New to mac - user accounts?

[aartoodeetoo]

Hopefully someone can help me with this one... At some point in the next couple of months, I'll be buying my first mac.

I have an iPhone, and an iPad already, both associated with my apple ID, both back up to iCloud. My partner also has an iPhone, with her own apple ID, again, backed up to iCloud. (she may have an iPad of her own at some point too).

So my question is this: Can I set up an iMac with user accounts, like you can a windows computer, for each of us? And if I can, can each user profile be associated with a different apple ID?

Hope I've explained myself clearly!
Thanks

 

[r0k]

Hopefully someone can help me with this one... At some point in the next couple of months, I'll be buying my first mac.

I have an iPhone, and an iPad already, both associated with my apple ID, both back up to iCloud. My partner also has an iPhone, with her own apple ID, again, backed up to iCloud. (she may have an iPad of her own at some point too).

So my question is this: Can I set up an iMac with user accounts, like you can a windows computer, for each of us? And if I can, can each user profile be associated with a different apple ID?

Hope I've explained myself clearly!
Thanks

Yes you can. Each user will have their own separate system preferences settings for icloud, etc. Here is a quick step by step I would recommend:

1 - set up the first user for yourself.
2 - don't log in to icloud during install, do it later (this is really optional)
3 - once the mac is up and running under your account, make a second user account for your partner
4 - in each account, go in system preferences and set up icloud for each separate user.
5 - contacts, calendar, etc will be separate for each user and will sync with that users' iThings. iPhoto will do the same once you enable it on all devices.
6 - I recommend switching photostream sharing of new photos OFF on your Mac. It only needs to be switched on for devices which take photos.

Please note that on iOS7, a single icloud account is used to "lock" the device and must be entered if somebody wants to wipe it. This sort of thing is might be coming to OSX someday but it should still allow 2 users with completely separate iCloud accounts to use the machine for day to day use, only if the machine was ever wiped, I would think the first user to set up an account would be the one who would have to log in to unlock it.

 

[aartoodeetoo]

Just what i wanted to hear - thank you!