Last night I went on an expedition, fueled by a Cole Coffee binge (Yemeni Mocca Sanani. It’s brilliant), to un-hose my iCloud setup, which was quite, well…hosed.
The reason for this is pretty simple: I’ve been dealing with Apple directly for over a decade, and have wound up with a handful of AppleIDs, all with different, and now mostly defunct, email addresses. This is a potential cause of having your iLife getting FUBAR when converting to iClould from MobileMe.
The problem was, in a nutshell, that my mail, photo stream, calendar, and contacts were all hooked into my MobileMe account, and my iCloud account was hooked in to the AppleID that I use for the iTunes, and other Apple Stores.
It took a few hours of experimentation, but I finally managed to get the whole thing sorted out.
At the end of the ordeal, and in an effort to help bail out other poor schmucks, like myself, I wrote a long and comprehensive blog entry detailing just how to do it. (I’m here to help …) But after finishing the lengthy tome, the result was confusing as hell, and only likely to help someone who had the exact same mashup of AppleIDs and MobileMe, and who had gone through the MobileMe Migration the same way I had. So I trashed it, and am just going to provide a couple of suggestions for how to transition, along with some links to docs that were useful in working everything out.
1) Create your iCloud account using the AppleID that you use for iTunes/App Store and Apple Store.
This is kind of key, and will make your life easier.
2) If you have a MobileMe account that is under a different AppleID, or has a different email address associated with it, migrate it to iCloud, and use it as a secondary iCloud account.
What?
You can’t easily merge the two together, and MobileMe will be going away at some point, but you can add your secondary iCloud account to your Mail and Calendar apps and have everything in one place while you migrate your mail usage to your new iCloud .me email address.
What Apple Needs to Do …
Most of this mess could be a lot less messy if Apple were to take a more flexible approach with AppleIDs … Allow users to delete, or recycle them, merge them, and provide more flexibility about changing the name and underlying email account associated with an AppleID.
If you’re just starting down the iLife, with your first iPhone, iPad, or Mac, try to get it right from the beginning and use one AppleID for everything. It will save you headaches, and Saturday nights spent in an over-caffeinated-frenzy trying to figure out why your Photostream isn’t streaming and your email not going where you want it to …
Helpful Links
iCloud 101: Apple IDs and your iOS Device (GigaOm)
Apple IDs and iCloud (Apple Support Doc)
Apple ID FAQ (Apple Support Doc)
iCloud Support and Community (Apple)