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But it's not without its idiotic blunders. Topping the list is Apple's insistence that your user ID be an E-mail address. That's not just a bad idea, but it has resulted in untold numbers of people with numerous Apple IDs and content bought with all of them.

discuss

ralfd|13 years ago

I actually think this is a good idea. An email address is unique and easy to remember for the user.

The stupid stuff is the following:

This was not always required. I think there was a transition period were it was not enforced but only advised on the register page. And also somewhat ambigous like "Enter here your Apple ID username eg. BruceWayne@mac.com" I know two people who entered their (company) name in such a way, but without really having a dotmac address! And then dotmac was changed to Mobile Me and even though me.com was retained for iCloud I couldn't use an "old" Mobile Me email-adress, which was sad because it was a nice address with the initials of my name, but had to make a new me.com iCloud account/address. Really Confusing.

batista|13 years ago

Which you can merge to the same account [edit: actually, no, you can just use in tandem].

But, really, how would that be different if the user ID was a random name? People could still have "numerous Apple IDs and content bought with all of them".

philo23|13 years ago

As far as I'm aware you can't merge Apple IDs and it has been said a few times that it isn't likely to happen, I might be wrong however.

If it does exist, do you happen to know the URL as I've been looking to do this for a while.

kalleboo|13 years ago

You can't use them in tandem anymore if you want to enable automatic download. Then iOS locks you to one account for 90 days.