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Apple Working on Allowing the Merging of Multiple Apple IDs

Long overdue

Not only should Apple absolutely support AppleID consolidation / merging, it shocks me that they haven't yet made such a feature available to customers who buy iTunes songs and movies, ultimately licensing those media files to that particular account forever.

Personally, I have a MobileMe account I use for everything except iTunes Store. I have a separate Apple ID for that and would LOVE to merge the two.

:apple::apple:
 
Two separate accounts

If they throw that dialog box on me as soon as I get on iCloud, I am going to unsubscribe pronto, iTunes and if necessary, all iDevices.

I have a very real need for two Apple IDs. Keeping them separate and being able to maintain two sets of downloads is very important to me.

If they decide to offer an option to consolidate, I want to know how their Apple ID development team is going to "fix" the issue when they are obviously not capturing input from their customers. i.e. people like me who need two separate Apple IDs. :eek:
 
Vip said:
they need to get rid of 5 "Computers" restriction, it was mainly for this reason why people choose to have (and still have) multiple apple id's.
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I just wish I could delete 1 or more of the "5 Computers restriction" that died a long time ago. Without me being able to log in to deauthorize the computer, it's still on my "5 allowed" list and I need access to my iTunes for a new computer(s)
 
class77 said:
I just wish I could delete 1 or more of the "5 Computers restriction" that died a long time ago. Without me being able to log in to deauthorize the computer, it's still on my "5 allowed" list and I need access to my iTunes for a new computer(s)
Click to expand...

You can do a deauthorize all, but you can only do that once a year or so.

arn
 
Lovely...

It was just yesterday when I moved my MobileMe account to iCloud. I now access Mail/Contacts/Calendar through iCloud but all the other MobileMe services still prevail until june 2012.

The problem is that I have all my apps downloaded through a gmail account; I wish I could consolidate it into my MobileMe account so that I don't have two apple accounts for the same thing.

Great that Apple's working on it and I hope the fix for the same comes before iOS 5 release.
 
I hope they allow merging of accounts from different countries, I have a US account, a Korean account, and an Australian account. As I live in more than one country and travel a lot I use and buy apps from each country. Some US apps are not available in other countries or are designed for a specific region. I have credit on each account, I would love to merge these accounts. I have them all on the same password but the 90 day issues is now messing with me. This one problem is huge and is a big negative for Apple as they target IOS devices for business people, but not international travellers that need apps from different stores due to locality issues in releasing.

Not only this, they need to be able to select English in the Korean store, I hate how the app store and website goes into Korean when I select that store, I live in Korea but cannot read it, give me English so the stores are usable.
 
Don Kosak said:
Back in the day when you signed up for a .Mac account, it by default, became an Apple ID, even if you already had an iTunes account with hundreds of purchases.

I'm in that boat.

My choice right now is to:

A) Give up my iTunes account and lose all of my music and movies (and the Apps I developed under that account) and stick with my MobileMe Apple ID

B) Give up my MobileMe account, and getting new email addresses for my family (yeah, I have a family MobileMe account that provides email addresses calendars, and storage/iDisk for me, my wife, and my son.) and start over from scratch.

Apple created this problem by not letting .Mac users use their existing accounts when they signed up for .Mac.

The second problem I have, is that my MobileMe account is a Family account with multiple email addresses, calendars, and storage space.

How does that map onto an iCloud account? As MobileMe is our main web service for mail, calendars, etc, I haven't been willing to risk losing it through migrating to the beta of iCloud.

I probably will hold off on using iCloud for real until this issue is resolved.
Click to expand...

Having an iTunes account(with an email address) before .Mac existed that is?
 
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Halle-freaking-lujah. I have to use an old email that I tried to ditch years ago because it was cumbersome and hard to explain to people. When I got my nice firstname.lastname@me.com I swapped everything over to that but have to maintain the old just for iTunes and invoices etc.

Glad to hear this news.
 
MacRumors said:
Apple has provided no official guidance on the issue, except to state that Apple IDs can not be consolidated at this time.
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This is a change from the past. I have had my Apple ID's consolidated. Only thing special was that I worked for an AASP and am an ACT which grants me access to Apple Service Exchange and Apple Sales Web. My Apple ID's were painless consolidated by Apple at that time to smooth my access to those non-public sites.

I'd suggest this is simply a 'work saver' for AppleCare. I predict the situation will change because it isn't a technological block.
 
Man, this would be a huge relief if they offer AppleID consolidation. One of the few things during the past few years that's made me genuinely angry at Apple.
 
Just hoe his is sorted out before my MobileMe expires in June next year.

I don't want to loose my current @me.com mail, but all my apple online and app and music purchases are on an apple ID created long before MobileMe was a twinkle in S Jobs eye.
 
They ought to offer it as an option. Some of us prefer to keep separate Apple IDs. I, for one am on international business and live in two continents. Consolidating them and restricting me to the one of the local Apple store policies is not going to be helpful.
 
Just wondering how this will work for accounts across multiple countries. I currently have 3 accounts. USA UK and CHina to access programming, films, etc that you can't get outside of that country.
 
binary1 said:
They ought to offer it as an option. Some of us prefer to keep separate Apple IDs. I, for one am on international business and live in two continents. Consolidating them and restricting me to the one of the local Apple store policies is not going to be helpful.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it'll be mandatory. Even with people with only one account - they'll get paired with some random dude and their accounts will be assim... merged. Eventually we all will share one iTunes account. :rolleyes: :D Nah, it'll be optional.
 
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Wait, what??? The 2 personal Apple ID thing has been an issue, but this sounds like it is going to create much bigger problem.

Locking Apple IDs to a device for 90 days is crazy. I do tech support for my office full of Macs and iGadgets. There are work related apps downloaded to the devices that the company pays for (Final Cut, iWork, etc). These people also want to purchase "personal" apps from the Mac App Store and App Store. They have to sign out and sign in with a personal Apple ID to get Angry Birds.

It sounds like now they won't be able to. A lot of people are going to be upset.
 
awesome

I mustn't be the only one calling iTunes support because I can't remember a password to an account created when iTunes debuted (what seems like) a million years ago. Didn't think they'd address this for some reason, but I'm really glad they are.
 
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I also contacted Apple once about two accounts and an application which I wanted to move between the accounts. They asked me to re-purchase but refunded me straight away instead .... which I think was quite nice :)
 
trainwrecka said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8L1)

Wait, what??? The 2 personal Apple ID thing has been an issue, but this sounds like it is going to create much bigger problem.

Locking Apple IDs to a device for 90 days is crazy. I do tech support for my office full of Macs and iGadgets. There are work related apps downloaded to the devices that the company pays for (Final Cut, iWork, etc). These people also want to purchase "personal" apps from the Mac App Store and App Store. They have to sign out and sign in with a personal Apple ID to get Angry Birds.

It sounds like now they won't be able to. A lot of people are going to be upset.
Click to expand...

It relates to the auto download function for iOS apps. You can still swap back and forth rapidly otherwise.
 
Well, this 90 day thing is not good. What about people like me who find themselves in several different countries a year for long periods, and need access to apps which are released only in those countries?

----------
EDIT
NAG said:
It relates to the auto download function for iOS apps. You can still swap back and forth rapidly otherwise.
Click to expand...

Ah. Thank heavens for that. So I can still download from different IDs to the MacBook without worrying about the 90 day thing, but will have to hook it up to my iPad to transfer the apps across.
 
arn said:
You can do a deauthorize all, but you can only do that once a year or so.

arn
Click to expand...

Not if you contact iTunes support and have them do it manually. I've done it twice this year already because I forgot to deauthorize before I sold my iMac.
 
Crimson77 said:
My wife and I are using our own iTunes accounts (AppleIDs), but the same iTunes library. So, how does this affect on us?
Click to expand...

I'm wondering about this as well. We have one llarge iTunes library (for AppleTV and iDevice syncing) and multiple iTunes accounts. Unless they come up with the concept of "family" accounts that can be linked together, I'm not entirely sure how to handle this. I guess I could create a third unique iTunes account and then merge both of our separate ones to it, but that seems overly complicated, and is yet another password to manage (I haven't gotten my wife to buy into the 1Password world with me, so it would have to be easier than I'd like it to be).

This would help clean up things a little bit though as she bought a bunch of content with a Gmail address she used to use before I added her to my MobileMe family account.
 
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