His & hers iphones & ipads...how to work together?

[lobo]

Hey everyone. I've got a situation with our Apple devices and was hoping for some tips on who to setup things so they work as we want them to.

The wife and I currently have our own iPhone4 and iPad. We have all four devices setup with the one Apple ID/iTunes acct. so that whatever one person purchases the other can also have. Lately, the wife has been wanting to have it so that her iBooks are synced between her iPhone and her iPad (including bookmarks). Now from what I understand, if I were to set this up, wouldn't my devices end up being synced this way as well? I don't want her books and she doesn't want mine showing up in our respective libraries. Oh and speaking of libraries, right now all 4 devices are synced to the one iTunes library on my desktop. I think it's time I moved her devices to her own laptop and her own iTunes library so I'm more than willing to do that if it's one of the necessary steps.

So, is this all a limitation of Apple's ecosystem or is something like another iTunes account required? And if that's the case, what happens when she purchases something that I'd like to have and vice versa?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Lobo

[beuh_dave]

I'm afraid that if you don't want her books and she doesn't want your books. You need to have different Apple ID's. I don't think that it's really a limitation of apple's ecosystem, it was designed that way for convenience sake. All of your information is supposed to synchronize no matter which device you're using (as you're using the same Apple ID). If she purchased something with her Apple ID that you'd like to have, you'll probably have to purchase it as well on your Apple ID.

[psyko514]

This is not a limitation but rather by design. Media is to be consumed by the person who purchased it. If you want something she has, you'll have to buy it as well.

[tubs]

Isn't the itunes/app store account separate from your icloud account? my wife and i use my itunes account but we have separate icloud accounts on our respective phones which can store your individual bookmarks and other stuff for backup.

[hdom]

Yeah, sounds like will have to set to iClouds if not already and do a manual sync for all 4 things.

[lobo]

Hey everyone thanks for the replies so far. Well, after some playing around with the accounts this weekend, I've discovered the following.

Yes you can have multiple accounts and use one for iTunes/apps store and one for iCloud. I guess the benefit of using the same iTunes account is that you will both have access to the same purchases but it results in your bookmarks and books all syncing together which is not what I originally wanted. If you use separate iCloud accounts, you can them have your own devices sync their respective things like contacts, calendars, Safari bookmarks, etc but not books and their bookmarks. This discovery resulted in a funny situation in the wife seeing all of my URLs from Chrome. :) Had a little explaining to do about the "Girls" folder.

In the end, we were able to successfully download a book from the iBookstore and have it go to her iphone4 and then over to her ipad2. Bookmarks for that book also synced fine. The downside however is that any books not retrieved via the iBookstore DO NOT get synced. So all of her books that she's gotten from either email, Dropbox or somewhere on the web will not sync/copy over to her other device. This sucks as this is how we get most of our books.

So we've setup the same iTunes account on all of our devices so we can share our apps. Using the same iCloud account for syncing to the cloud. Using different iCloud accounts for Find Friends so she doesn't follow my friends and I don't follow hers.

If anyone has any other experiences feel free to share them.

Lobo

[rvs007]

If you have the same AppleID set up on all of your devices, wouldn't that prevent you from iMessaging and Facetiming each other as well?

[Keigotw]

You can still share the apps with different accounts.
If your wife bought an app you want too. You can use her logging and log into your device and download the same app again.
Or you can sync her app into your devices in iTunes. And vice versa

Or you can create 1 Id just for apps buying. So when you want to buy an app just switch to that id to buy. After you buy it, your wife can log in with that Id and download it again.

[shaolinmonk]

Odd all my books sync...

One apple id for apps and we each have our own icloud we also have a shared icloud to push calendar events to each other etc..

My content stays with me and hers with her

I'll double check the setup