Apple’s iCloud: Data in Forefront, Devices in Background
- By John C Abell
- June 6, 2011 |
- 6:23 pm |
- Categories: The Cloud
The long, strange trip that has been Apple’s implementation of cloud computing seems to have finally hit the road Monday with a full-throttled embrace of a paradigm one might not expect from a hardware manufacturer: Your computing life is merely enabled by the devices you own, and should not be defined by them.
The unveiling of iCloud was telegraphed last week, and there were few surprises at the 2011 WorldWide Developers Conference. Cloud computing really just means one thing, and it’s a just a matter of how well you do it. The bottom line is that this is long overdue and utterly essential for the multidevice lifestyle that Apple has done so much to bring about.
It remains to be seen if Apple can deliver. But not trying to solve, in one fell swoop, the growing problem inherent in a distributed digital life might have been a drag on Apple’s core business. A massive mainstream is now the target audience for the mobile internet gadgets upon which Apple has staked its future. A perception that these things are complicated or don’t play nice with each other is toxic.
To be sure, iCloud doesn’t invent a single thing — except a new price point of zero (almost, more on that later) instead of the $100 a year for Apple’s current iteration of cloud storage called MobileMe. Music lovers will be disappointed: iCloud isn’t a repository to stream your music, and doesn’t one-up Music Beta by Google, Amazon Cloud Drive by much. And ? no real surprise here ? it’s only for Apple devices.
But Apple has lots of customers who now own maybe an iPhone and and iPad and a MacBook and have no patience for making any effort to make sure they’re all on the same page. The machine is starting to take a back seat now, by being a dreadfully easy to operate portal that makes your stuff available here and now.
And this is where Apple has the upper hand, why their cloud strategy could be a game changer: Like a tyrannical state, Apple can make decisions unilaterally, and impose them — no pesky cooperation from uneasy partner necessary, no buy-in from competitors, no dependencies.
You may not like the way Apple solves problems or — as in the case of the iCloud — believe that it’s about freaking time. But the sheer scale of this means that, if it’s as good as Apple says it will be, iCloud will refine how we think of computers and spur innovation from competitors in the still-vastly-larger Windows world.
For some the big question was how this would simplify iTunes, which essentially ties your music collection to a single computer. No more: Now your collection lives on a server farm and is available to any of your registered devices ? though not, sadly, as streaming files. And there’s a catch. For that $0 Apple will keep the music you bought from them safe and available to up to 10 devices (up from five). But it won’t do so for the music you didn’t buy from them — that’ll cost you $25 a year. The big innovation with the “matching” enhancement is that you won’t have to upload our collection, which nearly drove my colleague Dave Kravets nuts when he tried out Amazon Cloud Drive. Apple will just plop a another copy on the cloud.
Of course $25 isn’t a lot. But it’s a pretty significant asterisk on the “free” spin Apple will tout. Just about everybody’s collection includes non-iTunes music, so this means that Apple will get $25 from just about everybody who doesn’t want to get into a potentially nightmarish housekeeping problem that cloud computing is supposed to erase.
But, big picture: Apple’s cloud services have been a mess, and overpriced. I’ve subscribed to MobileMe for years, including the $150 family plan for our posse’s three iPhones, three Apple computers and one iPad. And I barely use it: I go to Google for e-mail and calendars, and use DropBox to share files among devices. Now, for 1/6th what people like me have been paying, they will get what sounds like effortless, seamless syncing in the background, and a huge digital hub in the sky.
That is, assuming iCloud isn’t more of the same in the problems department.
“You might ask, why should we believe them, they?re the ones that brought us MobileMe,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs knows the stakes told the WWDC audience. “We learned a lot.”
John is the Wired.com's New York Editor and directs coverage of disruptive business and media. He used to be a Reuters hack and a media critic and has always loved juicy quotes.Follow @johncabell and @epicenterblog on Twitter.
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