I prefer to leave my iMac running all the time, unless we are away overnight. Conversely, I turn my iPhone off before going up to bed, unless severe weather is imminent and I want to check conditions before going to sleep.

I am rubbish at coping with interruptions to my sleep. Once, when I was a junior doctor in a hospital in Cardiff, I am told that I answered the phone in the small hours, spoke meaningfully to the ward sister who had rung me, and put the phone down – completely unaware. I was quite surprised to hear of the conversation after I had got up the following morning.

As a result of my iMac’s lack of rest, I restart it quite infrequently now. In the past OS X and apps have conspired to thrust restarts on me daily, or even more often, but with 10.10.5 I usually have to remember to electively restart every couple of weeks. This tidies up any lingering temporary files, disk caches, and the like.

This morning I had a few moments, and it occurred to me that it might be good to restart. One app had unexpectedly quit a few times yesterday, and this was a good opportunity to let OS X clear any remaining dribs and drabs from that.

No sooner had the Finder cleared its throat and announced that it was ready for business, than I started to get one of those tedious series of alerts wanting me to log into everything iCloud. Most seemed happy with my usual passwords, but Messages and FaceTime were not fobbed off with that: they wanted an “app-specific password”.

This is an unfortunate side-effect of protecting my Apple ID with two-step verification. I had been reluctant to turn that on until various iCloud and related security issues appeared last year. Knowing that I was in for a torrent of exquisitely informative messages on my iPhone, I made sure that was to hand, then clicked on the button to Create an app-specific password, sighing internally.

My Apple ID page opened up in Safari, and I selected the Password and Security item on the left, then asked for the password. Once provided, it was easy to copy and paste into both Messages and FaceTime authentication alerts, and my iPhone was already singing to the incoming messages informing me of what I already knew had transpired.

It is not that I do not appreciate the need for all these security dances, nor that Apple does them badly. If you ever find yourself struggling with any part of this process – or having problems with your Apple ID – you will find Apple’s support very quick to respond, second to none, and amazingly caring.

However I cannot help thinking how much simpler and cleaner it was when all we had to do was log into our Macs.