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Tell HN: Full macOS reinstall because Apple ID

320 pointsby adabaedover 3 years ago
Hello! Just wanted to share what just happened to me, maybe some Apple SWE here can take a look at this. I recently changed my macbook and created a new Apple ID for the new machine. For work, I like to have a unique ID and not reuse old ones. The problem is that, today, after 2 days of &quot;use&quot; (the first time the laptop is charged is to reinstall everything), Apple decided without notification that my account should be blocked for &quot;security reasons&quot;.<p>I tried to reset my password, but they blocked the whole account, it seems to me that they even deleted the account from the database as they could not locate the ID of other information (name, mail, etc.). Coming from another OS, one can imagine that you can swap two IDs and continue, but ... NO! Here you need to provide a password to log out, but since my account has been deleted, I don&#x27;t have any password. Also, one can imagine that a +2000$ machine designed for &quot;professional&quot; users can actually recover from these types of errors using magic links or text messages. They wanted me to wait for an appointment with the service. Just to reset an account!!<p>Why did I reinstall all? Every 30 seconds, a message appears asking me to check the ID.<p>TL;DR: Adult human crying.

25 comments

sersiover 3 years ago
PSA do not opt to login with your apple ID, it&#x27;s an option when setting up the computer, you should never ever accept it. There&#x27;s no reason to ever accept logging in with a non-local account (same for Windows but Microsoft is much more persistent in forcing this whereas at least it&#x27;s relatively easy to not enable it on macs)
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pshirshovover 3 years ago
Oh, that&#x27;s nothing new. In 2017 one of my colleagues got his account banned afterehe moved to a different country, he tried to talk with Apple over phone and ask why, they told him &quot;you know why&quot;. He didn&#x27;t know though.<p>edit: Just to clarify, I&#x27;m sure that it was a false-positive and Apple mishandled the situation in the worst manner possible. Don&#x27;t trust Apple your money and data.
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heisenbitover 3 years ago
Related AppleID nightmare. FIL forgot his password &amp; recovery questions and when migrating his iPhone to a new one I did an encryped backup&#x2F;restore and it resulted in the new iPhone also getting that broken AppleID. Unfortunately find my iPhone was active on the old one and now the new was was unusable and also could not be reset. Panic...<p>Finally recovered on some old backup his password but without the second factor it was impossible to get full control of the account. So I disabled FindMyIPhone, wiped the phone and set up a new AppleId and restored from a not encrypted backup.<p>Everything worked for a while until the old apps needed updating (Whatsapp...) and the iPhone asked for the password for the Apple Store. Now the new password did not work. Took us ages to figure out that it was asking for the old appleid password - iOS remembers with which account an app was bought but it does not tell you what AppleID it asks the password for when trying to update.
petemc_over 3 years ago
I had a Ship of Theseus moment after getting my laptop repaired by Apple. They pretty much had to replace everything except for the bottom case, so when I went to sign in with my apple id I got a message saying &quot;we have sent a message to your other device&quot;. But there was no other device. Took over a month to resolve and I also kept getting the annoying pop up message asking me to check the ID.
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adabaedover 3 years ago
Update: Finally I reinstalled everything without the ID and is working just fine, I&#x27;ll use my personal Apple ID to download Xcode and I&#x27;m never going to create a new one again.. Thank you so much for your comments!
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aspenmayerover 3 years ago
Login with the original Apple ID you had on the device on iCloud.com and check if the device is still associated with that Apple ID. If so, leave it for now. Then setup a support contact session with that same Apple ID with Apple at support.apple.com, and tell them to help with your secondary account issue. Once support says it’s okay, remove the device from the original Apple ID; it’ll automatically get added to your second work one when you login during OOBE.<p>After support clears up any issues with the second account, reinstall macOS on the device with Internet Recovery.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT204904" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT204904</a>
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anaisbettsover 3 years ago
It&#x27;s a new machine, and it doesn&#x27;t work. What do you do when you buy something and it breaks? Return it and ask for another one.
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jevotenover 3 years ago
Can someone explain for those of us less familiar with Apple - can a Macbook not be used without a valid Apple ID, that Apple can revoke at any time?
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gus_massaover 3 years ago
It&#x27;s probably not deleted, just marked as blocked. I didn&#x27;t heard too many horror stories about Apple, so you many be lucky. With other big companies &quot;deleted&quot; and &quot;blocked forever&quot; means &quot;blocked untill you make a big enough mess&quot;. Try posting in tweeter.<p>Do you have an screenshot and a photo of the bricked macbook? It adds a lot of realism to the complain.<p>Anecdote time: My wife bought a new Android phone and gave me her older phone. After a factory reset, the old phone asked for her gmail account before I could add my gmail account. It&#x27;s a nice anti thief feature, but it surprised me a lot!!! (What happens if you want to sell a used phone?)
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hdjjhhvvhgaover 3 years ago
A regular reminder about the gradual but steady shift from open computing to devices that you think you own but in fact it feels closer to renting, and the manufacturer has more and more tight control over it.
drglitchover 3 years ago
This reads like a machine that has DEP enabled and getting locked remotely ;)<p>On a more serious note, I ran macs on multiple occasions without an AppleID - it presents maybe one nag a month, usually when you accidentally open “Messages”.<p>Microsoft, sadly, has also been increasingly more annoying with pushing online accounts on people’s machines lately.
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dbg31415over 3 years ago
American who moved to Australia for work... Apple account was frozen, just totally bricked my $5k MBP. It only started working again once I got back to the US. For 3 weeks I had to use a pen and paper notebook and a borrowed shitty plastic-y Dell junk-book. Fucking Apple, they won&#x27;t help in these situations. They have some sort of security flag that gets tripped... and when you are one of the false positives they won&#x27;t do anything to help you.
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___qover 3 years ago
It took <i>two weeks</i> for my Apple ID email reset email to arrive. Since then I&#x27;ve learned to never use it for anything. I&#x27;m sorry for your loss.
Juliateover 3 years ago
Apple on one hand does sell iCloud (and all that sync between devices that goes with it) along with its hardware.<p>And on the other hand, only manages to handle accounts issues like we were still in the 90&#x27;s.<p>That is, brutally locking people out of their own systems (sometimes for explainable reasons, which should still be resolvable) without any possible discussion or recourse.<p>The only thing you can do is go at an Apple Store or call Apple support on the phone, only to spend hours and hours with them carefully following their scripts, sometimes escalating the issue to a more senior one, all of them sorry in the end that they can&#x27;t fix it, and asking you to still note them well, because the issue is not on their side but on Apple&#x27;s procedure wall.<p>Which makes the first selling point (&quot;all my life sync&#x27;d across my devices&quot;) moot at best, adversary at worst.<p>The senior population is especially vulnerable to account hijacking and loss of their account, and then, their data, and then their devices (at least, they can recover their devices with the help of someone else, but most of their data is lost).<p>And&#x2F;or something is definitely rotten in the account reset&#x2F;recovery procedures.
evercastover 3 years ago
@OP Since the machine is new, I wonder if you talked to Apple support on the phone? Did they tell you to visit the service in person? Also, out of curiosity, how can you have multiple personal&#x2F;professional Apple IDs? AFAIK you need to provide a separate phone number for each. It is not very easy to create multiple ones.
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KiDDover 3 years ago
The issue here is you keep creating AppleIDs. You should have only one or two and use them on your respective personal and work devices. With 2FA you really need to have more than one trusted device or you can easily lose access and have to go through the account recovery process which can take a while.
ixactoover 3 years ago
Had to deal with the bug where macOS does not login even with the correct password even on reinstall last year on several M1 macs. Frustrating to say the least!<p>Apple should not be able to control logon&#x2F;pw of local system at all, especially if they can’t get it right!
tobiasbischoffover 3 years ago
Lol, WTF. &quot;Full macOS reinstall because of dude has no idea how to use a computer&quot;<p>You can always just boot into single user and create a new local admin account, a matter of minutes.
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throwoutwayover 3 years ago
I somehow lost access to an AppleID. I dont even know how. I have the password, it&#x27;s saved in a Password Manager, and an old Mac is still logged in. But the new Mac would not accept my authentication (I do not recall the specific error message).<p>I gave up and created a new one, but lost all my old purchases.
znpyover 3 years ago
And you&#x27;re paying good money in hardware, developer fees and app store fees for this.<p>I just can&#x27;t understand how people actively choose to endure into this situation.
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mlindnerover 3 years ago
I&#x27;m confused by this. You don&#x27;t use your Apple ID to log into your computer. There is no Apple ID used to log into your computer.
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jollybeanover 3 years ago
Leave them an invoice for reimbursing them for your time wasted etc..<p>We need to normalize this.<p>Every time they pull some shenanigan on you - invoice them.
sneakover 3 years ago
Don&#x27;t ever put an Apple ID into a Mac. The only thing you lose is iCloud (mostly not e2e encrypted, so a privacy nightmare) and the App Store. Macs can still install non-App Store software, though, so you don&#x27;t actually need an Apple ID on them.<p>You&#x27;re just asking for paternalistic, Apple-knows-best trouble. Apple&#x27;s cloud services are mostly garbage, anyway.
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mlindnerover 3 years ago
New machine in what way? You bought from a retailer or apple? Was it perhaps a re-sold but brand new stolen device?
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causality0over 3 years ago
This is why I absolutely refuse to have anything but a local account on my primary desktop. My computer belongs to <i>me</i>, not some sociopathic megacorp in California.
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