Two Apple Ids sharing one computer

mitchbert wrote:

I have a long, complicated question.  

My wife and I each have a mac desktop computer, mine is a new M1 and hers is an older 2017 model.  

We have together another M1 at our vacation home and it is set up to mimic my home M1 computer with iCloud. 

We have two separate individual Apple IDs.  I have an iPhone and she has an iPhone plus two iPad Pros (one WIFI + cellular and one WIFI only).  We would like to eliminate her old 2017 mac.  

We would like to share some items across all devices (Music library, Photo library, Calendar and Contacts).  

We would like to keep some items specific to our personal devices (Apps, she has a lot of games that she doesn’t want me to mess with and I have several technical programs plus excel and word that I don’t want her to mess up, she also has her personal mail and messages and I have mine) We want to keep these items specific to our own devices.  

Somehow, I think I might be able to do this with some combination of Apple One, Family Sharing, and iCloud.  I’m thinking the best way to share music around the family would be to sign up for a family plan of Apple Music + and forget about all the music we individually purchased to iTunes.  Times are changing and this is probably just a better way for music now, correct?  

What would be the best way to share our Photos, Calendars and Contacts?  Apple’s Family Sharing might take care of photos but doesn’t seem to handle sharing calendars or contacts.  Is there some other way to handle these? 

 Apple One Family Sharing would give me the Music +. And a shared iCloud account, which might get us a shared calendar and contacts, but would seem to force sharing of email accounts.  As you can tell I’m slightly confused so would appreciate any advice anyone has.

Long and complicated is right, including the one long paragraph.

I do not see how anyone can sort this out on-line here, including all the minutiae.

The simplest solution would be buy another notebook for your vacation home, and set it up individually as you prefer without all the slicing and dicing —why overly complicate the situation...

https://www.apple.com/mac/

You can always Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)

Combination of the following:

1. Use different login accounts for you and the wife on the Macs
2. Login to each account with your personal iCloud accounts
3. Sign up for 200GB Family Storage iCloud plan
4. Sign up for Apple Music if that's what you want to do
5. Share iPhoto libraries
6. Backup the wife's 2017 iMac and restore on the M1 Mac(s) using Migration Assistant and Time Machine to her own user account. Hopefully, you have sufficient storage.
7. Turn on Fast User Switching and you can toggle between the two accounts on the Mac's.

Pretty much doing all this without much difficulty with the wife. If you setup Family Sharing for Store purchases you can share the App purchases as well.