a 2 year old 399 windows 7 machine, has total iCloud syncing with it... A Macbook Pro only just turned 1 with Snow leopard? Oh no. All the Apple customers have to upgrade... it's twoddle

[TheRealTVGuy]

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)

Why won't Apple allow us to merge multiple ID's ?

Because Joe Blow and all of his friends would swap their ID and login info so they could share all of their purchases with each other. Can you imagine how the record companies and movie studios would react then?

[tbrinkma]

Originally Posted by danckwerts

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.

No, you don't have to junk either.
1) Use your mobile me account as your iCloud account.
2) use the account you used for your purchases for your iTunes account.

Done.

[Isengardtom]

My problem is as follows :

I have an apple ID (yahoo mail) for iTunes purchases. I also use this mail on my iPad with the mail app.

I would have liked to use the same ID for iCloud and also iMessage. This didn't work however.
In the case of iMessage, it said the yahoo e-mail was already in use, so I (temporarily) used my work email to set up iMessage on the iPad.

In the case of iCloud when setting it up on the iPad 1 it got stuck on "verifying" and when I tried on my mac I didn't receive a verification mail despite it claiming it had sent one. I resolved it by creating a me-account enabling iCloud.

So now I have to use 3 mail accounts for 3 different things. Can I change this?

[chenks]

Originally Posted by arilev

Don't know if it means anything but https://appleid.apple.com hasn't been working for a while now nor am I able to change account info from iTunes.

For the record I'm in the same boat as most of you, with an old iTunes account (firstlast) and a mobileme/icloud account with (firstlast@mac/me.com) where the primary email address of my iTunes account is firstlast@me.com and cannot be changed.

Currently on iOS 5 I'm using firstlast to log into the store and firstlast@mac.com to log into iCloud and as an additional method of contact on Facetime.

But I'm unable to use Find my Friends because it only let's me log on with firstlast@mac/me.com but then tells me that I must verify my firstlast@me.com which I can't do because it's tied to my old iTunes account which makes it (for some insane reason) unverifiable.

Something has to be done and I hope this downtime is that something.

this is the exact same problem i have.

[kirky29]

So, what I've done now (well in the middle of it right now).
I thought, sod it. Deleted my Gmail account from my iPhone & iTunes - and am currently in the process of rebuying all my apps for my main MobileMe account.

Can't stand all this, it's just causing headaches!

[h0mi]

I have 2 icloud accounts and my me.com account is giving me grief, telling me that the userid/password is wrong when I try to retrieve emails. The conversion also failed to copy my contacts- that me.com used to have all my contacts but not anymore.

(edit) the mail thing appeared to be due to not being able to connect to the servers, its working now.

[Mev75]

I found some explanations under the following link:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4895

Seems that you can explicitly use two apple ids on iOS devices, one for iCloud and one for all the purchases in the stores. At least for people having only two accounts with separated purpose this is good news.

Good luck!

(nevertheless, apple could/should definitely do better!)

[heisenberg123]

i was able to setup my iCloud using my @gmail, the same email i use for itunes purchases, the ony thing i cant use in the cloud is email becasue it wants you to have a @me account but i dont understand what email in the could even means, my @gmail is set up on my iphone and my mail.app for my macbook book pro, so whats the point fo mail in the cloud?

[shartypants]

I also have two Apple IDs, one with @mac.com/me.com and another with @yahoo.com. Interestingly, when I turned on iCloud for the <name>@yahoo.com account, it gave me a corresponding <name>@icloud.com email account. Does that mean I can also use the <name>@icloud.com as my Apple ID? It is kind of a mess, and I imagine if it was easy Apple would have allowed account merging, but I'm sure it could be a bit tricky, and seeing how loaded down their servers are now, I don't blame them for not offering it right now. Maybe after things setting down they will support it? Hope so.

EDIT: Now it looks like my @icloud.com account changed to @me.com. ?? Now I just with I could transfer all my contact and calender data from my old @mac.com account to this new @me.com account...

[waldobushman]

Merging just needs to be an option. And perhaps splitting as well.

Technically, my understanding is that the Apple ID is also used as part of the DRM. Now that would be a significant technical issue as well.

[rquick]

This is a common problem with any system that uses email addresses as user ids. Email addresses change over time as we move and change services. The easy solution is to allow users to change their ids to match their new email address. For whatever reason, Apple has decided not to allow that, which has resulted in some people having multiple Apple ids. It never occurred to me when I created my first Apple id some years back that I would be stuck with it forever. With all of the change in Apple's own email systems, you would think that there would be enough Apple employees with the same problem that they would go ahead and fix it. It would be nice if Apple would at least explain why they don't want to allow changing names and merging accounts so we could help them get over it. My personal guess is that it is based in some paranoia about drm but I can't think of a possible scenario where that really makes any sense. As with most of corporate America, this is probably an example of some high level executive who assured everyone this would never be an issue or if it was allowed it would be the end of the world and now just refuses to acknowledge he was wrong.

[World Citizen]

I don't know but can't we do it South Park Style?

Like, upgrading to an family account...

Or is this trick only for the Terms and conditions, and not for apps...

like "family apps" ?

[vitzr]

Originally Posted by rquick

My personal guess is that it is based in some paranoia about drm but I can't think of a possible scenario where that really makes any sense. As with most of corporate America, this is probably an example of some high level executive who assured everyone this would never be an issue or if it was allowed it would be the end of the world and now just refuses to acknowledge he was wrong.

Hint:

His initials are SJ. Widely known as a very brilliant yet self centered narcissist.

Never wrong, always right, with a proclivity to make sky high claims like "It's Magical & Revolutionary"

Highly revered, he was untouchable. The perfect human.