iCloud items in preference pane greyed out in Yosemite

Dear Starprowler,

I appreciated your post and so wanted it to work - BUT . . . my iMac 27" OS 10.9.5 (mavericks) won't apply the privileges to the enclosing folders either on the Home folder or the Library folder (as was suggested in another post). My problem is the same that others have, i.e. that the preferences on my iCloud account are all greyed out and that I need to enter a password EVERY frickin' time I log into Mail for ALL my accounts. Would you or anyone possibly have any other suggestions?

OK. I found I had the same issue. I tried the permissions route but it didn't work. Then I went to my keychain to see if I had the wrong password and realized that I had recently looked up another password and failed to lock my keychain. When I relocked it everything worked fine again.

Ok, after an hours online chat with an Apple Support technician my issue is fixed. I experienced the exact same issues as people have outlined here, namely changing permissions - didn't work

creating a new user account with Admin rights - this worked

However, the latter is a fudge! So, what worked was booting into safe mode, opening up preferences, logging out of iCloud and back in. Issue resolved. I then restarted the MAC and logged into my original account which was experiencing the issue. Low and behold all is now Ok.

Got mine working as well. Way to go!

The iCloud icon wasn't enabled until I rebooted my Mac.

If you didn't do that, it may work for you as well.

The settings for iCloud in System Settings on my iMac have been greyed out for over a week. It was very frustrating trying to find the right fix.

Thanks so much Starprowler!

Resetting the permissions on the Home folder worked!

What worked for me was going into Calendar and selecting Accounts... under the Calendar top menu. A dialog called Internet Accounts will pop up and iCloud will be one of the options on the left-hand side. Select it from the list and you should be able to modify your iCloud settings. The next time you access iCloud from System Preferences, those settings should no longer be greyed out.

Thanks

Resetting the permissions work like a treat.

I was helping a friend to resolve this issue, them having had similar symptoms:

- settings greyed out

- apple id entered correctly but has no effect

Thanks to the helpful suggestions of other people above (plus me trying to avoid signing out of iCloud and being reluctant to mess with home folder permissions), I just:

- opened Disk Utility

- repaired file permissions

- restarted the computer (which may not have been necessary)

and iCloud settings are now enabled again :-)

I don't quite understand the actions you took. Do you mean to say you logged into a different account to the one in which you were originally experiencing iCloud problems after booting in safe mode? You seem to give that impression. But, the way I'm experiencing this problem, you can sign in and out of iCloud in the account that's having the problems with no trouble at all. It's just that when signed in, everything is greyed out.

Can you clarify please?

Unfortunately I'm also suffering the same problem. Am working through the suggested solutions - resetting permissions hasn't fixed it. Will post if I find the fix.

Update. I tried all of the suggested fixes including signing in through a different (Guest) account and signing out/in in safe mode - no joy for me unfortunately, I still can't access iCloud to adjust anything in System Preferences.

However... while signing back in the assistant pre-selects several facilities (Contacts, Safari, etc) to turn on as default - this turned on what I was after by good luck - but I still have no actual control over iCloud on my Mac.

Grrrr.

Thanks for that.

I'm currently talking to Apple about this. After the phone tech did a lot of destructive stuff (e.g. moving ~/Library/Containers away causing me to lose all my books in iBooks) he had me run some log collection process and I sent the results to Apple for engineers to analyse. That was a few days ago now, and I think I've mainly restored my Mac to its former state, thankfully. I'll report back if any solution is found.

I also had this problem. For me, I traced the issue to the fact that my box is behind a filtering proxy that spoofs the User-Agent string. A direct internet access fixed the problem. The relevant system.log error in this instance is:

Jul 19 16:34:11 hostname cdpd[3011]: Unknown client type with bundleID 'com.apple.preferences.icloud.remoteservice'