iCloud - You can't sign in at this time - Catalina - mid 2012 Mac Book Pro

Update - today I wiped the hard drive clean and restored from Recovery Volume and Time Machine. When it got to the point of asking for iCloud authentication, it claimed server error. iCloud is fine on iPad. (log out, and log back in) Went to my Windows 10 machine. Logged out of iCloud, and tried to log back in. Didn't work. Uninstalled iCloud (for Windows) and re-installed it. No such luck. Won't let me log back in.

Okay, I'm now convinced the difficulty is on Apple's side. (it's happened before - "Oh wait, your account looks totally messed up. We'll have to correct our stuff here. We'll let you know..." That actually happened about two years ago.)

Okay. Without any doing anything, login capability returned this noon, all by itself. Except that iCloud acting weird. Notes won't sync, (they're fine on my iPhone) and settings periodically reports that Find My can't turn off without authorization, (no one asked it to...) and that some applications can't change without signing in again. A system re-start only starts the whole thing all over again.

Just tried it. Nope. No change.

Sorry “Some services require to to sign in again” -> Continue (have seen it now many times)

• Jim H.

Sorry about the breath thing. Too much sugar, I think.

Will Google that to find out exactly how you find that out. As far as OS, it’s a mid-2012 MacBook Pro, and Catalina is as far as that can go. Budget won’t support a hardware upgrade… yet…

Nope. Did an OS re-install from the Recovery Volume. No change. Exact same things happening.