No it doesn’t Steve, wherever you may be.
Caveat lector. This is posted as therapy for me. You probably don’t want to read it.
What doesn’t work is the Apple ID. It has caused me more frustration in the past month than you can imagine — and while I am occasionally obtuse, I remain, like Yogi Bear, smarter than the average.
Here, as concisely as I can explain it, is what has happened.
I began eight years ago with one Apple ID (October 31, 2003, to purchase Peter Malick’s album New York City featuring Norah Jones). Through 500+ iTunes tracks, a few movies, and a few hundred apps I continued to use this ID, let’s call it NMK. (This is not the actual ID.) All my Apple devices (two iMacs, a MacBook Pro, my first two iPhones, an iPad, two iPods and two Apple TVs) are registered with this Apple ID.
In 2008 I purchased MobileMe, Apple’s email/syncing/online storage service. MobileMe required that my Apple ID have an email suffix (@mac.com or @me.com, they are interchangeable). Unbeknownst to me, that turned my Apple ID into two Apple IDs. Let’s call the second one NMK @mac.com (but that is not actually it).
Which was OK. I didn’t even know except every once in a while I would sign into email with my first, the store ID (NMK) and get rejected, or sign into the store with my email ID (NMK with the @mac.com) and get rejected. I, alas, never gave it much thought, just changed the ID thinking the sign-in requirements were different, not that I was dealing with two different IDs. After all the unique ID part was the same for both! The password was the same for both! The credit card was the same for both!
Until iOS 5 and iCloud last month.
I had a helluva time getting it to work until I finally realized I had two different Apple IDs — and it took me two frustrating days to realize that. Ultimately I learned to sign up to the store with the first and to iCloud with the second. Everything seemed to work, though my OCD caused me to twitch. [I bought an iPhone 4S last month. I see now that I registered it to the second account, unlike every other Apple device I own.]
Then this week, iTunesMatch became available — for $24.99 a year it matches your iTunes library in the cloud so that all of your music is available to all of your devices. Very nice. (It does seem to work reasonably well.)
I subscribed to iTunesMatch Monday without thinking about which ID I was using. And I used the second, the iCloud ID. The one where I have only one device. The one where I own no iTunes music or movies. The one where I cannot update my apps. The one I don’t use with my Apple TVs for Home Sharing.
So, this week, by telephone or email, I have dealt with four different Apple customer service reps to correct my mistake. As Apple claims to be unable to merge Apple IDs (WTF?) or to transfer purchases between IDs, I suggested they refund my iTunesMatch subscription and let me start over with the correct Apple ID. A little while ago this is what I was told:
“With that in mind, I consulted two supervisory agents to seek assistance and a possible refund. Ken, I am truly sorry, both have let me know that because of the nature of iTunesMatch, we do not have the option to provide a refund. If I could make this right I certainly would.”
Apple’s solution is to log in and out of the two IDs depending on whether I want to update purchases or listen to the music in the cloud. “[Y]ou can manually manage your devices and content and enjoy purchases from both accounts.
Manually manage! Manually!? WTF?
(This is even stupider than it sounds. When I sign into the store to buy or update an app for example, all of the iTunesMatch data disappears. And, as I have thousands of tracks, it takes considerable time to reload it on any of my exclusively Apple devices.)
So, it doesn’t just work then, does it?
It all comes down to DRM. You don’t actually own any of the digital items you bought from iTunes. If you did, this wouldn’t be any kind of problem at all.
I think DRM is incidental to this problem actually. I can access all of the music in the cloud or in iTunes on my iMac (98% of it from CD). I just have to be have different IDs to do so.
Though you may be correct in that the whole Apple ID thing may be tied to their agreement with the music industry.
I should add that I am not complaining about iTunesMatch, just Apple’s whole inability to manage the Apple ID business effectively. I like iTunes match, hence my frustration not having it “just work.”
Specifically, the thing I was talking about is that you can buy a track from iTunes, and that music is bound forever to the Apple ID you used to purchase it. There’s no real way to transfer ownership of it, hence you can’t merge the accounts.
However, if I recall, on most Apple devices you can flash a reset, and then sign into those accounts with the Cloud ID. If most of your music is CD based, then you should be able to upload it all to the Cloud no problem, and then in iTunes you can “share” the DRMd stuff with the Cloud ID (since you can authorize five computers with it).
Pain in the ass, but it might be the only way to make it work.
Oh, and what jerks for not refunding you the money. That part blows my mind, knowing how much Apple gear you’ve bought over the years. $25 is a drop in the water trough to keep a customer like you happy.
oh my God.. TOOOOOOOOmuch and it isnt even the THE phone, you know, the one that Obama has. What in the???
Wow..NMK, I have EXACTLY the same issue and history with Apple IDs. I have resisted transitioning to iCloud in the weird hope that merge will be possible prior to June, when I have to switch…In addition, my whole fam uses both IDs to make purchases, so we have a few hundred purchases on each ID (the “name” one, and the “name@mac.com” one). It’s a rotten situation–can’t they just allow merging of all accounts using the same credit card??
Manually manage. What a joke. Apple should be able to enable multiple, automated sign ons from your device. Jesus, I can manage my personal email, my work email, my various fantasy teams, Salesforce, my yelp account, my Twitter account, Facebook, foursquare, etc. all on my iPhone. Yet, Apple can’t write an app to allow you to dynamically change between the apple ids you need to?
DRM allows you to access content on a specific number of devices, so it is not a DRM issue, otherwise they wouldn’t tell you to do it manually. This is Steve Jobs 101, no customer input during creation and limited feedback after launch. He knew best what we wanted and needed. So obviously, this is not something you need Ken.
Good luck getting anywhere with Big Brother.