I went through an interesting adventure this weekend. I found myself trying but unable to reset the password for my Apple ID account — or so I thought, anyway. It wasn’t until I spent a couple of hours trying to fix things on my own that I gave up and turned to Apple Support instead. To my relief, the support rep recognized my problem more or less instantly. He showed me that I had logged into different accounts for iCloud and the Apple Store. Then he explained there are implicit perils when multiple accounts get interlinked in that way.

What Are the Implicit Perils When Multiple Accounts Get Interlinked?

Long, long story short when I was trying to change my password for one account I ended up changing it for another. The iCloud account took precedence over the Apple ID account for whatever reason. I didn’t see any visual cues to tell me that’s what I was doing. Thus, it took a call to tech support to clear up my misunderstanding.

Now, though, things have been set straight. I’ve got known usable passwords for both Apple accounts and have disentangled use of the two IDs on my iPhone which caused that immensely frustrating and bizarre set of symptoms and circumstances.

One More Thing, Though…

Right now, I can use my credentials on Firefox to access appleid.apple.com. But those same credentials don’t work on Chrome. I’m mystified and mortified, but I have no earthly idea why this is happening. Aha! Internet research tells me it’s likely a cookies or history issue (apparently old cached credentials trump newly entered ones at the keyboard). Just another wonderful aspect of living large as a digital person, I guess.

I swear! Sometimes I spend more time digging through login and credentialing issues to access accounts than I actually spend using those accounts directly. Sigh.