Task: Digital Accounts: Apple

Photo Credit: ZorroGabriel/Shutterstock.com

If you’ve got an iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV, and use any of their services (iCloud, Safari browser, Apple Music, photos, games, video…) then you’ll want to follow a similar route as you did with Amazon.

The Keys To The Apple Kingdom

The Apple ID is digital gold and grants access to all of these services. Anyone who might be taking control of your iKingdom needs the username and password, as well as the associated email account (to update or reset the password) and the access code to the iPhone if Two-Step Verification is enabled, which is the extra layer of security that sends a code to your phone to complete the login process.

Instructions To Delete Or Transfer

Once again, don’t do this on a whim because once it’s closed, or inaccessible, it’s almost impossible to get it back. For a company that was built to make computing easy, deleting an account is quite confusing and arduous. For this reason, you may want to tell the person to change the email on the account to their own — or one they set up on the side — just to keep them from spending hours or days trying to figure it all out.

Your Task

Outline all the things that need to be managed, such as photos, texts, contacts, passwords, and everything else associated with that Apple ID. If you’ve made a lot of purchases, mainly because iTunes was the first legit marketplace for downloadable music, you might want to do the same thing we did with the Kindle: Freeze it in time and keep using it without connecting it to the Internet.

We’re fully aware that some of these solutions seem crazy in an era with such amazing technology. The problem: These companies, along with the majority of the human race, don't want to think about death. However, as more and more people who use these products start to disappear off the earth, they’re going to have to come up with better solutions, like offering an easy way to merge or transfer these accounts into your own. If they included a feature like that it would render this task completely unnecessary, but that’s not the world we currently live in.

Like with the other “mothership accounts,” share the login credentials with someone you trust. If you use a password manager you can write it directly in the notes field, if you use a digital document you can put it there, and last but not least you can put it in the Digital Accounts section of your Everplan.

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