[X4U] one mac, two iPhones

[Jim Scott]

On Sep 6, 2011, at 1:09 PM, alexandre wrote:

> anybody?
> 
> On Sep 1, 2011, at 01:57 , alexandre wrote:
> 
>> my wife and i share an iMac at home, each of us with his own user account, and up until now i was the only one with an iPhone, buying apps, syncing photos, music, etc. 
>> 
>> now, with a second iPhone, we would like to sync apps, photos and music from my user account on the iMac (we don't want to buy apps twice) but my wife obviously wants s to sync her address book and calendar with HER account.


This is exactly how my wife and I sync our iPads. It works fine, as we use my iTunes/App Store account  to make purchases and sync them between iPads. We also do the same thing with books purchased via my Amazon Kindle account. We sync our address book, calendar and e-mail accounts as well as bookmarks separately -- me on my iMac and her on her MacBook. 

>> i know this is possible but is it the most logical way to proceed? what potential problems could i run into? 

If you only want to have one iTunes account or Amazon Kindle account, and can agree on the shared/purchased books, apps, music, etc., then it's certainly a lot less complicated than having two separate accounts, and it also prevents duplicate purchases. The only problem is remembering to manually select which items to sync with iTunes when it's time to update or backup. 

>> 
>> furthermore, with iOS 5 around the corner and OTA syncing, is this set-up still going to work?

Who knows? The only people who know are developers and Apple employees, and they are sworn to secrecy by non-disclosure agreements or threat of being fired. When IOS 5 and the "cloud" are released to mere mortal users like you and me in the near future we'll all find out. But logic suggests that there will be a method for multiple users of one Apple "cloud" account to manually select what gets synched with each device and each user account in a multiple-user household. And I suspect that it still will be possible to sync certain features manually through iTunes. There are far too many Mac users without "cloud" access for Apple to totally shut off the ability to sync mobile devices with Apple, as well as Windows, computers.

Jim Scott