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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> Like many long time Mac users, I had one Apple ID for iCloud and another one for iTunes. I can’t remember exactly how this happened but I know I’m not alone.

Here's a common way this happened.

1. You got an iTunes account first, before the predecessor of iCloud even existed. The Apple ID this created was associated with your regular email address.

2. You got a .Mac or MobileMe account early on. Those originally required you to use an email address at one of the Apple-owned domains (@mac.com or, I think, @mobileme.com, and maybe one or two more). Thus you ended up with another Apple ID associated with that email address.

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Yep. I’ve been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years, for various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps, etc.). It’s one of the special ones where you can’t change the email address you use to sign in with, you have to use @mac.com.

Annoyed me enough that I burned 15 years of purchases and other history to start again from scratch on a new ID I control completely.

But I can’t get rid of the old one, and it has some link to my phone number due to it using 2FA which cannot be removed, since 2FA is a one way trip. Which confuses the hell out of the Apple Watch (No one can add me for activity sharing since I switched to the new Apple ID).

And yes, every device under my control has been wiped and reset without a restore, no go.

Hotel California…

> Yep. I’ve been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years, for various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps, etc.). It’s one of the special ones where you can’t change the email address you use to sign in with, you have to use @mac.com.

This is no longer true. I was able to change the primary email address on my @mac.com account to my personal domain. I did this maybe a year ago. The @mac.com address is still associated as an alias I can’t delete but it’s no longer the primary address.

That’s exactly the order for me. My iTunes account was so old that it wasn’t even an email address, it was just a username. I don’t mind the two separate accounts for iCloud vs iTunes, but was annoyed when Apple aggressively started trying to force me to change away from a “username” to an account login based on an “email address”. I finally caved and did it a while back, being told that I wouldn’t need to re-login on every device, but that turned out to be a lie. I’ve also had to call Apple three times to get some kind of “security alert” cleared on the account (they seem to immediately know the issue and fix it quickly, but won’t describe why it happens) following the change or otherwise I’m blocked from making purchases.

I got the iTunes account a long, long time ago. And then when I heard the @me accounts were going to go free, I got one so I could name-squat. And then when I totally drink the Apple Kool-Aid I find out that I can't merge the two accounts, even though I've changed the iTunes account email a couple times.

So now it's a continuous exercise in trying to remember which account I use for what. Essentially, if it involves money, it's the iTunes account. Well, except to pay for the iCloud storage. Yeah, pretty straightforward.

For me the Apple ID has always been the one and only.

What I got later on as an unwanted extra, was an @icloud.com email address that was linked with my existing Apple ID.

@me.com, not @mobileme.com. But yep.

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