And sad, too. I think my cover letter was one of the best I've ever written. Now no one will be able to appreciate it but me.
This is not how things were in the old days. Back then we would just show up at a job site and after working for a few weeks go to HR and say "hey. I didn't get a check." And then when HR couldn't find your records, they just assumed they were lost somewhere and helpfully set you up as an employee with information you gave them.
How you have changed, outlaw sili valley.
[Edit] So when I say I have zero iProducts, that's not entirely true. I do have an old 2015 era iMac. But the first thing I did with it was put a new hard drive in it and boot up FreeBSD. And then I installed Linux and installed FreeBSD as a VM under Linux because I have nothing better to do with my time. And somewhere along the way L4 got wedged in there, because you're not a TRUE power user unless you have L4 running under bhyve under FreeBSD under KVM under linux on hardware the manufacturer would really prefer you just run Mach on. I am wild. I am the wind.
So I found the old macOS hard drive and installed it. It really did not want to boot. It told me so many horrible things when I tried to boot, mostly that I really should visit an apple support web site. The AppleID I'm trying to recover is the same one I used to create a macOS account with. I wonder if apple knows I've installed Linux, FreeBSD and L4/Linux on their hardware and have marked my AppleId as "unholy spawn of Satan" ? I guess if the roles were reversed I might think anyone who installed L4 on Apple Hardware is "not to be trusted."
Or more seriously... I wonder if you don't boot macOS or log into macOS with your AppleId every now and again, you go on the "naughty" or "potentially naughty" list. This whole affair really makes me miss my Atari 520ST. [/Edit]
And no, they don’t care if you ran other OS’es on your computer. I don’t think I’ve turned on my 2020 mba since 2022 and its fine.
what you could do here is go into Internet recovery mode. Reinstall on that drive (or another blank or spare.) And sign up for a new ID that way.
they have softer requirements for iCloud account creation when it’s done on a genuine Apple device that’s fresh installed.
on a 2015 device I don’t know. I have some iPad that won’t be allowed to register for iMessage or iCloud in 2027 because it has an expiring certificate - it’s possible old macOS has the same issue , I hadn’t ever run into this but imagine it’s on the horizon - and the only way you’d get around that is using OpenCore Legacy Patcher (Intel only) to put a more recent macOS on it.
To keep someone from making 100 accounts for spam or fraud though - What apple does have a limit on (recently) is that you can only create an Apple ID about 4 or 5 times from a given device when it’s fresh installed. and then it’s banned from creating any new ones.
Apple does not ban “voip” per se from being a 2fa number. all my iCloud numbers are voip. They likely ban any that are known to be burners for SMS verification.
At least that’s what I’ve run into making iCloud accounts for various siblings and nieces and nephews so they can use an iPad despite not having a cell phone yet. Every single one of them are under one of my own numbers.
Maybe this is a test. Maybe everyone who tries to login to jobs.apple.com is told "oh yeah... that AppleId is invalid," and then they wait and see what people do. If they give up, then they're not Apple material. If they cheat and use someone else's AppleId, then they're morals are found lacking. If they post about their experience on a public forum, then they're a security risk.
Just for kicks, I tried doing it at home. The error messages I got were:
"Enter a valid Phone Number" (I had) "Service::Unavailable" ??? "That Code has been used. Hit Refresh Code." (the refresh code link is unresponsive)
and also, the error we got at the Apple Store:
"It looks like the phone number you provided is not registered with iMessage. Please verify the number and try again."
Or rather... thank you for the suggestion. I'm going to dig into the docs on their web page and see if there's a way to contact support w/o having to log in first.
[edit: After a bit of digging around, as best I can tell, I have to log in with an AppleId before I can post a question in the support forums about how to reset my AppleId.]