Merge apple id's, me.com and itunes account?

My boat is slightly different to everyone else's, but still just as frustrating. Just as iCloud arrived, I had finally had enough of my old email address - my ability to access to the webmail interface was becoming sporadic, I would receive maybe 20 pieces of spam for every regaular email, and as good as the spam filters were, more and more was slipping through into my inbox, plus sometimes they would catch some legitimate mail and I got sick of picking through offers of cheap erectile dysfunction and graphic descriptions of naked women. So I decided I would use my newly signed-up me.com as my new address and my new ID, and if my old yahoo.com purchases were not automatically synced, that was ok, I'd get what I wanted by a manual sync when I had to.

Like the rest of you, I received the error message that the me.com account was already an AppleID when I tried to update my primary email address. However I seem to be even luckier in that I can't even use the me.com one on its own, as it's somehow been inextricably linked to my old yahoo address, to the extent that I can go to the iTunes store, as the AppleID login name use 'mynewaccount@me.com', submit my password, and it takes me straight to 'myoldaccount@yahoo.com'. I can buy something using the AppleID 'mynewaccount@me.com' and it will be registered in Fairplay to 'myoldaccount@yahoo.com'. I guess that's actually (almost) what some of you want, but for me it means I can't completely discard the old email account as things from Apple (for example any email alerts I get telling me someone responded to this very post) will always, and only, go to 'myoldaccount@yahoo.com'. I was willing to start fresh with a new ID, but now it seems like I'd have make a fresh start on my fresh start, and after advising contacts, businesses, friends, family, etc of my new address, I don't want to have to tell them there's another one (plus all the sensible versions of my name seem to have gone and I refuse to have a string of random numbersor innanne repetitions in there).

Once again Apple has an incredibly narrow view of what the consumer experience should be, and they build their products in a way that support only that view. Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least they acknowledge not everyone has the same experience and their (buggy, virus-prone) software supports options and customisations.

Yeah, wow, Apple screwed this up royally. I've always used my gmail account for my iTunes Store / Apple ID. Created an iCloud account when it launched. Same name just @me.com. Login to my Apple ID and try to change it's primary email address to the @me.com account and Apple won't let you. Seperate Apple IDs apparently. Seriously why can't I merge these two? Having two accounts... one for the store and one for the iCloud is just plain stupid. Didn't they anticipate this problem? It's not rocket science. "Oh, hey, we've got all these people with old accounts. Maybe they'll want to have a unified experience". In classic Apple fashion if you aren't one of their *new* customers you can **** off.

This desperately needs fixing. We have family me.com, so my wife has a me.com, and I use my old mac.com. Back in the day, I used my ISP email addy for itunes. Everything is on the ISP addy iTunes, but we want contacts, ekmail, etc with myu mac.com (or wife's me.com). 2 macs, 1 laptop, 2 iPads, 2 phones, various iPods...

*****, just ***** that I cannot dump my ISP-email associated account and not lose all my apps, music, etc.

Same problem here. I need to merge my two accounts. Apple, please listen to us!!

After the release of MobileMe, many customers ended up with two Apple accounts. As a result, one holds the @me address they wanted for themself and the other holds hundreds of iTunes purchases.

Ultimately, people that were the most exited about MobileMe when it started are paying the price of this lack of flexibility from Apple. It's sad as they are probably what you can call dedicated customers.

In my case, the chain of events that follows is pretty simple. I can't use iCloud Mail so I use Google Mail. As I need my contacts synced in Google Mail, I can't use iCloud Contacts and use Google Contacts. Same goes for Calendar and Documents and here we are, I am not using iCloud. Nicely played!

Right on target Asterokid! Same situation here, and likey similar for the 72,790 people that have viewed this discussion.

My congratulations for mjward's and Asterokid's posts. Maybe the threshold for Apple correcting this ID debacle, which has been going on for years (and is greatly exacerbated by iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion) is 100,000?

I still have 28 more days before the 90-day ban on accessing 95% of all my digital purchases is lifted. Apple blocking my access to most of my purchases for 90 days occurred because you must use an e-mail ID to have use the iCloud for syncing, etc. Of course, the blocked digital purchases were made during the past 6 years with a simple four-letter ID (no e-mail address for login) so I am in purgatory until the 90-days expires because I committed the sin of not using an e-mail ID for six years and cannot combine the two accounts, ever, according to Apple's draconian policy.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this is Apple's unwillingness to give an adequate/reasonable explanation for this policy. It's hard to imagine the company purposely wanting to snub and frustrate loyal customers, but I can't think of any good technical or other reason for the inability to merge IDs. For example, with purchases...let's say I have for one reason or another got two different IDs with past purchases associated. Because they are mine I know the IDs and passwords and can access those accounts individually. Moreover I can easily prove by providing specific additional information such as credit card information and personal identifying information that I am me and I 'own' both accounts. I cannot fathom what would prevent Apple from linkIng this accounts on their servers so that I only have to worry about a single login. Same on the iCloud side of information and files being pushed and exchanged to my various devices. As long as I have enough information to 'prove' I am me and these are my own ID's/accounts, then what reasonable explanation can Apple give for not accommodating me and making my life easier? It seems so...well...un-Apple-like. If there is a valid reason, then what harm is there in giving an explanation to us? How can such an innovative company not come up with a great solution to this very real and serious problem?

I think I can think of a good technical reason why.

Just think of how many different databases Apple must maintain that make use of your apple id. These forums, the online Apple store, the iTunes Store, iCloud, Mobile Me, Game Centre, the Mac Store, etc...

Now, each of your apple ids will have a unique identifier, and each of these databases will have a reference to it, and will probably even use it against each entiry in the database relevant to you. To merge your id's, Apple will either have to update all of these database, or provide a mechanism to allow them to map your one id to your other. Different database may also reference the unique id in different ways. They may just simply re-use it as a unique identifier for you, or they may map it to their own unique identifier. As a software developer, the thought of having to update that many databases, with those many records, is something I would really want to avoid.

It may also introduce unique key and sequencing issues. Imagine, for example a database that stores a sequence of your purchases, like this:

appleid1, 1, Heroes season 1

appleid1, 2, Lost season 1

appleid2, 1, Californication season 1

appleid2, 2, Californication season 2

Now, if they were to update that table to merge appleid1 and appleid2, you'd then have duplicate entires for appleid1 and sequence ids 1 and 2. This would likely cause a unique key violation in the database, and would also mean the true sequence of purchases was lost (now, this is a bit of a rubbish example, as it's a bad database design, but I can imagine there may be similar issues).

There could also be issues if they maintain summary tables, for example with a count of your total number of purchases, so that the count didn't need to be recalculated each time. If they were to then merge accounts, they'd need to recaculate all such values.

Then there's factors like partitioning and sharding which mean information for your different accounts may not even be on the same physical machines, which would make merging them even more difficult.

There's also the matter that any DRMed purchases you've made from the iTunes store have your AppleID embeded in them. So, they'd also have to provide a solution to this.

So, whilst I am annoyed immensley by the situation, I can also understand that it may be far from a simple problem to solve.

See now this is a good discussion...if there are technical issues then Apple should explain that and/or say they are working on it. I still think it is a big problem they need to solve, but the lack of explanation of any kind compounds Apple's error here.

I agree with you that when you try to mix or merge databases it needs to be done carefully and there can be technical challenges to the process. But at the end of the day it's just data, and any decent engineering team ought to be able to ennumerate the problems and tackle them.

For example, right now Apple is able to take my username and password for each of my Apple IDs and allow functionality and access associated with each account/ID to occur. If nothing else, what if Apple just allows me to create a "super-user-ID" and "super-password" that then automatically logs me in to each service/functionality on the back end (behind the scenes) as needed, without me having to pay attention to which account is being used for each function? That would require some security features, I'm sure, but again, that's a techincal challenge that engineers should be able to tackle.

I could understand it if Apple came out and said "look, we understand the desire to have one Apple ID rather than multiple for many users, and we intend to provide that...there are some technical and security issues that have to be worked out before we can make that available to our customers." At least then we would know it's coming and that Apple understood what an important issue this is and cared.

While I can see your point on the complexity merging the ID's would be, I still think it just illustrates the major mistakes Apple made in setting this up in the first place. They never should have used a common name "Apple ID" for separate entities, such as iTunes ID, iCloud ID, Apple Support ID; otherwise, Apple ID should be overarching to all of these. Secondly, if they're going to show an email example in the login window then that should automatically be your assigned email address too. Don't allow one to have the email address as an ID and then also have that address available as contact for a separate ID. Either the ID has to be an email address or it cannot be an email address.

In the end, I believe this is a maelstrom that Apple created when it didn't have the foresight in setting up these various services over the years. MobileMe, iTunes, Apple Support and now iCloud were all set up separately and were not envisioned as a single collaboration at some point. So to your point, it probably is much less of a headache for Apple going forward to keep these separate, but it is us the users who are paying for their incompetence!

+1 from me too. Just becuase I had to get a @me.com address after (regretably) purchasing a Mobileme account I am now penalised and cannot get my main Apple ID to work correctly and have to wait 90 days before I can associate my iPad 2 to the correct ID.

Stupid beyond recognition.

I work for Sony PlayStation and if we did something like this for PSN there would be outcry and for good reason.

Apple sort this out, allow merging of IDs and this problem goes away.

Neil

With over 20 years in CS, I agree that database integration on large-scale can be difficult and frustrating--prone to many errors. However, I have one question that maybe you can answer to clarify a confusion/problem on my part. In my case I have 4 Apple IDs, three are e-mail addresses and one is a 4-letter ID. I have made purchases from iTunes and App Store from all IDs, but 95% of my digital purchases reside in the 4-letter, non-email ID. With iOS 5 syncing, you can only use one user ID, it must be an e-mail ID, and you are locked into this one ID for a minimum of 90-days with no wi-fi syncing to another ID until the initial 90 days expires.

The confusion I have, in light of the problems you mention regarding integrating multiple IDs, is that there is no problem with integrating multiple Apple IDs! All of my purchases, from all my different Apple IDs show up completely seamlessly integrated in my iTunes Library. In fact, by merely using USB tethered synchronization, I can update any of my Apple devices (iPod Touch and iPad2 running iOS 5 plus nanos and classic iPods) with all the purchases from all of my Apple IDs.

Now I may be naive, but if all multiple Apple ID purchases are already present in my iTunes library and I can sync these to any Apple device, why can't Apple simply provide me with one "Super/Meta ID" that unifies all my existing IDs as they are already integrated, verified and linked in the iTunes Library?

I am not suggesting that users should be coerced to unify Apple IDs if they wish to maintain multiple IDs, but for the thousands of us who find the non-merging of IDs to be a problem completely introduced by Apple, I think denial of merging IDs shows Apple's lack of good faith to its customers.

Thank you, Toran, for your concise contribution to the merging of IDs problem that frustrates thousands of loyal Apple users. I think a solution to this problem is already in place, but has not been acknowledged by Apple. In brief, this is what I think could be done.

In my case I have 4 Apple IDs, three are e-mail addresses and one is a 4-letter ID. I have made purchases from iTunes and App Store from all IDs, but 95% of my digital purchases reside in the 4-letter, non-email ID. With iOS 5 syncing, you can only use one user ID, it must be an e-mail ID, and you are locked into this one ID for a minimum of 90-days with no wi-fi syncing to another ID until the initial 90 days expires.

However, all of my purchases, from all my different Apple IDs are already completely integrated in my iTunes Library. In fact, by merely using USB tethered synchronization, I can update any of my Apple devices (iPod Touch and iPad2 running iOS 5 plus nanos and classic iPods) with all the purchases from all of my Apple IDs.

Now I may be naive, but if all multiple Apple ID purchases are already present in my iTunes library and I can sync these to any Apple device, why can't Apple simply provide me with one "Super/Meta ID" that unifies all my existing IDs as they are already integrated, verified and linked in the iTunes Library?

I am not suggesting that users should be coerced to unify Apple IDs if they wish to maintain multiple IDs, but for the thousands of us who find the non-merging of IDs to be a problem completely introduced by Apple, I think denial of merging IDs shows Apple's lack of good faith to its customers.

Yep, in a nutshell we need a fix. I dont care whether it is a "Super Meta ID", merging my existing ID's or being forced to create a new one with a one time only "transfer previous purchases" option.

I wish Apple would listen to their customers.