The Robservatory:
I use a lot of cloud services for file storage, primarily Dropbox, but also Box and (begrudgingly, for certain shared projects) Google Drive.
I also use iCloud, but not in any way that would be considered a true cloud file storage service. I use it strictly as a sync service for contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, Safari; I also use Back to My Mac.
But that’s it; I don’t use iCloud for cloud-based file management at all. Why not? Because iCloud in its current implementation is chock full of the stupid, at least for those of us who still use and rely on OS X.
When people say, “Apple doesn’t get Web Services”, this is a prime example of it.
not to be argumentative here; i’m not a huge fan of icloud either. but saying that you don’t use it for “cloud based file management” is…well, isn’t that kind of misleading? does icloud even offer such a thing?
isn’t it disingenuous to imply that it’s bad at a service it doesn’t even offer?
Yeah it’s largely a rant article about design decisions some guy doesn’t like. This isn’t a “prime example” of “Apple not getting Web Services” at all; when they say that they largely mean that it doesn’t function as expected and has downtime or bugs. That it isn’t a clone of Dropbox with enormous amounts of free space is true, but not interesting.
Or, when people say, “Apple doesn’t get Web Services,” they mean, “Apple didn’t build iCloud to work exactly like DropBox, which is what I want!”
Perhaps people should understand what iCloud is designed to do and not try to compare it to other services.
iCloud for me works perfectly well, in that it allows me to share documents between the same app on my computer and my iOS devices.
Don’t like iCloud, encourage the developers to support DropBox as an option.
with the iphone, Apple hid the filesystem from the user and apps.
iCloud is an extension of that thinking.
So asking to go back to non sandbox system is ridiculous.
Granted Apple vision is kind incomplete and half hearted.
People seem to give them benefit of the doubt
even though TimeMachine backup has failed for them multiple
times.
I’ve been using Apple’s online services since eWorld. Apple has come a long way (and it currently does much more in this regard than meets the general eye).
Despite their progress, Apple’s not beyond criticism. Particularly from the consumer-facing perspective.
Apple still has work to do if they (1) want to restore some of the cloud services they offered in previous iterations of iCloud and (2) if Apple wants to compete service-for-service* in the cloud with Google, Dropbox, etc.
*Apple doesn’t need to compete service-for-service, but computer users do benefit from certain basic Wed services that iCould doesn’t currently offer.
My frustration is that the storage is tied to Apple ID rather than relative to iOS devices. I have 4 iOS devices currently that I sue my Apple ID on and I get the same 5GB as someone who buys a single, low end iPhone or iPad Mini.
It doesn’t matter that I have multiple 64GB devices, I only get 5GB. That’s not enough to back up even a single 16GB device oftentimes.
Apple should offer storage equivalent to the size of every iOS device you purchase. Have a 16GB iPhone? You get 16GB. Also have a 64GB iPad? 80GB. And so on.
This doesn’t even get into the technical idiocy of the system as pointed out in the linked article. It’s simply not good or usable other than for the most basic use cases.
“Apple should offer storage equivalent to the size of every iOS device you purchase.”
I agree on an intuitive level completely.
However, at the tune of, what, 100 million devices added every year, I wonder what the actual cost of offering that kind of storage would be.
It would be a lot, but I am paying them money with each device i buy. At the very least why don’t I get 5GB with each device? Sure, it cuts into margins, but margins are very healthy, it can be depreciated, and it’s a competitive move.
So with Google Drive building a customer profile on your information, Onedrive’s data lookup incident, and Dropbox’s new questionable hire, I’ll go with Google Drive since it’s the cheapest ($10/month for 1TB).
Apple’s “web services” have been pretty useful to me in my life. Whether its iTunes, the App Store, Apple store, iCloud (yes, I actually do like all of iClouds services), iMessage, Facetime, Maps….you get the idea. I use them all and love all of them. Would it be nice if iCloud/MobileMe still offered a locker service like the previous iDisk? I guess, but that’s not what iCloud is, so I can’t really fault iCloud for that. If it was an offered feature that just refused to work, as well as all of their other services, then I might jump on the bandwagon. But frankly, as someone who uses 90% of Apples web services on a frequent daily basis, they serve me well and provide me a ton of value.
I even pay for additional storage in iCloud for backup on all my devices. I absolutely love the fact that I never have to worry about backing up, and my devices are always backed up daily without any work on my end.
I’d say some of the criticism is warranted, but as others have pointed out I think its a bit unfair and ridiculous the hyperbole people throw at Apple regarding web services. iCloud was designed and announced as an automatic background sync service that automatically updates content across devices. It was never billed as an online storage locker, and Steve Jobs even poked fun at that idea.
I have a 64GB iPhone and a 128GB iPad and my iCloud backups for those are 2GB and 1.8GB respectively. I don’t understand why you think you need the full storage space of a device for backups, given the list of things that are restored in other ways.
article doesnt make sense.
stupid #1 – per its own chart icloud overs over twice the free space than Dropbox does. but that counts only as stupidity on apple’s part.
stupid #2 – where did apple state their goal is to kill the local file system, thus making cost-per-gb relevant?
stupid #3 – of course apple reserves icloud integration for MAS apps. they want as many apps in the store as possible, and getting to use their cloud services is the carrot. if as a developer you dont like, simply invent your own cloud sync infrastructure and use that. but you dont want to, do you?
…and thats where this stupid article comes off the wheels — this is all totally acceptable because apple is not banning local, non-MAS apps. at all, anywhere! app devs are 100% free to write kernel extensions, System Preferences panels, and over-priced productivity suites. as noted, you cant even buy Office or Photoshop in the MAS. that itself is proof that apple doesnt hate you and you can make app dev work outside the MAS.
how do you mean TM has failed for them(?) multiple times? for you? for my mom? what are you talking about?
agreed — most of the success of icloud are invisible to most users. your music just shows up on your phone/desktop/tv; your movie purchases are just there; your backups just happen while you sleep; and migrating to a new phone is just painless and boring.
how quickly we forget what a PITA all of this stuff was not very long ago.
I think I need it because iCloud tells me I do.
Your iCloud backups say they need 64GB on your 64GB device?
They say I need more than 5GB. I was literally in the Apple Store yesterday with a Genius trying to fix the atrocious battery life of my iPhone 5 with iOS 7 when he told me I needed more space to do an iCloud backup (which he said I needed to do to fix the battery issue. it didn’t help).
Apps are restored in other ways. Photos can be too. But not app data. Not iMessage data. And I don’t store any music or video on my device.
Pay a couple dollars a month then, I guess. I don’t see why that makes it “unusable”.
A 1:1 relationship isn’t necessary. Apps and music aren’t backed up, for instance. Apple rejects apps that back up things that don’t need to be backed up.
You should check what’s actually using that much space. It might be surprising. My guess is that some of it is old apps that predate iCloud and Apple’s new policies.
When Apple first switched from MobileMe to iCloud, my MobileMe was worth a storage bonus for a year (I think they extended that, too). I never filled the original 5GB, let alone the bonus space.
I have six devices backing up through 5GB: three of them are 64GB devices. No problem.
I’m not sure I agree with all of the “stupid” things from the website. As far as cost goes, the cost is not outrageous compared to the ridiculous prices that Apple charges for extra GB on their devices. $200 for 64GB … seriously???
However, I do think that if Apple really does want to replace the file system, they do need to have better inter-app communications.
Also, I am a developer, and I looked at using iCloud for my apps, but I found the API for iCloud to be VERY hard to use and never bothered.
I actually love iCloud for what it does. There are plenty of other services for other needs. Apple isn’t really in the business of catering to enterprise customers and power users when in fact there are already many services on their platform. This guy is just demanding have the same features as those other guys. Unnecessary. iCloud automatic backup and syncing are a godsend for those two things alone.
I love iCloud. I use it nearly every day at work to manage Numbers, Keynote, and Pages documents. I can seamlessly go from Macbook Pro to iPad, or iPad to iPhone with all changes pushed down to the devices.
If you use other office productivity suites, maybe iCloud isn’t for you. I, however, find it extremely useful.
My only gripe is that I’ll put together 400MB keynote decks and that file size competes with an iPhone and iPad backup for the 15 GB of space I pay for. If Apple offered larger storage capacities at/around the same prices as the competition, that would be awesome.
This is exactly why I LOVE iCloud! I’m so sick of pathetic bloggers who don’t get OSX and the way Apple works.
TM has never failed for me. I’ve restored and upgraded multiple macs using a single TM backup over many many years.
So true… Switch android devices and if you forgot to manually back up local photos, videos, etc… Then they are gone forever, and tough for you.
I don’t get it… These “stupidities” are precisely what make iCloud work so well. Try keeping some data on an android device and see how well backup & restore work for you then. Google has google drive, but they have nothing like iCloud when it comes to seamless backups, app data sync, and restore.
Same here. Although I had to fix the disk’s directory that was running the backup a couple of times.
The only people disappointed with iCloud are the dolts who want it to be something it wasn’t meant to be – which is cloud storage and backup solutions.
TOTALLY agree…. I’ve owned 22 Macs all the way back to the beginning and iCloud May be the first major service/development that I 100% do NOT use.
1-you sell me a 128gb iPhone, give me 128gb storage to back it up! Or sell it to me! What’s the point otherwise? Really really stupid. And why the limit of 100gb anyway?!!!! I have two iPads and an iPhone and you limit me to 100gb?
So let me get this straight: Apple took away iWeb and MobileMe (I used iDisk just about every day, as did most of my buddies in the music industry), made all of us re-do our websites , took down our photo galleries, and replaced it with this lame shit?
Unbelievably short sighted and stupid.
I run my life and career on Apple devices, but now use Everweb, Box/Dropbox, Smugmug/Flickr etc. to replace the services Apple took away from me. What a hassle.
And by the way I see the arguments below that you shouldn’t need 64gb of storage for a 64gb device because of apps and music. Well I DO. I carry huge amounts of music I record, along with video I’ve generated…using Apple software by the way…
there’s absolutely no need for you to back up 1:1. your apps are already on apple’s cloud infrastructure, it merely needs to reload them, not back them up individually for millions of device owners. that’d be insane.
why would you need to backup your apps? they’re already in the cloud and apple re-downloads them on a restore. it doesn’t make any sense.
you are looking at almost 500 petabytes to cover the existing user base then. Think about that scale for a moment then you see why it’s not done that way.
Cost would be prohibitive even with you paying. They’d need at least 500 petabytes of storage replicated world wide for resiliency and latency, etc.
Well beyond the fact that you compress your backups, apps, music, etc should not be 1:1 anyway because of de-dupe and redownload. Anyone thinking you need 1:1 doesn’t understand how backup and archive actually works.
Most who rail against iCloud and Apple services either want something like a dropbox, have seen the issues with core data syncing (which no one else is trying to solve really), or just are holding on to issues with Mobile.me.
Apple is trying to make this stuff appliance level stupid/easy for users. Many techno-nerds hate that because it’s like liking that band before they were popular and now that they are they must suck.
Facebook is doing effectively just that with more users, smaller margins, less revenue, a smaller war chest, and no direct correlation to a user’s purchase.
It’s expensive and complicated and absolutely plausible while not being cost prohibitive.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/229861827208629/scaling-the-facebook-data-warehouse-to-300-pb/
Scaling database storage is not the same as object storage. Object storage is going to be more complex and costly because of the nature of it. You can’t compare database specialized storage to a general object store. It’s not just buying a bunch of disks and enabling some cross site replication.
It’s not an issue of whether Apple ‘gets’ cloud services. The issue is that they chose to provide select services that are not the ones that very vocal bloggers etc think they should have. Thus Apple isn’t doing it right. Apple could be perfect in what they do provide but because feature x, y or z is missing and Mr Blogger wants it included and would have if he was in charge then the whole thing is junk.
Same with how iTunes runs, how the phone was designed etc.
Them? I think you mean you. If time machine was really that crappy there would have been huge lawsuits etc
Perhaps you should stop keeping every single text message you get like they are precious jewels and stop filming your home porn movies in slo mo and keeping them on your 5s.
Then you wouldn’t have such large backups
Impossible since that 64 GB device is really more like only 61 GB of actual storage. And then there is a good 3-4 GB of iOS on there.
I’m not sure what your point is. By “object” do you mean things like photos, files, etc? Because that’s what Facebook is doing and I would think would be the primary requirement for iCloud as well. Did you read the linked article?
If anything Apple could maybe be more efficient than Facebook through content addressable storage and deduplication as I’m guessing a lot of the data is the same (I send a photo to you, for example).