iCloud Set-up

[kribensis12]

I recently decided to use my wife's MacBook Air (10.12.5) for my classroom. Part of doing this, I disconnected her iCloud account and have added mine.

I went through all of the steps to set it up as the main iCloud account (deleted it from "internet accounts") and proceeded with the two factor authentication and approved it on my iPhone.

Once all of that was completed, the iCloud area under system preferences says that I may need to sign in again in order to gain full iCloud access. I clicked on it and it says "waiting for approval" from another device. There is no prompt on my iPhone to approve it. I have done this 6 times and the prompt never shows up on my phone.

Frustrated, I hit "Can't Approve?" and as soon as I do that, the entire System Preferences app becomes unresponsive. I've done this several times as well.

Any ideas on how to gain full access to iCloud for my Mac?

 

[chscag]

Did your wife have 2FA activated at one time on her MBA? And did you designate any other approved device for 2FA? The authentication might have been sent to another device and not your iPhone.

And... if you're locked out of iCloud because of 2FA, it's going to take a call to Apple to straighten things out.

 

[kribensis12]

She did. I used her phone to completely remove her iCloud account from the device. I only have one device, my iPhone. It used it for 2FA the first time to set up iCloud. Then it asked me to re-authorize the device for full iCloud access. The second time it tried to do 2FA I received no prompt on my iPhone.

 

[chscag]

OK... my advice for now is to try and remove 2FA from your account and see if things return to normal. You should be able to do that by signing into your iCloud account and remove 2FA. I don't want to advise you on whether or not to use 2FA (that's a personal choice) but when things go south with it, it can be difficult to sort out. Let us know.

 

[kribensis12]

I did as suggested and it worked!

If I re-enable 2FA, will it then require me to 2FA all devices already signed in?

 

[chscag]

If I re-enable 2FA, will it then require me to 2FA all devices already signed in?

I have avoided 2FA because of the many problems I see users are having with it, so because of that I can't give you a definitive answer. But, as a guess I suspect that it will since it will probably assume 2FA for all your devices.

Some of our other members have experience with 2FA and will likely have a better answer for you. Hang on for a bit before re-enabling 2FA.