SEPTEMBER 2020 MACWORLD 119HOW TO SWITCH UP YOUR
APPLE ID IF YOU’RE LEAVING
AN ORGANIZATION THAT
NEEDS ACCOUNT ACCESS
An Apple ID is a powerful hub for one’s
Apple-centric identity. However, what if
you use your Apple ID within an
organization—an organization that needs
access to Apple ID-linked purchases,
email, developer resources, and other
Cupertino-connected sites and services—
and you’re retiring or moving to another
place of employment?
Take measures before it’s too late for
the handoff. This is especially important
when two-factor authentication (2FA) is
enabled, because your former group could
wind up locked out of an account.
First, Apple lets you change the
address associated with an Apple ID under
a variety of circumstances. The easiest
method is if you’re using an address that’s
anything but an Apple-managed one that
ends in mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com,
as you can change that address to
anything—including an Apple-managed
one. (I provide the step-by-step
instructions in this November 2018 column
(go.macworld.com/nv18).)
In an institutional environment, like a
college or company, where the Apple ID is
an address managed by the organization, I
suggest that the folks taking over the
account create a new account that’s more
generic. One reader is retiring from his
college, and the Apple ID for his team’s
Apple Developer project is his address,
which will retire with him.
Instead of pointing the Apple ID to
another individual’s address, the group
could create [email protected]
and use that. Internally, that address could
forward to one or more individual tasked
with managing associated Apple services.
Then, if Apple changes Apple ID policies
about modifying the email address in the
future, this change protects against any
limitations.
(Another solution may be preserving
someone’s old email address and setting
up a permanent auto-reply that explains
they have left or retired, and only using the
incoming email box to check for
verification messages or to send email
required to verify access for Apple or
other services.)
If someone is using a personal mac.
com, me.com, or icloud.com address,
there’s no way to shift that over to
another address. Apple only allows Apple
IDs to move among third-party email
addresses. With an Apple-managed
address, you can only swap among
available aliases, shown at appleid.apple.
com (go.macworld.com/iapp) when you
log in and click Edit to the right of the
Account section and then click Change
Apple ID. For me, since I’ve had an