What’s an Apple ID?

An Apple ID account always comprises two parts: a username that’s in the form of an email address, which is also the primary way for Apple to reach you; and something that authenticates you—a way to prove you’re the valid holder of the account.

While an Apple ID can have multiple email addresses associated with it, for backup communications and rescue purposes, it only has a single password associated with it.

Depending on the way your account is set up, authentication may be through a password or a password plus a login token. I explain how login tokens work in Use Two-Factor Authentication.

From a Murky Past, Apple ID Emerged

Long-time Mac users will remember that Apple started offering cloud-based services many years ago, before the term cloud began to mean “a bunch of servers that appear like one entity and I don’t know where any of the hardware is.”

Apple started its internet-based offerings under the name iTools in 2000, not long after Steve Jobs resumed control of his company (Figure 2). It included some online storage and let you host a website.

iTools also let users claim a unique account name—one that for many of us persists as at least one of our Apple IDs! A friend registered my iTools name in Seattle while I was at the Apple keynote in San Francisco listening to Jobs introduce the system. (Thanks, Geoff!)

iTools morphed into .Mac in 2002. This service increased storage and added email and other features. It expanded to become MobileMe in 2008, with email, contacts, and calendar updates and syncing friendlier to the iPhone (Figure 3).

Apple settled on the name iCloud in 2011. This service became a superset of everything that a user stores or syncs across devices or exclusively in the cloud: events, contacts, email, photos, and music. It’s also regular old cloud storage in the form of iCloud Drive. Third-party apps can use iCloud for sync and storage as well.

While Apple expanded and renamed its cloud services, it also added iTunes purchase, starting in 2003. However, you couldn’t buy stuff in iTunes using your preexisting .Mac account. You had to set up an iTunes account to make purchases—and if you didn’t use your .Mac email address to set up your iTunes account, now you had two different Apple accounts. The iTunes-based account eventually became the way to identify yourself in Apple’s online stores, including its hardware and software store, and in Apple apps in Android and Windows.

Where does Apple ID fit into this? An Apple ID has never managed anything in the cloud, but it evolved from both a cloud services account and a purchasing account to be your key to everything you sync or store with Apple and purchase from Apple. An Apple ID is really just a username with a password attached.

How Apple Uses the Apple ID

Apple uses Apple IDs as the ownership credentials for a host of different kinds of data, behavior, and commerce. The notion of the Apple ID gets commingled with iCloud, because that single ID is also used to link up most of your iCloud behavior.

Let’s look first at how Apple uses Apple ID, and then at the difference between an Apple ID and its iCloud ecosystem.