Can you find non-anecdotal confirmation of this claim? As far as I’m aware, it has always been impossible to merge Apple IDs. This isn’t a new topic—we were proud of the fact that we built a system for Take Control that allowed us to merge accounts in the early 2000s because neither Apple nor Google had ever allowed it.
Obviously, for a company with Apple’s technical chops, merging Apple IDs is technically conceivable. But it’s a barrel of worms, which is likely why the company has refused to do it. Issues include:
Purchased content
Personal data (email, contacts, photos, etc)
Financial data (Apple Pay, Apple Card, etc)
Security data (“Sign in with Apple”, app-specific passwords, etc)
If you have tens of millions of customers, how do you confirm in a staffing-reasonable way that every request to merge accounts is legitimate? How do you guarantee that no scammer can take over an Apple ID? (That will be a constant attack vector.) What about people wanting to merge a deceased spouse’s account with theirs? And children who disagree about whose account should be merged with their deceased parents’ accounts?
And that’s all before you get into Apple’s legal role in licensing content for others, managing financial accounts, serving as a security guarantor with single-sign-on, and so on. It would open Apple up to significant liability.
I don’t like it any more than anyone else—I have at least three Apple IDs—but Apple is never going to allow it for entirely explicable reasons.
Nope…can’t remember where I read it…it was a year or more ago as I recall. This is the primary Apple oriented mailing list I am on so I thought it was here vice on some web page someplace…but then you would know about it if it was here so maybe not. Don’t remember any of the specific details but my recollection is that the user somehow ended up with more than one ID and Apple had screwed up somehow to cause the problem…and since it was their screwup they fixed it.
I agree though…unless they have a really good security process for allowing this to happen I’m sure it’s a lawyer thing and not a technology thing that results in their refusal to do it…but dressed up as ‘impossible’ rather than ‘we won’t do it’.
I kinda agree with them that it opens them up to a whole lot of liability…but then again I kinda agree that they could invent a process that was secure enough to eliminate the possibility of getting into the liability situation…but that process would have to be human involved rather than completely automated and there is a lot of room when humans are involved to either accidentally or deliberately for some sort of profit motive…to screw up the process. Overall…while I don’t like it…I think the liability concerns outweighed any common sense or we ought to be able to do this sort of situation.
Thinking about it a bit though…when one starts a Family group the other individuals get an email from Apple IIRC asking them if they want to join the group. Noodling on this…maybe one can invite the other AppleID to a family group, then on the email account there accept the invitation and thus sorta combine the IDs, at least for Family Sharing authorized apps which is mostly the reason I think people want to merge IDs as personal data can be exported/imported relatively simply for the most part.
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for consultants to work with people who have no idea what to enter when prompted for an Apple ID password, and changing the name to Apple Account won’t help that. Having separate passwords for Mac logins and Apple IDs also throws people.
A good percentage of my Mac consultant work has to do with people who have messed up their Apple ID as a result of this confusion. I totally blame Apple for this. When presented with a dialog box asking for a password it doesn’t specify which it wants, or at least not always. If your Mac account username is different from your AppleID username, you can deduce which password is wanted—IF you’re paying close attention to the text in the dialogue box. Hell, even I get confused sometimes.
As for the new name—Apple has a long rich history of horrible naming decisions. As it is I spend a lot of time explaining to people that AppleID = iCloud = iTunes = Apple Store (and ≠ Mac account login), so the new “Apple Account” will be an improvement, but not until the current living generations of Apple users shuffle off this mortal coil.
A suggestion for those who write documentation: always refer to it as “Apple Account (AppleID/iCloud/iTunes/Apple Store)”. Only partly tongue-in-cheek.
I was at the original MacWorld San Francisco where iTools was first announced (2000), and I signed up on the spot for my mac.com email address. So now I have the same one with functioning me.com and icloud.com variations, all of which can be used to log in to my AppleID account, as well as my previous non-Apple email address which was my first username for…maybe eWorld? I can’t even remember now.
(Raise your hand if you’re old enough to remember eWorld!)
It’s confusing that people who sign up these days get icloud.com but not the predecessors mac.com and me.com. I guess people like me are grandfathered for the sake of backward compatibility. The history is actually pretty complicated, as I was reminded by this article.
Although @mac and @me emails still work instead of @icloud (in effect they are aliases) that is not the case with my sign-in for Apple Discussions or some early iTunes and App purchases. I no longer have access to them with my old or the latest passwords.
As I understand it, they work as email aliases and for logging in to AppleID, but I’m unsurprised they don’t work for other things that might view the username as a text string and not an identifiable email address.
You’re not alone, @neil1 . I had the same recollection, and I thought it was in this thread, actually. However, I can’t find it now, either in this thread or any other.
At least I know I’m not going nuts…well, I might be but at least I don’t remember things that never happened…or at least most of the time. I simply refuse to believe it’s not technically possible to merge them…but I can understand that legal might have convinced them it’s a bad idea with too much potential liability so that they didn’t develop the automated tools and thus they can be like lawyers or politicians and redefine what the word impossible means. My remembering of it was from awhile back…and since Adam asked me if I had any non anecdotal evidence I guess he already looked in the archives for it.
This sounds a very reasonable way to consider it - not unlike an email address (identifier) vs an email account (the service).
The more I think of Apple ID/Accounts and the .mac, .me and .icloud variants - not counting the multiple accounts I have - the more I realise what a total mess (and ongoing legacy maintenance) Apple has created for themselves.
I don’t see the point in this change. In my opinion (based on my experience as an independent Apple consultant for 30 years), this will only cause further confusion. “Apple ID” is a very specific term, connected with Apple for more than a decade, that at least triggers a “Apple ID sounds familiar” response from clients most of the time. The very generic term Apple Account will not ring bells in the same way, in my estimation. But, regardless, users will still continue to be clueless about what their Apple Account/ID login info is anyways. First of all, most of them don’t know what the username is exactly (because half of users have no record of their user name, and must refer to the icloud panel in their devices to find out what it is). And, second of all, a huge percentage of users don’t know precisely what their current Apple account password is (Just as was mentioned in the article). I waste a huge portion of my life waiting for people to remember or find their passwords. (And don’t say the words password manager. With the vast majority of users that’s a fruitless pursuit. And I put a lot of blame on Apple for taking 20+ years to come up with a Password manager of their own!)
In my password manager I have the AppleID and password of all our senior management - and their wives. As the ‘IT Guy’ I was asked to set up their devices as it became clear most of them weren’t capable of creating a memorable ID/password or smart enough to write them down.
The very worst situation is when they try to resolve a problem, end up resetting their password (which they immediately forget) and then nobody knows the credentials and the account gets locked.
We have people who have worked here ten years and don’t know the difference between logging into a machine, mounting a server or logging into their email. It’s not they haven’t been told, it’s they have no interest and don’t care.
Apple has had a password manager since before the first edition of Mac OS X. That’s several years before most of the third-party password managers many people use. (According to Wikipedia, 1Password was first released in 2006; Keychain in 1999, for Mac OS 8.6.)
Keychain might be criticized for not having as nice a user interface as some of the others – that might be a valid complaint – but it is not accurate to say that they took 20 years to come up with one.
I have used Keychain almost all that time. It has improved slowly and steadily. I used 1Password in parallel for a while, but when 1P v7 came out, Keychain wass good enough for my purposes that I saw no reason to upgrade 1P.
For most users, the Mac OS Keychain has always been inscrutable. And I would disagree about it seeing any improvements. And because it contains a lot more than passwords (such as certificates), I have not encouraged users to use the Keychain app. It’s entirely possible for someone to cause system trouble making changes in the Keychain.
And then when Apple did make a more user-friendly interface to the stored passwords, it was only accessible in Safari, and took several steps to access. Still not a user-friendly solution. Only now, more than 20 years into OSX, is Apple finally providing users with a user-friendly solution.
And @trilo, Like you I am tasked with keeping the credentials for users safely stored. It’s the only way to keep my sanity with users that I support on an ongoing basis. Sadly, this means I am their password manager. But it’s better that, than nobody knowing their password.
But, by the combination of Passkeys, and Apple finally giving us a user-friendly password manager app, we might be on the way to our users being more self-sufficient with their credentials. Might be. Maybe. Possibly. :)
My situation also. Because of the hassle involved with lost AppleID passwords, I would always ask clients if I could store their password for them, with strict instructions for them not to flail with their Apple password but to call me. I store them in 1Password.
Even so, I can’t tell you how many clients forgot their password, could not re-access their account, and ended up creating a whole new AppleID with associated problems regarding purchased music, synchronized contacts and other data, and so on.
I think my record is someone who ended up with three different AppleID accounts. Untangling their various services was like picking apart a bowl of spaghetti.
