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0 pointsmakeitdouble2y ago0 comments

I think many people end up in that situation.

An Apple account is required in many situations (e.g. you want to download something from the Mac Store, you want Find My Mac etc.), but Apple doesn't cleanly support multiple accounts on any of their devices (and they probably have no incentives to do so)

It's also a PITA to have single devices with single accounts. For instance 2FA is a pain, you also can't use features like sidecar.

All in all, Apple is really bad at this and makes you jump through hoops if you intend to have clean separation between your work and personal accounts.

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lxgr2y ago

That's exactly the problem, in a nutshell. Everything is tangled in a big ball of yarn with Apple:

Theoretically the iTunes/App Store/TV account is independent of iCloud – except that it's tangled to Apple Podcasts.

- iMessage used to be mostly standalone (iCloud sync was explicitly optional!) – but not it's tied to iCloud via contact key verification.

- Books is a weird mix of iCloud (for media) and iTunes (for purchases).

- Having my device as a trusted login factor is a complete mess: I still haven't figured out what makes or doesn't make a device "capable of generating authentication codes".

- iTunes subscriptions can somehow only be managed on an Apple device or iTunes – and logging in for that purpose messes up podcasts (see the first point).

At least on macOS, it's possible to make a second account and log in to most of these cleanly, but it's still a hassle compared to e.g. Google's seamless support for multiple accounts in almost all of their products.

octo_t2y ago

The solution I landed on is having 2 iCloud accounts in the same “family” so things can be shared, but in a controlled manner.

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