back to article 'Sacrifice another goat!: iCloud is Apple's biggest failure before Google

For a company that prides itself on craftsmanship and a beautiful user experience, Apple's cloud services continue to be more than a blemish on the company's reputation. They are a serious black hole. Google, meanwhile, was born in the cloud, and it shows: things like document and calendar synchronisation just work, and across …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well...

    You have to remember that they are a patents and marketing company. I don't think they have many professional programming staff, that's why they've been producing just minor variants on the same OS for at least 10 years now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Well...

      ...and Google are an advertising company with a sideline in search.

      Everyone has been producing minor variants of an OS for decades, it's called Unix.

      The only company with a truly original codebase these days is Microsoft. Sadly BeOS, AmigaOS, RiscOS and others are no longer in the mainstream or being developed.

      1. Aaron Em

        Microsoft has an original codebase, but...

        ...modern Windows (i.e. NT and its descendants) didn't originate with Microsoft; Mark Russinovich has the whole story. (For the attention-deficit crowd, what became Windows NT was born as DEC's anointed successor to VMS, and when DEC killed the project most of the team decamped to Redmond at Mr. Gates' invitation. Your Windows 7 box may not look like a VAX from the outside, but from the inside...)

  2. Tim 11
    Unhappy

    android syncs across devices?

    hmm, I was just bemoaning the inability of my android phone to sync the calendar with my gmail account and wondering about switching to apple, thinking "well it's expensive but at least the basics would work seamlessly"

    So maybe I'm better off sitting where I am and waiting for android to get better. What I really want for android though is an app that makes it work as a mobile phone - that's the thing Nokia always understood and I miss it like crazy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: android syncs across devices?

      Maybe you're thinking at it from the device-centric point of view - you should have your calendar on the cloud and sync to the device. This is the theme of the article. Doing this means you calendar syncs seamlessly on your Android phone, PC, tablet etc.

      If you can't manage this - and by your comment of not being able to use you device as a phone, perhaps this is the case - then maybe you are a bit confused by technology. Perhaps a Nokia dumbphone and a little paper diary might help you manage a little better?

      1. Craigness

        Re: android syncs across devices?

        Even when it's seamless, there are a few things Google doesn't do well. Eg. If you have 2 or more calendars then an invite in Gmail will still become an appointment in your default calendar. I tried in Android (2.3) to send 2 photos from a cloud gallery in a single email, either as links or attachments. Only one can be done.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Really?

      I have my calendar and contacts synced between Chrome on Windows 7, a Blackberry Playbook and an HP Pre 3. When I was using an Android tablet, that synced too. I find the comments of the author accurate and to the point. I have difficulty understanding what you might be doing.

    3. Ian Yates

      Re: android syncs across devices?

      What exactly happens for you? Assuming you have your Google account registered on your phone (Settings > Accounts) and marked to background sync, anything you add to the calendar for that account should be "instantly" available in your online Google Calendar and any other Google-powered devices.

      I've had this across three Android devices for years and have aways found it to be completely hassle free.

      I'm not saying it works 100% of the time, but I've not head before of it not working at all...

      I'm looking forward to Google Music coming to the UK, to complete the multimedia cloud experience on Android.

  3. Lord Voldemortgage

    I have to agree re Google

    I am not particularly fond of Google's approach to many things but the technology really does work.

    I've bought or been given almost every generation of portable computer including Newtons, Zodiacs, NetBooks, iPaqs, and iPods and nothing has ever come close to the simplicity of moving from one Android phone to another which was almost bafflingly straightforward for someone expecting a bit of hacking around.

    I can't comment on Apple's own cloudiness but I use Google's services to keep my iPod Touch and my work Outlook in sync, it will even do contacts with my old Nokia phone.

    Of course the upshot of this device coverage is that, like the author with his house full of Apple products, I don't feel tied to Google devices.

    1. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

      Re: I have to agree re Google

      > I am not particularly fond of Google's approach to many things but the technology really does work.

      But for whom?

      At ^n clicks of six thousand million switches, Google's underlords know all there is to know about everyone they want to know anything about.

      No icon until we get get a Thatcher inane grin icon.

      Come on you dolts!

      You know it makes sense.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    iCloud works for me.

    Sorry, but it does.

    Seamless sync between iPhone, iPad, Android phone & PC running Win7 plus Outlook.

    Calendar, contacts, photos, music all just sync.

    1. Si 1

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      Same here, it would be nice if the article author had put a bit more detail into what specifically iCloud was failing to do for him. I find my appointments, notes, documents, reminders, music, etc all sync very nicely. I've never had something not show up or a sync fail.

      My only real criticism of iCloud is that parts of it aren't free (iTunes Match would be nice to have, but not nice enough that I'd pay for it) and that for no explicable reason if you switch iCloud sync on, your device will no longer automatically sync with your desktop, it has to be triggered manually. I don't really see why that restriction exists. Surely two automatic backups are better than one?!

      1. Craigness
        WTF?

        "never had a sync fail"

        As an Android user, I've never had to sync. I win.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "never had a sync fail"

          Maybe, Mr Craigness, because in your world google was never down, was it?

          Unfortunately back in the real work where Google's ass doesn't shoot rainbows it fails quite often.

          They even lose people's data! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/28/gmail_account_deletion_snafu/

          1. Craigness
            WTF?

            I still win

            Seems that some people don't understand the way Google does things. Just because I don't have to sync, it doesn't follow that I'm not able to store my data on my own devices. Calendar, contacts, tasks, photos, videos and email sync with a variety of software on any hardware, even it's not rectangular, expensive and made from glass and aluminium. Non-Google-format docs sync with the Google Drive application and Google-format docs can be exported in open formats in a single zip file. Reader feeds etc can be exported too, no rainbows are involved. Everyone has a backup routine, don't they?

      2. Richard Cartledge

        Re: iCloud works for me.

        Works for me too. "And when I stop reading in the Kindle app on my iPad 2 and pick up my Kindle Fire, I won't miss a beat." well, when I stop reading or listening on iPad I can pick iPhone and carry on where I left off. Synching of contacts, calendars, photos, notes all work.

        Saving on iCloud is a synch in OS X 10.8 as it's right there as a tabbed choice in the save dialogue, you can also drag files there right from the Finder. It is strange at first having discreet sets of documents for each app but it's early days and I reverve judgement for a year, why should I see a .flv or .c4d file in textedit's open dialogue anyway?

        1. Craigness

          @Richard

          Ubuntu has the best sync I've seen. Instead of having a vault that syncs everything within it, you can select folders to sync and then exclude files/subfolders from the sync if you wish. So there's no need to separate your documents between 2 separate locations as with Drive, Skydrive, Dropbox etc. And you can still open that .flv file with any media player of your choice, or even a hex editor.

    2. Sean Timarco Baggaley

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      Ditto. iCloud hasn't glitched once and does the job perfectly.

      Google Mail, on the other hand, STILL can't even do IMAP or CalDAV properly. I'd use the Microsoft Exchange option, but I'd much rather just switch to a company that can read a f*cking RFC every once in a while.

      Speaking of Microsoft: that company includes Hotmail, which was doing free email long before Google thought of that particular "innovation". And Microsoft have been doing SaaS for years. 1&1 Internet will lease servers running Exchange and / or Sharepoint if you wish, and they've been offering that for a few years already. Exchange + Sharepoint crap all over Google's offerings. From orbit.

      On top of which, Microsoft will even sell you all the components to run their complete "Office365" service in-house, on your own datacentre. That's the kind of control I like. Google don't offer anything anywhere near as good.

      If it's the "cloud" and "SaaS" you're after, forget Google. Microsoft have been spanking their arses raw and bloody in the corporate space for years. Their consumer-space SaaS / Web-based offerings have been improving in leaps and bounds. Apple are in the business of selling hardware; I don't think they'll mind jumping into bed with Microsoft again if necessary. They've done it before.

      That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for Google. If I were them, I wouldn't be popping the champagne corks just yet.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        FAIL

        Re: iCloud works for me.

        Microsoft bought in Hotmail when it was called HoTMaiL. There were several outages as they converted it from UNIX to Windows.

        That said to their credit they've finally came round to SSL, POP3, and ActiveSync support although it took them long enough.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      Me too, I have never had any issues, and iTunes Match is awesome as well.

      As for the former Apple engineer, did he not leave before the data centre went live?

      I think Goole is great, but I still prefer iCloud over my Gmail though I continue to use both...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      You just try syncing Notes between devices - yes the tiny little uncomplex text files. Then report back here just how well iCloud works.

      (For the impatient: it doesn't, it's a complete mess, either duplicating everything or deleting it. At random.)

    5. Ted Treen
      Facepalm

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      Aw, C'mon...

      Can you EVER see any El Reg "journalist" writing ANYTHING positive or praiseworthy about Apple?

      It appears that they now try to ape Ms Leach - who used to write for the Grauniad ('nuff said)...

    6. Fink-Nottle

      Re: iCloud works for me.

      iCloud works fine - but I mourn the loss of MobileMe's email account settings sync.

  5. garyi

    Ms skydrive

    Not defending apple because if nothing else i am a bit annoyed i cannot put any file i like in icloud.

    But i did try both google and microsofts recent efforts, (and dropbox and sugar sync and tonido) and both google and microsofts efforts for me at least simply did not work. Microsoft was crippling slow, 100kb download. Googles in a perminant state of confusion as to what needed syncing.

    Dropbox is best but a tenner a month. I cannot afford that. Tonido did not work and so far sugarsync has been fine.

    But i really wish icloud was more tha it is. Athough i have to say my contacts, diary etc has touch wood be perfect.

    1. Phoenix50
      Thumb Up

      Re: Ms skydrive

      Open Internet Explorer

      Tools > Internet Options > Connections tab > LAN Settings button

      Unitck "Automatically detect settings", Click OK to finish and close IE.

      Speed issue solved.

  6. R Cox

    Google provides a free service in which the data lives on Google servers and can be mined and destroyed at the will of google. We have seen cases where people have losed access to their data for really stupid and arbitrary reasons. If data is not critical, Google is a good choice.

    Apple, with iToos and successors, provides a paid service in which contacts, calendars, mail, personal information, and files are synchronized among computers. In my experience over the past 10 years or so I have not lost data. Sometimes there has been issues, but I have had up to three computers in sync. In addition, I have been able to manage family computers remotely using Mobileme.

    These are two different products, and unfortunately with the introduction of iOS, the toolchain became broken and Mobileme no longer worked as well as it did. So a good product is gone.

    I see nothing that great about iCloud, except it is not google, so I have some level of confidence that my data is not be mined and advertisements are not going to be targeted based on email. iCloud no long synchs mail between Mac and iOS devices, which sucks. it no longer helps me manage passwords, which can cost $50 per device. OTOH, the App store now lets me share purchases across all macs.

    I am not saying iCloud is good, it seems to suck. Mobileme really helped me manage data much more transparently than Google dropbox or anyone else. I also have a personal webdav server which I could use but it is not as transparent as Mobileme. Now that Mobileme is gone I might make it work.

    What would make me a google fan is if they updated the Google Docs. This could be the new killer app for google. However, they are missing some quite fundamental features on the application. For examples, graphing has few advanced options, and the presentation cannot change slide size.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Funny that I read this just after trying to upload my music collection to Google's cloud, so I can use it on my Nexus 7 (not enough local storage on the device for all my music and rest of the stuff)

    Then I estimated - since the Google's Music Manager app doesn't show it, nice touch for a "web" company - the time it will take to upload my collection: 5 days.

    That's at least 4.7 DAYS slower than when I used the similar service in iCloud... fortunately not long after finding this Goole's Music Manager froze up completely (should get an award for shittiest app ever), leading me to completely give up on that idea.

    1. Neill Mitchell

      Re +++Ath0

      Have you not stopped to consider how your music collection gets into the cloud? Via magic pixie dust transfer or using your variable speed, quality and loaded wifi/Internet connection?

      Even my pretty whizzy 30GB Virgin cable service only has an upload speed of 2MBit (that's only 256Kbytes remember and that will be throttled if I go outside the 9pm-10am unlimited time). So uploading my modest 20GB music collection would take days to complete no matter whose cloud service I decided to use.

      So I would be amazed if uploading your music collection to iCloud only took 0.3 days unless it was very small. There was some network factor at work.

  8. Joe Gurman

    I suppose it's just me

    ....but why do I find an article with this point of view from a competitor to be just a wee bit self-serving? I'm impressed Matt and his family have so much Apple kit, because he trashes the firm so regularly. I'm sorry if this sounds fanboi-ish, but I can't help thinking that any approach that makes cloud storage as transparent as possible to the user is better than what Google, Apple, and Microsoft have offered to date. Apple and Microsoft have made a brief nod in that direction, but mostly, for all three, it's been, "Ooh, look at us, we do stuff in the cloud," when most users aren't as awed as some techies with the breathless utterance of any marketing sentence with the word cloud in it.

  9. Individual #6/42
    Unhappy

    Sorry but my mileage varied

    Google just caused a load of sync problems, duplicating events and contacts. Icloud just works (for me). Some analysis would've supported the suthor's arguments but I guess neither the fruteloops or the chocfans like to give out that sort of data.

  10. Morningstar

    Currently sharing content between three Android devices, desktop pc, and a netbook. It is effortless with Google, my calendar, mail, documents and photos are just there. I logged on with my new Nexus 7 and my contacts, and calendar were populated, photos were on Drive as soon as I logged in, books were ready to download as soon as I wanted to read them.

    I use dropbox as well for a selection of music, so it didn't take long for that to be set up on the Nexus 7 as well.

    I've watched people struggle with iCloud and iTunes, I'll pass on that.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In an occasionally connected world

    " In a hyper-connected world, devices continue to matter"

    This relentless push towards "cloud computing" and software as a service ignores that the world is NOT yet hyper connected. There are plenty of places where your 3G device won't get signal and plenty of occasions when your home internet connection isn't connected.

    Standlone install with connection on demand for me thanks.

    1. PJI
      Thumb Down

      Re: In an occasionally connected world

      Added to which: Internet/cloud dependency is all very well for the stay-at-homes and those always near free wi-fi. But you need deep pockets and to stay on the beaten track if you travel at all. Fat lot of good all your maps, pictures and books are in the cloud when you've got no connection or a kb of data costs as much as dinner for one.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    iCloud

    Used as a backup it does work well, wife dropped her phone recently and restoring the new phone back was pretty painless. My main issue with Apple having multiple devices in a family is the issue of seperate accounts vs shared accounts and the ability to fine tune syncing across them.

    1. Lusty

      Re: iCloud

      Agreed, I lost a phone when out and a little worse for the wear. When I replaced it the new iPhone was identical in every way to the one I lost before I left the apple shop including open tabs in the browser and half written drunk texts! Anyone who has restored a phone with iCloud will know how good it is.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: iCloud

        Although to be fair you get the same functionality every time you sync your iPhone with iTunes on your computer, which, since I use my computer to charge my phone whenever I'm near it, is several times per day. No cloud necessary.

        1. Lusty

          Re: iCloud

          "Although to be fair you get the same functionality every time you sync your iPhone with iTunes on your computer"

          No you don't, your computer has no idea about all the stuff that happens after you leave your house. As I said above I had unfinished texts and open browser tabs in my recovered phone which were from my night out.

  13. Sean Timarco Baggaley

    @Matt Asay:

    Enough with the tired "market share" straw-man. You know it's bollocks. We know it's bollocks.

    A good CEO is only interested in profits—they're running a business, not a charity. There is no "tablet" market. There is only the iPad market... and a much smaller niche with some cheap knock-offs selling at half the price for a third of the features.

    Sure, iCloud may yet prove another flop—the night is young—but Apple have enough cash in the bank to just buy their way into the market if need be. Though I suspect they'll just ask Microsoft to let them rebrand some of their offerings instead. They already did it with AIM: Apple's "iChat" instant messaging service relied on the AIM protocol and back-end behind the scenes.

    1. midcapwarrior

      Re: @Matt Asay:

      He's an FOSS guy so he's used to existing on charity

    2. steve2727

      Re: @Matt Asay:

      Microsoft had enough money to buy their way back into search, Google had enough money to buy their way into social networking, neither have had much success in their respective attempts, and neither will Apple. Doesn't matter how much cash they throw at it the cloud will always be a struggle for a company whose success is based on making shiny toys.

  14. Dave Perry
    Megaphone

    iCloud good for personal

    A friend of mine has restored apps and backups from iCloud to his iPhone several times and is happy with it. I found the what it would backup bit confusing when moving to iOS5 so have disabled it on the iPhone (so it's not backing up my photos). I sync photos to my Macbook using a USB lead and iPhoto, and am happy that my Apple ID means if I download a song from the iTunes store on one device the other gets it next time I'm on wifi (no 3G at work due to faradays cage office).

    I read somewhere Apple's own advice for enterprise however, was not to trust it. I was looking at what was the best platform for syncing educational-owned iPads which is a big PITA in establishments, and we concluded Dropbox was the best bet for non-confidential data (as they are not safe harbour, even though Amazon S3 which Dropbox sits on is actually SH and so is Google).

  15. odb
    Thumb Down

    A single example?

    Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see a single example of iCloud not working in this entire article.

    Apparently he didn't like something about the iTunes music syncing with his son's music and "turned it off".

  16. djmyob

    Google isn't the pinnacle of cloud sync, Dropbox is

    One simple thing makes me dispute that "cloud in, not device out" is the right way to think about sync/cloud: Dropbox.

    It's superior to anybody else's offering as far as I'm concerned, and it starts with your device. Personally, I don't want my data dependent on the cloud. The cloud has its problems too. I like that Dropbox makes a copy of my files on every computer I sync. It's essentially sync + remote backup + online access + device access. What's not to love?

    That said, while Apple has been horrible at generic document/file sync, I've been using their services long enough to have a mac.com e-mail address, and contacts/calendars/bookmarks/notes all sync pretty much flawlessly, with the occasional glitch along the way as everyone has.

    I'll grant that their music approach leaves a lot to be desired, but that seems more the product of bad decisions than bad tech. The worst thing about iCloud by far isn't iCloud per se but Apple IDs. They need to create a process whereby people can merge past IDs created through mac.com, Mobile Me, iTunes store, and iCloud into one.

    1. Craig McGill 1

      Re: Google isn't the pinnacle of cloud sync, Dropbox is

      It baffles me that DropBox gets the praise it does. You can't edit and save work on Apple apps like Pages and Keynote remotely. On the iPad for example, ou need to open Dropbox, access your file, then open it in the host app then save it on the iPad. Then transfer it over when you get to your main machine.

      I'm really hoping OsX 10.8 allows for proper Cloud storage (with folders and so on) but with a local version remaining for when in offline areas.

      Basically a version of DropBox that works with Apple apps...

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    "iCloud is Apple's biggest failure before Google"

    ... before Google what?

  18. Andy Taylor

    How do you input the data then?

    You have to start on a device somewhere.

    iCloud works perfectly for me across multiple devices.

  19. Tank boy
    FAIL

    Well then

    So much for Open and Shut. This asshole uses crApple products, and apparently they suck so bad, this douche just keeps using them.

  20. Mike Bell

    Stop talking about MobileMe

    It's dead. Deceased. An ex-cloud.

    It was Apple's first foray into cloud computing and has now been retired, replaced by iCloud.

    My experience with iCloud, for what it's worth, is that it's been excellent, unobtrusive and seamless. When I upgraded from an ipad2 to an ipad3, the effort involved in getting my music, documents, apps, contacts etc. involved little more than entering my credentials and making good use of a high-speed Internet connection.

    I have one gripe: it's not currently possible to re-download paid-for movies from iCloud. This being the case, I'm currently not happy about buying movies from iTunes and I'll hang on until the copyright issues involved have been resolved.

    I also spotted a glitch where some contacts were appearing twice in my contacts book. Shit happens. A bug, for sure, but easily resolved: turn off iCloud contacts on the device, accept the option to blitz contacts on the device, then turn on iCloud contacts again. Ta-da. All contacts back in place. Didn't need to 'sync' anything because it's the device's job to figure that out.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stop talking about MobileMe

      20th Century Fox movies can now be re-downloaded on your device, I would anticipate more studios will follow...

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Well isn't this other article very timely for this discussion:

    "if you use SkyDrive, you might be surprised to find content you deem as harmless and personal will get you banned. And the first you’ll know of this is the next time you try to login to find your account suspended.

    How easy is it to post inappropriate content? That’s undefined and completely up to Microsoft, but they do monitor everything you upload and have a broad set of rules defining what prohibited content is.

    As an example, say you’ve been on holiday and took some shots of your family on the beach in their swim wear. SkyDrive does not allow “partial human nudity,” so there’s a chance you may get banned for those images. You also aren’t allowed to store works protected by any laws e.g. copyright law, so does that mean you can’t store your legal ebooks on there? Maybe you can amd maybe the holiday photos are fine, but the point is that decision is Microsoft’s and you run the risk of an account suspension through no real fault of your own because of ambiguity.

    Users are being caught out by this SkyDrive content monitoring. A photographer lost his account for storing images of partial nudes earlier this year. Then in May a Dutch user lost access to 12GB of files due to a file/s containing prohibited content, but it doesn’t look as if Microsoft told him exactly what that content was. There’s bound to be many more incidents such as this."

    http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/skydrive-account-suspensions-prove-you-cant-trust-cloud-storage-20120719/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re: they do monitor everything you upload

      Completely unacceptable for either personal or business use.

      Personal is personal. Confidential is confidential. That's all.

    2. Matt_payne666

      I've had nude images of my kids on my skydrive f9r months, along with all manner of assorted crap, no intervention or anything from Microsoft...

      I have 70gb uploaded (none of it is public), and very happy with the sync across my various devices.

  22. alex 39

    You're complaining because iCloud synced songs to your device, that your son bought, with your AppleID on his device, how is Apple meant to now that your son's device isn't yours, since he's using your apple ID. Sounds like its working as described to me.

    Maybe your son needs to buy his pop songs with his own Apple ID.

    You could argue that a shared family account would be nice for iTunes, but Apple hasn't offered that, you're just trying to shoe horn that by using one ID between multiple people's devices.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We all know Matt luuuvs the cloud.

    One thing apple do very well, perhaps too well, is to give people a strong idea that their products represent good value. And, honestly, this is far easier to show with a device in hand than with vague descriptions of the merits of having your data hosted by some third party in who knows what country, where without any warning or indication whatsoever all your stuff might just up and vanish for any reason including no reason at all.

    I haven't really paid attention, but apple's cloud services seem to be positioned to provide fall-back for their hardware, not as a primary use case. From their point of view, this using-as-insurance makes sense. Too bad the Asay household then tries to use a bunch of individual devices in ways that would've given the use case designers headaches. Now you can quibble and argue about whether they should've thought about using their devices in similar ways (and it would've made sense if they had), but they didn't.

    A sack of devices designed for the individual doesn't automatically a collaboration system for a family make. I don't think this has much to do with "going cloud" at all, no matter how much Matt would prefer it would.

  24. Doug Glass
    Go

    "Even desktop-bound Microsoft groks and executes the cloud better than Apple."

    You grok?? I'm impressed; Valentine Michael Smith would be too.

  25. Nanners

    The cloud

    Sssuuuuuuuuuuccccccccckkkkkkkkkkksssssssssssssss..... That is all.

  26. Kar98
    Terminator

    Works just fine

    Author must be holding the cloud wrong, because iCloud actually does work. Funny how he didn't manage to come up with an actual example or usage case to demonstrate how it isn't working.

    In comparison to former systems like Palm's HotSync and Microsoft's ActiveSync? Holy hell, does it work, and how.

  27. croc

    Let's talk 'cloud' stuff when all and sundry have FTTN / uncapped data. At reasonable prices, please... Until then it is just too costly to use a 'free' cloud service.

    Then there is the 'megaupload' aspect of cloud services. What happens when the MPAA decides that what you've stored might infringe something of theirs? Who cares where you live, mate... Or maybe you've got stuff stored there, and 'there' disappears due to an FBI takedown notice? Fat chance of recovery, mate. Others see clouds, all I see is ISP's and lawyers chasing the silver linings.

  28. ysth

    Obligatory google calendar complaint

    Why oh why do they refuse to support floating times? There's a *reason* they are in the iCal specification.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Still waiting for the cloud

    I remember back in 1995 when Java was released and the web started to become slightly more than some static pages and everybody was predicting that people would stop buying PCs and start buying dumb terminals that just had a web browser and maybe a Java runtime.

    If I had a nickel for every time I heard that the cloud is right on the verge of being all-important since then...

    Meanwhile, back in reality-land, the operating system you run locally (Android, iOS, Win8, etc.) is gaining importance to people, as is the software they have stored and run locally, i.e., games and other apps.

    Surely "the cloud" is important and useful for some stuff. As for it becoming all-important, I've been hearing that claim for almost 20 years and I'll believe it when I see it.

  30. (AMPC) Anonymous and mostly paranoid coward
    Unhappy

    The author forgot one detail

    I have an Iphone (inherited a 3G) and like it OK, except for one or two annoying things:

    1) I can't upgrade a lot of games and apps I previously paid for unless I buy a more recent Apple shiny (maybe I will after I win the lottery).

    2) After reading the article, I decided to give the ICloud its day in court. However, it seems I will need to go through some (many) hoops to run it on this officially unsupported device. Fortunately, I love a challenge.

    Backwards compatibility is one thing that Apple seems to have deliberately or inadvertently engineered out of its products. And it is most annoying. On the other hand, I can easily use my iphone as an initial calendering input device, upload these events to my Google calendar and then see them happily (and automatically) sync with Tungle Me. Can I sync backwards fom the cloud from Google et al? Dunno, but I think not. So still no temptation to shell out big bucks for another Iphone, but that doesn't seem to stop Apple from selling them

    Apple (and many others) still does not get the cloud. And I don't think my next mobile (or any) device will be from Apple. This designer fad stuff can only run so far. I am still debating about whether or not to put Icloud on my PC.

  31. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    Apple's user interface...

    I still have no idea what "sync" does on iPhones connected to iTunes. Whatever it does, I don't like it. With a 32GB iPhone and 120+GB of content on the PC, "Sync" simply Does Not Work.

    Insert random mindless comments below.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Apple's user interface...

      Sync does a bunch of good stuff, like back up everything on your phone incrementally. You can go through the tabs in iTunes to choose what you want sync'ed with your phone, i.e., choose which of the 120+ GB of content you want on your phone. It's pretty easy. If you can't figure it out maybe a friend can show you.

  32. Dropper

    iCloud Fails?

    Not really. While I can't claim to be a fan of Apple, their phones are so poor it still amazes me anyone would buy such shite, iCloud is pretty decent. It has only failed me twice, and both times it probably would have paid to free up some space before trying to fit 2GB video files into 512MB of storage. And there-in lies the problem. With Amazon's cloud service, the only physical storage you need is enough to buffer what you're trying to watch. With iCloud (at least on an iPod Touch) you can only watch what your device can download. I can watch 35 minutes of Pirates of Carribean if that's all that will download - which is precisely what did happen last time I tried - but no more until I delete a few episodes of Stargate Universe. On the other hand it does as advertised. Everything I've bought is available wherever I have WiFi, provided I pay attention to what I've already got on my device.

    Oh, I may (quite correctly) believe iPhones are shite, the way they suck is too endless to list, but I do love my iPod and want an iPad. Also I play WoW on a Macbook Pro and it works seemlessly, which is all a computer is good for anyway. Other applications are sort of like an orange some arsehole has put in your Christmas stocking - a waste of space..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: iCloud Fails?

      I've heard a lot of people say they prefer Android Phone X to an iPhone but rarely does anybody declare that iPhones are shite. I'm sure I can come up with plenty of examples of much worse phones, so, not sure what you mean.

  33. blueprint

    Works fine for me.

    Not had any problems with iCloud at all. The neverending torture that is trying to make sense of the Android 'Operating System' however...

  34. Uncle Bernie
    Happy

    As usual, everything in this diatribe was bullshit. My iCloud works fine.

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