macOS: Cannot sign in to iCloud #

Disclaimer

Proceed at your own risk (and joy).

Environment

macOS 12.6 Monterey

Issue

Signed out of an iCloud account. Attempting to sign in to another iCloud account (or even the original iCloud account) failed silently and repeatedly, even after rebooting. Creating a new macOS user account and signing in to iCloud therein worked as expected, but the prospect of manually migrating over user data and settings (while not borking the now-functional iCloud sync) was not especially congenial.

Solution

The ability to sign in to iCloud under the orignal macOS user account was restored thanks to nikhilgohil11's suggestion from 2019:

  1. Backup
  2. Empty ~/Library/Caches/ (the original advice to delete the directory itself requires admin credentials; standard users cannot delete their own ~/Library/Caches/ directory, but can delete its contents)
  3. Delete ~/"Library/Application Support/iCloud/"
  4. Delete ~/Library/Preferences/MobileMeAccounts.plist
  5. Reboot

The urtext for this answer appears to be from 2015 by Kurt Lang, who credits Apple support. richard2's 2016 post mentions signing out of iMessage and FaceTime as well as disassociating the Apple ID from your macOS user account (if they were previously linked) beforehand.

Otiosities

Related

/mac | Oct 08, 2022


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