Alternate Apple ID mystery

Question

Alternate Apple ID mystery

See the caption? "You can use your Apple ID or your Alternate Apple ID to access everything you do with Apple". Sounds to me like a merging of the accounts?

The person that this Apple ID belongs to, can sign in with either emails and its one iCloud account!

I have 2 Apple IDs:

iTunes Media purchases (apps, music, movies..) with Apple ID 'name@domain.com'

Personal iCloud (email, contacts, calendar) with Apple ID 'name@me.com'

I have tried before to merge these two and I know its not possible but maybe by linking them as an Alternative Apple ID, it will solve my issues and I can have one Apple ID for everything.

Any ideas?

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), i7 250GB

Posted on Mar 2, 2013 7:06 PM

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Answer 1

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Mar 2, 2013 7:25 PM in response to Rod Christiansen

I believe this only applies to an iCloud account ID, where your @me, @mac or @icloud email address can be used interchangeably with your primary email address (ID) to sign into your iCloud account or other services.

As far as I know, there is still no way to merge different Apple IDs. You could contact iTunes store support with your example and ask them for clarification on this: http://www.apple.com/emea/support/itunes/contact.html.

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Answer 2

Mar 3, 2013 12:25 AM in response to Rod Christiansen

Hi Rod,

When you create an AppleID with an existing mail address (let's say johndoe@johndoe.com) you have the option to, next to this, create an iCloud mail address (or, in the past a me.com mail address/mac.com mail address). You do this by going to iCloud on one of your devices and activating the mail tab. This will allow you to create such a mail address and this mail address is then linked to your account as both an active, working mail address and an AppleID alias that you can use to login to all of Apple's services.

This mail address, however, has to be new - it can't be existing - and it therefore can NOT be used to merge two accounts. Apple does not allow you to merge two accounts at this moment and it does not look like it will be allowing this in the future.

Kind regards,

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