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Level 3

535 points

iCloud Sync - Multiple devices and one AppleID

So your contacts and calendar will sync automatically between your Mac, iPhone, iPad. And you can backup your stuff. And it does this based on your AppleID.

I, like I suspect many others, have an iPhone and iPad for me and my significant other. And we have two Macs. We both used the same AppleID. We clearly would not want to "merge" our contacts and calendars, or any backups.

Why do we share an AppleID? So we only have to purchase music, iOS apps, Mac apps, once for the family. Multiple AppleIDs is not an option as that negates a primary benefit of the Apple ecosystem. Apple has been pretty family friendly up to this point. You can share an AppleID with 5 devices today (if you have that many Macs or PCs), in my case we are talking 2. And they did still say you can buy Lion in the app store and use it on all your AppleID authorized machines.

I suppose you could maybe just turn all that stuff off and forget the iCloud part of Lion and iOS5. But I have to believe that is going to cut out a significant segment of the population from using iCloud services.

Anyone know how Apple is going to handle that situation?

Posted on Jun 9, 2011 7:25 AM

Best reply

timfromdavie

Level 1

10 points

Posted on Oct 9, 2011 12:34 PM

I am in the same situation. iCloud allows you to create a new account for free. Create an individual accout for each of your email, contacts, calandar, ect. and use the one you have been using for itunes only. That will allow you sync all your itunes stuff accross all the devices and wont interfere with your personal stuff. I am doing it now and love it. I have over 20,000 songs on my ipad and my iphone and loving every monute of icloud so far.

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16 replies

kahlel

Level 1

0 points

Mar 22, 2012 11:46 AM in response to user1724

Hi there

this topic has been really helpful and i think i now understand what i need to do to have one itunes where we can have both our iphones and soon to arrive ipad connected to it.

my query now is that before i found this i had set up 2 seperate log on accounts on our laptop so we had seperate itunes accounts so we have different apps and music on each itunes account with seperate apple ids.

is there any way to combine all our purchases onto one itunes account under one apple id rather than set up a third log on and account for the ipad.

we want to share purchased apps and music etc just not contacts, email, pictures, personal stuff.

any advice is appreciated

iCloud Sync - Multiple devices and one AppleID