iCloud – Why Won’t iCloud Account Accept My Password on Mac Mini?

icloudmac-minipassword

Attempted to sign in to my iCloud account on my Mac Mini and it failed.
I use a password manager so the pwd hasn't changed.

I went ahead and changed the password (and used the old password) and the iCloud account said that it reset it.
Then I tried signing in again and it still failed:
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So, since I still can't sign into iCloud account (supposedly incorrect pwd) I decided to change it again.

But this time it complains that I cannot change pwd to same thing —
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This means that it knows what my password is, since it just let me change it and now it won't let me change it to the same thing. However,even though it seems to know the password, it won't let me sign in with it.

Completely Signed Out

Also, I had completely signed out of iCloud before trying this second password change thing.

Does anyone know why this occurs?

EDIT – Next Thing That Happened

So I decided that maybe my 32 character password was too long and I decided to try again, but when I tried it with the shorter password then it said, "I can't do that right now." and gave up.

So I then noticed that it is talking about my appleId. I know the password to my appleId, because I just signed in on the web site (to confirm) while using it.

Is this thing trying to get me to sign in with my appleId or iCloud id? This is a really terrible system.

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Best Answer

I had to take the following steps to get it to work again:

  1. reboot Mac Mini

  2. sign in using local account. When I signed in, it said that FaceTime needed a password -- that was my original icloud account.

  3. I then went to Settings and signed into the iCloud account (using my original icloud password).

  4. it requested I set up the sync items (find my mac, etc).

The sign on worked but my appleId sign on now seems to have the same password as my icloud id which I thought was not possible in the past.

So, I guess the point is that if you encounter this error where you can't sign into iCloud you should reboot the device and work through it to see if you can get signed in again.

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