Can I merge 2 Apple IDs?

This answer is by far the most comprehensive advice all the way around if you want to know what you can do and how the issue Apple refuses to solve impacts your user experience with Apple. The issue for me is not identical, but does reflect the desire to manage all my purchases and purchase history from a single unified interface.

Everything from Apple under one umbrella as it should be.

I wanted to expand the answer that Jim has offered us.

What you need to know before you open the box is that from the begining your APPLE ID is your passkey for everything related to any Mac, or Apple product. Not just for iTunes and music, video, and your apps, but your hardware, software, O/S, service contracts, Apple Store receipts both via the App Store and the Apple Store.

I am certain Apple could solve this in an instant if they had the intellectual capital, which is to really say the focus. A good reason NOT to goto work for Apple relates to how they simply ignore real-world customer issues in their forums and support line. I seldom see an Apple employee put anything in any forum anywhere to actuall solve "your" issue, versus offering you a kludge work around, or a lame excuse in lieu of actually helping you.

I am generally extremely satisified with all Applites that I encounter, but the "party line" gets a touch obnoxious from time to time. I found this post today as result of wanting to just check and see if anything has changed. Not really, since inception they have bastardized the interoperability between the . ME, .MAC and .COM domain account information.

The good news is that if you only ever create ONE id, everything will be fine, but they simply cannot interpret their directory servers so they can speak the same lingo. "Apparently."

Thanks for your time. You will love your new Mac, but there are some quirky Apple Corporate decision makers to contend with just like any other company where they only want your money and your "rating" to make sure they can hedge the bets they play in the stock market.

Understandable? Sure, necessary? Not really.

Just one guys "real" opinion.

Ciao, Allen

I have a somewhat related question for anyone who can answer it. I originally had a .mac email address, which got changed to a .me address. I have since only used the .me address, yet I continue to get email to the .mac email address, even though everything I use email for has been changed over. I now have switched over to iCloud. The problem I am having is that I am getting spam email like crazy coming to my .mac email, which in turn comes to my iCloud account through the .me email address. Is there any way to delete the .mac email associated with my account??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! 😉

Hello All - I too am having ot deal with this issue. My wife inadvertently ended up with two accounts and now cannot merge them. Honeslty I love Apple products but their ability to execute on the software and cloud front have failed miserably. My solution - I have migrated everything I can to other platforms (Google, Spotify, SugarSync) and everything is working great. I have endured nine years of pain with them and just decided it was time for a divorce on the app.cloud front.

Apple, please listen, you need to get these issues fixed and soon. Not only is it frustrating that this does not work you are completely ignoring the community that loves you. You do not have to look too far in the past to see how giants before you have fallen by not listening to their customers.

Loving my mac - with other companies apps!

Well, I read through all of this and it doesn't seem to help me with my problem. My wife and I had two iphones, an ipad and two computers between us. She had one Apple ID, that went to her email acct. I have another. She passed away last year and now I have songs stored with her ID, most purchases from our home computer went through her account and all are tied to her old email address.

All I want to do is change her account to my email address and delete my account since most of our stuff is with her account. But because I have another account it won't let me use my email address.

For the life of me I don't understand why Apple doesn't want me to be able to consolodate accounts in this manner. If I could simply delete my account it would solve my problem but from this post and others it doesn't seem like they want me to do that.

That one is actually easy. Sign up for a free hotmail or gmail account. Change your account's email address. You can now change her account.

It seems after I had posted of my temporary success, my Apple ID that I was logged into after I completed this miracle merging, was displayed instead of the address I had altered my Apple ID to become (which was an @me.com email address,) ending what was the @me.com address with @me.oom. I cannot think of a logical reason that would explain this, that does not involve conspiracy, personal vendetta and a sense of satisfaction from rendering my miracle merging process now ineffective. I've decided to post this follow-up to my experience as I have read of a similar experience where this user I'm referring to's Apple ID was altered to an innexistent Apple ID (@me.oom) from a previously existent functioning Apple ID (@me.com,) disabling access to the altered once functional Apple ID. In order to perform any Apple-related activity that required me to sign in to my Apple ID, I identified no other solution other than altering my Apple ID to the Apple ID I previously used. This was a very stressful experience, as I had achieved success only for the success to become no longer successful.

But, "Macs just work". Apple can do no wrong. Hey, it doesn't have to work if it looks this pretty, right?

thanks for advice

I too, have 2 apple IDs, my gmail address which I have used to make iTunes purchases for years and my @me address. For "all things apple" I have wanted to use my me.com address for a while. This is what I did:

1. Every time I made a purchase on iTunes I burned the music to a back up CD. So the protected music I would always delete the original purchase and copy it back to iTunes from the CD. This left all my music in iTunes unprotected. I could play it without logging in and move it around on my computers more easily.

2. Once Apple started offering the purchase of unprotected music, that is what I always purchased for the above reasons.

3. I then copied ALL my retail store purchased CDs into iTunes so my entire music collection is digital.

4. Since it is unprotected, I can sign in with my me.com address and from now on make purchases using that.

I also purchased iTunes Match with my new address so my entire music collection is in the cloud. It worked great.

That doesn't work for movies, of course, but I only had a few that I purchased through iTunes, I would usually rent movies, so the impact on that was minimal. I've used Amazon for instant video purchases for quite a while, more flexible than iTunes.

The App store is a little different, I have to install old apps logged in with the old gmail ID. I then signed out and signed back in with my me.com account and make all new purchases with that. Because of the beauty of Time Machine I have rarely had to log back into the Mac App store to reinstall something. I just copy it from my time machine backup when putting it on a new Mac.

For contacts, I just used the sync feature to sync all gmail contacts to my mac, then signed in to iCloud with my me.com ID and synced to iCloud. That also worked like a dream.

I still use Google Docs/Drive for keeping my files/documents in the cloud. Apple has completely missed the boat so far with cloud files/documents and sharing.

I then reset my iPhone to use my me.com account. Fortunately, I only had a couple of inexpensive paid apps on my iphone and I just paid for them again with my me.com account, just to simplify things.

This proces worked easily for me only because I had been creating the backup music CDs from the early days of iTunes and creating an unprotected music library. But, maybe something in this process will be helpful to someone else.

Enjoy!

Much time has passed since your post Jim, and I was wondering if you've learned anything new.

My story:

In January signing up for itunes match I had ID issues, they directed me to a page where I could make my primary email (originalID@mac.com) my sole ID. (I believe this page has been changed since)

Come to find out today that I now have TWO ids, originalID and originalID@mac.com and have been making purchases on the @mac.com account. Needless to say this isn't working.

This is all made more confusing because it only recently became a problem.

And then today apple phone support essentially told me it was my fault and I had to live with it.

Has anybody had more succes with this issue lately?

As far as I understand, it is not possible at this moment. I found this at Apple FAQ into Apple ID page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hi guys..

I originally had a non email Apple ID, and when iOS5 came out I was forced to create a new one email based ID. I then ended up with two IDs, the original for purchases, and the new one for all things iCloud. It worked ok but was very annoying and I very much wanted them to be merged. And up until yesterday I was living with it.

I logged into the applid.apple.com and changed my new email based Apple ID to a spare/back up email address (if you don't have one just go create one on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc). After verifying this email was corrected I logged back in with my non email based Apple ID and used the 'upgrade to email' option.

My original Apple ID is now under my email address (all my app. purchases) and surprisingly my iTunes Match subsription, which was under my second account is now attached to my first account - Apple must tie it to the email and the change email option doesn't seem to update that.

The only things I've lost is my iCloud back ups, which I figure isn't a big loss anyway. Any contacts, calendar events, etc you can merge back into the Cloud.

Now I'm not sure if this will work for anyone else, but it did for me.

Good luck!

HELP!!! I recently switched everything over to iCloud (or so I thought...) and now only some of my calendars & contacts are syncing through to my iPhone and only some (different) calendars & contacts are syncing back to my iMac. I feel like I'm losing my mind for the past 2 weeks until I finally realized that I have 2 separate apple IDs.

All of the separate calendars I've been using on mobileme (about 7, each with a different color to help me organize events) still exist on my mac, however, they do not exist on my iPhone. If I enter a new appaointment on my phone my sub-account options are now limited to 3 "colors" and they aren't going back to the mac. Likewise any new iCal entry I make on my mac goes to my phone in one of the 7 separate colored accounts but I can't edit all of them.

Does this make sense to anyone?

I suppose I need to consolodate the 2 calendars (one for each apple ID) into one apple ID so everything will go back to the way it was but just be on iCloud now.

I will send good karma to anyone who can not only understand my problem but who can also tell me how to fix it! I seem to remember hating my pc because nothing was simple like the mac but it's not feeling that way lately...

Apple didn't do themselves (or us!) when they changed the goalposts for Apple ID formats. I've had an apple ID for three or four years, but when I bought an iPhone and tried to register iCloud my Apple ID was not in the required format - it needed an upper case letter, which my original ID did not have. So, I've ended up with two apple IDs - an iCloud/IOS App store one and and iTunes/ mac App store one. This is silly but it seems I cannot do anything about it. So now I invariably choose the wrong one first time around whatever I'm doing. Come on Apple this needs to be sorted.

I'm fairly convinced that there WAS a mention of how to merge IDs on the Apple site until quite recently but it certainly isn't there now. Maybe I just saw the question "How do I merge two Apple ID's?" and never got to read the answer that it was not possible.

Hi Yorkie29,

That's the issue I had. Since changing the newer Apple ID to a spare email, and then the original non-email Apple ID was allowed to be 'upgraded' into the email name. Everything that was mapped to the email still seems to be linked ok.

--Cynan.