As I paired a new AirTag to my iPhone today, I got the warning about use and misuse. But it showed an old phone number for me. On the iPhone, Settings > [my name] showed the correct phone number. On my Mac, System Preferences > Apple ID showed the correct phone number. On the web, appleid.apple.com (I think that’s the web address I used) showed the correct phone number. And pairing a second AirTag to my iPhone showed the old phone number.
What’s going on? Should I care? If I should care, how do I update the old phone number?
And I’m back after a year with a possibly similar issue. I just got a notification (on a Mac) that some services will not be available until I enter my Apple Account password. (It was phrased differently than that, but that was the effect.) So I went through the rigamarole of entering Apple Account password, Mac account password, and then I got a prompt to enter the password for an account on a Mac that I no longer have.
Fortunately, I was able to guess the correct password, but why would Apple ask for a password for a device that is not listed as one of my devices? And does Apple expect that I will use the same password for multiple devices? Isn’t that encouraging poor security?
That sounds very similar to what macOS wanted my wife to do on her work MBP. It was confusing as heck and since there was no such 2nd Mac, there was no password to enter. On that Mac iCloud thus remains broken to this day.
If I am not mistaken it is to unlock iCloud Keychain, which are entangled partially by the device password/passphrase and not just by the Apple Account paraphrase (that’s a good thing). If you are unable to provide it, if I remember right it will ask for a different device. Unfortunately you can’t chose which device it will ask you.
But it does seem like whatever device it chooses should be associated with me—and I mean currently, not formerly. I mean, the verification system was asking for a password to an account that doesn’t even exist anymore.
I’d say it was asking for the passphrase for a Mac/device account that was once associated with (e.g., signed into) your Apple Account.
When setting up a new device recently I was prompted for the unlock code (or passphrase) for an iPod Touch that I haven’t used in almost ten years now.
I try to keep a manual (written)track of old devices, appleIDs and passwords that are no longer used - just in case. However my original apple ID (before they required emails) stopped working a few years ago. Annoyingly this meant that years of contributions to Apple Discussions were lost and also some old App Store purchases would no longer update.
So far I haven’t encountered the problems described in the above posts - touch
This is my experience too.
I have been confronted with this many times, probably since I have many devices and I tend to be experimenting with OCLP and often have more than one OS version on the same Mac. I often have to refuse more than one suggestion before I get one that I am positive I know.
Is there any penalty for refusing a suggestion? For example, after a while, does Apple decide someone who keeps asking for another device is a bad actor?
