iCloud ID vs apple ID
What is the difference between iCloud ID and apple ID?
Can they be the same?
iPhone XS
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If you use your own email address to make your AppleID and then use that to make an iCloud account, your @icloud.com email address is an alias to your AppleID.
So it is still one AppleID, but you have two emails that will serve as a login ID for it. All @icloud.com, and the legacy @me.com and @mac.com addresses (if you have them) are aliases to your AppleID (so I can sign into my AppleID with my personal email address, with my @icloud.com address, and my @me.com address and all are logging into the exact same AppleID).
You can also make an AppleID directly when signing up for an iCloud account on an Apple device. In that case, the @icloud.com email is the only AppleID user Login ID.
So it depends if you create the icloud account using an existing personal email based AppleID, or create the iCloud account at the same time as creating an AppleID.