Update... After a bit of work, I was able to boot the old hard drive with macOS and tried to log into apple services. Of course it rejected my existing AppleId password, but this time with a working iMac, I asked it to send a reset code to my iMac.

It seemed to think it sent one to my iMac, but nothing ever showed up. The internet says it should have showed up on my iMac's screen or in the upper right corner of the screen. No dice.

This is similar to what happened at the Apple Store when we tried the "use someone else's iProduct" to reset the password. The login page seemed to think it had sent a PIN, but it never showed up at the end device.

I suspect that because I'm in the iForgot 24 hour cool down period, nothing is going to work. They claim they will send instructions to my phone (I hope they realize my phone doesn't have iMessage) in 15 hours for what to do while waiting 30 or 90 days to try the reset again.

This sort of reminds me when we got bought out and we had problems with our dev certificate. We had released a couple versions of "iFoo" using our domain "foo.com". Then we got bought out by bar.com and wanted to release future versions of iFoo under bar.com branding. When we eventually got ahold of a human, they said we would have to re-release iFoo as iBar and re-submit it as a new app. We eventually did this, but they responded that iBar was confusingly similar to an existing app called iFoo and they wouldn't allow it to be released in the app store. Then they revoked the foo.com dev cert because of shinanigans. When we tried to explain to them that we were following the instructions they had given us (and sending them emails and screenshots where they told us what to do,) they closed the support ticket and revoked bar.com's dev cert as well.

I think Apple processes work very well for the usual case, but they don't think through some of the corner cases.

The irony is the role I was attempting to apply for was one that would (partially) oversee working out these corner cases and what Apple should be doing in those situations. I was invited to apply for this position explicitly because I had encountered similar problems in the past.

My suspicion is I'll have a 30 day wait at the end of the initial iForgot 24 hour cool down. If I'm still looking for a job in 30 days, I'll probably still submit my resume. It seems that Apple really needs some help in this area.

But I applied for a job in '93 and didn't get it and I've been told you're only allowed to apply to Apple once (despite having worked on the Qualcomm baseband processor in the original iPhone and as a contractor in the very early days of macontosh.) And I'm sure they wouldn't be happy about me talking publicly about identity management corner cases. I suspect the chance they would really care to hire me is fairly low.

But if anyone from Apple ever reads this, feel free to contact me if you need more details on what inputs I provided to your system and what the responses were.