Believe me, I wish I had documented it. I didn't realize that this would be surprising or controversial until I described the experience later to others. Some people basically didn't believe me.

The basic flavor was that I spent at least an hour getting a working apple account and getting signed into it, and I used at least two other devices to achieve that.

I do vividly recall that whenever I performed the final successful account verification, rather than seeing a success message, I saw a page or webview that just had a huge XML document in it. I only knew that attempt worked after I just tried logging in again. But that was one papercut out of dozens from my hazy recollection.

If I ever set up another Apple thing, I'll take photos, but it will probably work perfectly then. Oh well.