What you would do is take one of your Apple IDs — the single username to manage all your Apple accounts — associate it with a single iTunes account and a credit card, and assign it to all of your iOS devices.  From here on out, you can continue to make all of your family’s purchases for all of their devices from that one iTunes account.

However, there’s one exception: iCloud. It may seem like you would want a separate iCloud account for each device because each iCloud account comes with a mere 5 GB of free storage.  This hardly seems enough to back up even one 64 GB iPhone 4S or iPad.  Each member of your family may own multiple Apple devices and want to have all of their data equally accessible from each device. But having a separate account for each device does not make much sense either.

So what can an Apple ID do?

Some of the confusion over how to handle multiple Apple IDs comes from not knowing exactly what is possible.  For instance, every Apple ID is not automatically enrolled with all of Apple’s services.  You can create your AppleID and enroll it in each Apple service individually as you need to.  You do this by logging into that service with your Apple ID.  Additionally, each device can utilize multiple Apple IDs at the same time.  Some of Apple’s services can be configured once per device, others multiple times per device.  For example, each device can only be backed up to one iCloud account whereas each device can have multiple iCloud email accounts configured.

It can be hard to figure out how to do this. Some Apple IDs are set in the device settings, other are set separately per an individual app setting.  The chart below illustrates how many Apple IDs you can have associated with each device, and where the ID associated with that service is configured:

We’ve narrowed down your options and here are some suggestions for best organizing your family’s devices and Apple accounts:

One iTunes Apple ID for apps and media

Using the chart above as a sort of Apple ID map, you can plan which services you want to use, and just how you want to configure them on each family member’s device.  To start, take one Apple ID and associate it with an iTunes account for all of the app and media purchases your family makes. This is the account that is linked to a credit card.  With each Apple device, the purchased apps, music, books, magazines, TV Shows and movies account will be accessible by all of the devices registered with this account.

Keep in mind that the rules are changing.  Whe the iPad first came out, it used to be that you could authorize up to five OS X computers with the same iTunes account.  And in turn each OS X computer could sync its locally stored library of purchased apps and media (via a USB cable) to an unlimited number of  iOS devices.  With Apple moving away from physical access, cable-based direct syncing and online music storage in the cloud through add on services like iTunes Match, the opportunity exists for more than a household of devices being configured to access a single iTunes account’s media files.

This now means that a single account that access its music via the cloud can only have up to 10 devices and computers combined.  Ten sounds like a lot for an individual, but not a family. Think of a family of four having a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad each.  That’s 12 computers and devices, not including any Apple TVs and additional iPods scattered throughout the house.

One primary iCloud Apple ID on each device

The Apple ID that you use to create your iTunes account does not need to have an iCloud account associated with it.  In fact you do not need an iCloud account in order to use your iOS or OS X device.  But to take full advantage of all of the iCloud based features of iOS 5 listed in the above chart, you will need an iCloud account.  For some of these features there can be only one iCloud setting per device.

When configuring your family’s Apple devices, these settings are part of each device’s primary iCloud account.  While each device can have multiple iCloud accounts associated with it, only one of these iCloud accounts can enable a select set of features.  These features include Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Storage & Backup.

Unfortunately, since these features are configured only via the iCloud settings on the device, they must all be associated with the same iCloud account.  This fact is really disappointing since it would be nice to configure all of your family’s devices on one iCloud account for iCloud Backup, and a separate one for app-based Documents & Data.  This would allow a user to have to pay once for additional storage on that one shared family-sized backup iCloud account.

One Apple ID to keep track of all of your family’s devices

With your family’s iTunes purchases under control, and the core features of iCloud storage taken care of, there is one particular feature of iOS 5 that can be set separately from a device’s primary iCloud account.  When it comes to locating each of your family’s devices, do not rely solely on the Find My Friends app to locate their position.  Create a common family iCloud account and configure each device to use this account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings.  In fact, you can even create this iCloud account without creating a new Apple email address.  This family iCloud account’s sole purpose will be to keep track of all of your Apple devices.

Configuring each device in such a manner does not interfere with the use of a different app, Find My Friends. You only need to have one account on the device enable the Find my iPhone service.  Then the Find My Friends app will use that enabled service to share your location with whatever account is used to log on with the app.  That means each family member can still individually manage who knows their whereabouts via the Find My Friends app.

Multiple secondary iCloud Apple IDs on each device

Most of the iOS features that require an iCloud account have been taken care of, except the ones that really matter most.  At this point you can decide if you want a me.com email address or not.  Each family member can create their own account (or accounts) for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.

When it comes to mail, not every third-party service out there supports all of these features.  Hotmail, for instance, will support Reminders, but not Notes.  Some Microsoft Exchange Servers will support Reminders, some Notes and some both Reminders and Notes.  If you happen to configure your Google Mail as an Exchange service, you will not get Reminders or Notes.  Yahoo on the other hand actually supports them all and AOL, well, just Notes.  So be sure to pick a mail provider that will support all of the services you need.

Several independent Apple IDs for everything else

So what’s left?  Quite a bit actually.  FaceTime, GameCenter, Messaging, HomeSharing and even the Apple Store app.  The default account used by each of these independent apps is the Apple ID configured to be used with the iTunes account on a particular device.  But you can use any Apple ID you like.

These apps support features that are independent from both the iTunes account as well as the iCloud account that are configured on the device.  They are managed separately, configured in separate settings and even stored in separate apps.  You can sign out of each of these particular features and sign back in using a different Apple ID.  And this will have no effect on the aforementioned iTunes and iCloud account settings on the device.

A good strategy

The idea here is that you can use multiple Apple IDs on each device, and at the same time each Apple ID does not need to be enrolled in every Apple product, feature and service.  Decide what products and services you want to use first and determine how each device will be used.  If you don’t, before you know it you could end up with a real rats nest of accounts.

Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices.  As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well.  Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want.  This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device.

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• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
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In February, we took a look at smaller changes in the pre-release version of OS X Mountain Lion that Mac developers are using. These changes are good indications of what we’ll see when the final version goes live sometime this summer. Apple has released two new previews since then with quite a few updates — some significant, some seriously minor, and some that have even undone changes since we last wrote about it.

Here’s what’s new:

General changes

• The App Store now supports automatic downloads, which is one of the things I’d hoped Apple would add. You can also go backward and forward in the App Store and Game Center with two fingers, the same as Safari. Notably, you still can’t do this in the Finder.
• There’s a new popover for choosing avatars, which is used in Game Center and the Users and Groups pane in System Preferences.
• You can no longer remove apps and stacks from the Dock by simply dragging them off. You have to do it by right-clicking, which I expect is going to draw the ire of many power users.
• Launchpad is no longer arranged alphabetically. The “Utilities” folder has also been renamed to “Others”.
• The linen background in Mission Control is slightly darker than in Lion.
• Font Book now has a full-screen mode and two smart folders in the sidebar for fixed-width fonts and monospaced fonts.
• The battery item in the menu bar has been simplified so that the only option is to show the percentage left or not. Showing time left has been removed.
• You can go from one stack to another in the Dock with one click. In Lion, clicking another stack with one already open just closes the current stack. (Updated: Sorry, this isn’t new to Mountain Lion. Turns out, it doesn’t work in Lion when your Dock is hidden — which mine was — but does when unhidden.)

Safari

• There’s a new button for iCloud tabs, which allows access to tabs on other devices.
• There’s a new page-loading animation, which you can see in this YouTube video.
• Web apps can send native notifications through Safari, as evidenced by the new Notification Center tab in Safari’s preferences.
• Reading List has a new look, with a more neutral background color and paper texture instead of linen. It also supports offline reading.
• When you download a file in Safari in Lion, the file flies into the downloads button. In Mountain Lion, it flies into the downloads stack in the Dock, and a progress indicator appears over the stack.
• Safari has a more “responsive” UI: when you resize a window past a certain point, buttons will be hidden to save space.
• There’s a new tab button next to the bookmarks bar when only one tab is open and the tab bar is hidden.

Notification Center

• There’s a new “do not disturb” mode, which disables notifications when active.
• The menu bar icon has a gray dot in the middle, rather than black. It also changes into a moon when do not disturb mode is on.
• There’s a new button in the lower-righthand corner that’ll take you to Notification Center’s preference pane in System Preferences.

System Preferences

• The General perefence pane has been simplified. The options for smooth scrolling and double-click to minimize are gone, with the latter being moved to the Dock preference pane. The three dropdowns for the number of recent items has been consolidated into one. The dropdown for choosing the sidebar icon size has been moved to the top section. Finally, there’s a new checkbox for “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.”
• The preferences for “tap to click” have been moved into the Trackpad pane and are enabled by default.
• The Mission Control pane now has the option to disable grouping windows by application, so all windows will be shown the same way.
• Time Machine’s pane has been updated slightly, with flatter buttons and a simpler explanation of what Time Machine does.

What do you think of the new changes? Tell us in the comments.

Header image via Flicker user sigsegv.

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Editor’s Choice is exactly what it sounds like, a pick of the best apps from the App Store team intended to highlight something they don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of the 600,000 apps for sale in the iOS App Store and the 10,000 in the Mac App Store. The debut choice for iOS apps is Facebook Camera, a high-profile new camera app for iPhone, and the game Extreme Skater. For Mac Apps, Cobook and Deus Ex Human Revolution were the picks.

The first Editor’s Choice picks in the Mac App Store

Making the App of the Week free for the first time — it was for Cut the Rope: Experiments — is, as many will note, something out of Amazon’s playbook. A free app each day is one way Amazon helps people discover new apps in its Android Appstore. Who knows if Apple will ever do it again. It could have been merely an experiment — but it does show Apple is keen to try new things to improve app discovery.

It’s slightly ironic to me that Facebook Camera was one of the first choices for this new feature, particularly because when I tried to search for it in the App Store on my iPhone yesterday after news of its availability hit, the store returned the wrong results. Instead of Facebook Camera, it kept giving me Camera Awesome, iVideo Camera and iUploader for Facebook. What does it say about App Store search if the hottest new item can’t even be found by people trying to search directly for it? There are more drastic measures that need to be taken than just surfacing a few cool apps.

It’s obviously not a secret to App Store shoppers — or app creators for that matter — that sifting through hundreds of thousands of apps is tough. That’s why Apple has continued to introduce categorization features meant to more easily surface quality apps across different genres. There’s already the carousel of picks up top, the “New and Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” sections, in addition to the top paid and free app charts, in addition to curated lists like Games, Education, and a variety of starter kits.

But it’s also not a secret to Apple. It’s presumably what was behind its purchase of app discovery tool Chomp back in February, believed to be for $50 million.

Not that any of these challenges have prevented Apple and its developers from making money on them. Apple has seen more than 25 billion downloads from the iOS store alone since 2008. But making that process easier is always welcome.

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Credit: Bowen Liu/Apple Inc. via Bloomberg

The biggest challenge for Apple over the next several years will be how it adjusts under the leadership of Tim Cook. We’ve seen bits and pieces of what this new era means for Apple, but Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky has a cover story on Thursday that pulls it all together and is chock-full of fascinating details about how Apple is changing with him at the helm.

We’ve deviated from our usual roundup of must-read Apple coverage to highlight the story by Lashinsky, who wrote a book last year called Inside Apple. Here are the five most interesting details from the story that any Apple watcher should take note of:

• Wall Street loves Cook. Not only has the stock skyrocketed since Cook took over as permanent CEO in August, but he has given investors their long-awaited dividend, and he actually, like, talks to investors. And they love him for all of those things. Said one Goldman Sachs analyst: “By any quantitative measure, so far his performance is phenomenal.”
• Cook has embraced corporate types. He’s brought in a lot of MBA-toting new employees to Apple. And it’s not a real surprise, given his background as COO, that he’s emphasizing operational efficiency. But some are starting to wonder if efficiency is becoming more of a priority compared to engineering creativity. One former long-time Apple engineer is quoted as saying, “It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine.”
• He’s a communicator. He was recently photographed meeting with Speaker John Boehner in Washington, D.C. But Lashinsky reports that he told several high-ranking politicians that he wanted to be “personally accessible to them.” The same seems to be true of his employees — he’ll randomly sit down to lunch with them at the Cupertino campus’s cafeteria — and his partners — he personally visited a Foxconn plant in the aftermath of the public outcry over working conditions there.
• He is not scary. Siri isn’t a finished product and has understandably had bugs. That would not have gone over well were Steve Jobs around, notes one employee. And whereas in the Jobs era employees feared him, some Apple employees now seem a little more relaxed, as he tells in one anecdote about an engineer who didn’t feel like he had to rush back to work right after lunch anymore. And the annual retreat for the company’s 100 best performers was actually considered fun this year and not as stressful as it had been under Jobs.
• He is shepherding the creation of new products that employees like. At the top performers retreat, those in attendance got a look at future products. One veteran executive was “blown away” while others “came away totally comfortable with where the company is headed.”

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According to Reuters’ copy of the filing, Apple stated:

“Apple’s entry into e-book distribution is classic procompetitive conduct” that created competition where none existed, Apple said in its court papers.

“For Apple to be subject to hindsight legal attack for a business strategy well-recognized as perfectly proper sends the wrong message to the market,” it added. “The government’s complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law.”

Apple also denied that the government “accurately characterized” the comment attributed to Jobs.

The “comment attributed to Jobs” is referring to a January 2010 email from Steve Jobs in which he seems to suggest how to set prices of e-books between $12.99 and $14.99.

The “fundamentally flawed” characterization of the case by Apple in the latest filing is a slightly more agressive version of the company’s initial response to the suit last month, when Apple called the accusations from the DOJ “simply not true.”

In April, the DOJ filed suit against Apple and five publishers – Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins (who quickly agreed to settle), Macmillan and Penguin — accusing them of colluding to keep Amazon out of the e-book market unless it changed its pricing structure.

To get up to speed on the case since then, see my paidContent colleagues’ “Everything you need to know about the e-books lawsuit” post.

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• Dell admits “alternative mobile computing devices” — aka the iPad and other smartphones and tablets — are having a significant effect on its PC business, Marketwatch reports.
• How big of a chunk has the iPad taken out of the entire PC market? Asymco has a good visualization of the latest numbers.
• Following his epic takedown last week of Digitimes’ faulty Apple reporting, Harry McCracken at TIME posts a response from the Taiwanese publication and his own post-mortem thoughts on Apple rumors that are worth reading.
• Speaking of rumors: more hints that Microsoft may be closer to releasing an iOS version of Office, according to BGR. And, in a twist, there might also be an Android version in the works too.
• Not only did the mediation talks between the Apple and Samsung chief executives not bear much fruit, accusations between the two companies continue to fly. This time Samsung is accusing Apple of withholding documents in their ongoing court battle, writes The Mac Observer.

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“The two technology giants could find no clear agreement through the talks, according to a Samsung official,” says the report.

As the two sides failed to come to any agreement, and unless some other deal is struck in the meantime, they will proceed to trial, which is scheduled for June 27.

One of the reasons few expected a settlement or any progress is that the meeting was ordered, not voluntary. Samsung CEO Choi-Gee-sung and Apple CEO Tim Cook were told to meet before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh last month.

Apple has accused Samsung of “slavishly copying” its iPhone and iPad designs, while Samsung wants Apple to pay royalties on a variety of mobile patents. Cook recently told reporters and financial analysts that he has “always hated litigation,” Apple “just want[s] people to invent their own stuff.”

Update: FOSS Patents got a look at the official record of the proceedings:

The two orders don’t state a result. What is know for sure is that ‘Tim Cook & various counsel’ met with ‘G.S. Choi & various counsel’ for nine hours on Monday and seven hours on Tuesday. The minute entry for Monday said that they were going to meet again on Tuesday (which was the original plan), while the minute entry for Tuesday doesn’t say anything about a continuation of this effort, which suggests that there aren’t any near-term plans for further talks of this kind.

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While the article focuses, perhaps unsurprisingly, on his links to Britain — his design education, how London’s a vibrant city and so on — and runs over the now-familiar details of his career, there are a few choice quotes where he explains a few things about his sensibility.

In particular, he mentions how Apple tries hard to make its customers feel that the products and services have a built-in sense of care. By that he means trying to instill a carefulness and thoughtful philosophy right through the product — and avoid the worry that producing millions of devices would somehow introduce a “godless” quality to the things it makes.

“We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”

“I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care. I think it’s a wonderful view that care was important – but I think you can make a one-off and not care and you can make a million of something and care. Whether you really care or not is not driven by how many of the products you’re going to make.”

“One of the concerns was that there would somehow be, inherent with mass production and industrialisation, a godlessness and a lack of care.

“We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.”

The allusion to “godlessness” may seem odd, but I suspect that he hasn’t turned to religion — and is in fact referring to the soullessness of many designed-by-committee, manufactured-by-the-ton products.

Given how rarely Ive steps into the limelight (even now) (he also spoke to London’s Evening Standard a couple of months ago) it’s worth a read: the rest of the interview is here.

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• Fortune recounts how the iPad played a role in the Greek debt crisis: the company working on reordering the country’s finances bought 100 of Apple’s tablets, loaded debt-restructuring and real-time analytics software on them, and handed them out to its team scattered all over the globe.
• Security guru Eugene Kaspersky wants to create antivirus software for iOS, but he says Apple won’t let him, for a variety of reasons, reports The Register.
• Apple’s Monday stock bump added $29 billion to its market cap, or as Daily Finance put it, “about double the size of Research in Motion and Nokia combined.”
• Another example of what a company can do with billions in the bank: Apple will spend $27 billion on chips this year, according to analysts at IHS iSuppli, which puts it far ahead of any of its competitors, including Samsung. CNET has the report from IHS iSuppli’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications Summit in Paris.
• Later this summer TiVo will start selling the TiVo Stream, which will send streaming video from the set-top box to an iPad or an iPhone. ZDNet has details and a photo of the Apple TV-like device.

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While it might seem like overkill to dissect reports about the size of a still-unreleased-and-unannounced phone’s screen, when it comes to the iPhone, the screen is kind of a big deal, especially to all the developers behind iOS apps. The screen size determines the most important things: The layout, appearance and user interaction elements of an app. As a handful of high-profile iOS app makers told me recently, they have faith in Apple not doing something crazy or drastic that would upset the established development process.

9to5Mac’s report on Tuesday seems to give added foundation to that faith. Though the report concerns a test device and not a finished product, the scenario laid out is one that would be most amenable to developers and iPhone buyers. Here’s what they learned about the prototype:

Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.95 inches diagonally.  Apple will not just increase the size of the display and leave the current resolution, but will actually be adding pixels to the display. The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 x 1136.  That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display.  The screen will be the same 1.94 inches wide, but will grow to 3.45 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.

We’ve also heard that Apple will be taking full advantage of their new pixels. Apple is currently testing builds of iOS 6 that are custom-built to the new iPhone’s display. These builds include a tweaked home screen with a fifth row of icons (besides the stationary app dock) and extended application user interfaces that offer views of more content. Apple is able to pull this off with the same sharpness as the current iPhone Retina Display because of the additional pixels.

Though it’s likely we won’t see a new iPhone until the fall, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference takes place in June. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple chooses to preview the next version of its mobile software, iOS 6, at that event, and if by doing that they’ll end up spilling the beans on the screen-size changes months before the new device is ready.

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