I wish I could return all my Apple devices for refunds. Actually, that isn’t true; I like my Apple iPhone 6, and I’ll keep it; but the iPad is far more trouble than it’s worth, and the MacBook Pro, while useful, suffers from the same security mania that makes the iPad useless. I can’t even install free apps on the iPad. I tell it to install; it asks for my Apple account password; I go find that and mistype it, but eventually I get it right; whereupon it tells ,me it has sent a security number to a trusted device. I go looking for trusted devices. Naturally they have to be Apple. Eventually I remember that the iPhone is an Apple device and I trust it, and lo! I find there is a message with a code number. I type that into the iPad. It is rejected. I try again. Still rejected.
I give up. I have an iPad with almost no apps because it takes all afternoon and another Apple device to get an app for it, and that doesn’t work because – I don’t know why. It took me a while to figure out that the trusted device was the iPhone; could the delay be it.? I suppose I will have to go to the Apple Store and see if anyone can fix this, but at this season that’s not a practical thing to do, and I’m not really all that mobile at my age anyway.
I thought the Surface Pro was a fussbudget and it is, but it’s got to be better than having to own two Apple devices before you can use one of them, and then having them send you a security number that doesn’t work, with no instruction as to what to do next. Congratulations. My iPad is now so secure I can’t use it, and I don’t know what to do next.
My iPad insisted on updating to iOS 10.2 last night, so I let it. And I think I know where Jerry’s problem might have arisen.
Apple has been insisting for several updates that 2-factor verification should be used to protect your Apple ID. That’s all well and good if you have multiple iOS devices (as Jerry points out), but I don’t even have an iPhone (and don’t want one, thanks anyway).
I have one iPad Air 2. I use it for little more than amusement. I am not going to futz about with 2-factor verification for a fucking toy, particularly if it requires me to own a fucking iPhone.
But what Jerry must have missed when iOS came back from upgrading was that you can actually abort the implementation of 2-factor verification. The link is getting smaller and less intuitive and may eventually go away, but they ARE giving you a choice (for now, and I suspect they will have to always give you a choice, because they don’t control your choice of other devices).
While I know there are plenty of hackers out there who would love to get control of my iPad (yeah, OK, I’m gonna snicker here for a moment), the fact is that I do use a very strong password for my Apple ID. It’s got all the bells and whistles recommended for strong passwords, and I have no trouble remembering it. If I were using “password” for a password, yeah, maybe 2-factor verification would be a good thing. But unlike casual users, I don’t futz around with weak passwords.
So I just tell Apple “no”. Maybe someday I’ll have a use case for that, but right now, I don’t.