A Drastic Solution to a Simple Problem

After that, they opened normally

I reformatted the test partition for Yosemite over what should have been a fairly simple matter. It came to a question of my ID. Long ago, when the iTunes Store started, I created a login using my (then) e-mail address (it’s still my e-mail address; I get all e-mail sent to it, but it forwards to the account I actually tell people to send to).

When I created my Yosemite install, I was asked for my Apple ID. The only problem is that my Apple ID is not my iCloud ID. That’s my @me address. The @me address showed up in the iCloud settings for Yosemite, noting that it was pending on response to an e-mail. I clicked the “Resend” button. Nothing.

Since so many things hinge on the iCloud ID, clearly if I were going to make a real test of Yosemite, I needed my iCloud ID, but since it wouldn’t let me switch things over, there was only choice: reformat.

It’s not so bad when you’re dealing with a 50Gb drive, a handful of documents (which I spent a moment copying over to my other drive), and only a few applications. I booted into Mavericks, launched Disk Utility, and goodbye Yosemite. Once the drive was wiped clean (which took just a few minutes), I did a fresh install of Yosemite. That took about fifteen minutes. As before, I did not import any settings.

Truth be told, what I really need to do is change my Apple ID. I’ll do that. (Of course, then I’ll have to log out everywhere I’ve used it and log back in again. Here’s the first step:

1. Sign out of iCloud, the iTunes Store, App Store, FaceTime, Find My Friends, Find My iPhone, and iMessage on each device that uses your current Apple ID for these services.

So I’ll be waiting a bit before I go to Step 2.

This time, when I was installing Yosemite, I used my iCloud ID instead of my Apple ID. When I got to the Feedback Assistant, I found I had to use my Apple ID. As of Day 5 of using Yosemite, I haven’t had anything to report.

Once all was done, I wanted to go to Blogger (this should be no surprise). I use my @me.com address to log into Blogger. Once I entered that into Safari, Safari wanted to know (as it did the time before), if I wanted to use this e-mail address Mail, Messages, Calendar, and so forth. This time, I said yes. They all opened up.

My first thought was, “oh, I was going to wait until tomorrow to do that.” But I was there. What the hell. Since I had trimmed down my mailbox, things moved in fairly quickly, and I was up and going. Now I could check my calendar while in Yosemite. I still can’t access files in iCloud. Byword, the app I use to type up (most of) these blog posts doesn’t see iCloud in Yosemite, and I’m not setting up iCloud Drive (and if I did, my iOS devices wouldn’t see it). There is still that workflow issue.

There were a few things to tweak in the morning, but so far, not too scary.