In September, there had been some hope that Apple was working on a solution to allow users to merge multiple Apple IDs into one. The news came from an encouraging phone call from Apple's executive relations team saying that they were aware of the issue and seemingly working on it.
Now that iCloud has launched, many have been wondering if anything had come of the previous discussion. One reader emailed Tim Cook and received an official response. Apple is simply pointing users to a support document outlining your options for managing multiple Apple IDs. Unfortunately, merging is not one of the options.
Their recommended solution is, of course, to use the same Apple ID for both store purchases and iCloud. They also explicitly state that merging simply isn't an option:
Can I merge multiple Apple IDs into one?
You cannot merge two or more Apple IDs into a single one. You can, however, use one Apple ID for iCloud services and another Apple ID for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match). See “Using one Apple ID for iCloud and a different Apple ID for Store Purchases” above for details.
The document does outline the possibility to use one Apple ID for store purchases and another for iCloud, but that's as far as it goes.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Apple employees, therefore, have at least four (their company email address). In addition to that, I had one given to me by iTunes Store support for iTunes, and one prior to the usage of email addresses (if I recall correctly, back then it was just a username, but later they required an email address which became your Apple ID).
At last count I have 6 Apple IDs. It's ridiculous. It's probably only a matter of time before Apple gives me another.
Mail, contacts, calendars etc. all use that address as my iCloud account as of today. All the other one is for is for iTunes purchases.
While the current solution technically works fine, it just seems silly that Apple can't find a way to make this work. I can change my Apple ID in iTunes to a new email address if I want to with no trouble, why not my @me.com address?
There are many people who signed up today and there will be more in the future now that we're over the disaster that was MobileMe.
Insisting that people keep their old gmail accounts going doesn't sound like it would fit well with Apple's idea of enhancing their ecosystem.
:apple:
I don't care if Apple allows merging publicly but we testers had to create new IDs for iCloud pre-migration and are now stuck with two, unnecessary, IDs and some of us already paid for iTunes Match and storage upgrades :\