Tong Family

Ok one issue with Apple iCloud+ is that there’s a limit of six family members (family size-ists!)

So we had to create two families and have some duplicate IDs.

This family sharing is pretty odd and requires three steps to get going:

• Decide who the organizer is. That person should sign up for iCloud+. The $0.99 a month for 50GB is not a bad deal since free is just 5GB. And this isn’t easy but on a Mac you go to System Preferences and then look for you icon at the top and then click on iCloud Manage (the button to the right and then Change Storage Plan and select what you want. But it’s much harder on iPhone and iPad because you can’t have two accounts in the same machine like the Mac. So make sure you have a Max around when you do this.
• Then you go to System preferences > Family and choose Add Member and you can Airdrop, Email or Text a link
• But here’s the tricky part then in System Settings > Family > Subscriptions and choose iCloud and then Share. The iCloud is not default shared.
• Now what should happen is that if you are using the free plan in a little bit it should switch you. The wait is the strange part.

This took an entire day to get this right. The main reason to do this is for backups. The 5GB person is nice but not enough for photos so the $3/month for 50GB is pretty good. Plus now find my works pretty well if someone loses their phone.

IPhone Activation failure after Update

Argh in the middle of doing this the iOS 16.3.- update failed. And even doing the famou up volume down volume and press the power didn’t work. The iPhone b14 pro max just hung on upgrade so we had to do a full reset.

This also failed several times. And the same up, down then press power finally worked.

But then the iPhone would not activate. It reported failure and then continued on install. The esim was still there and t-mobile activated properly.

We finally got this to work by either waiting long enough or just toggling Use iMessages like crazy in the Messages app and FaceTime. Frustrating.