Apple's iCloud will automatically store, sync data for free

In general the service seems really neat, but I have to admit I find their storage and pricing system a bit confusing. How is the average consumer going to react? I can't imagine explaining this to my parents...<p>---<p>So...it stores all my files?<p><i>Yes. Well, sort of. If your apps use the iCloud API.</i><p>What?<p><i>Nevermind. Yes. It stores your files, and sync them across all your computers.</i><p>What does it cost?<p><i>It's free.</i><p>Awesome. And I can access them any time?<p><i>Yep. Except photos. Those are only stored for 30 days. But the copies stick around on your devices. But only your PCs - your phones only keep the last 1000 photos.</i><p>Oh. But what if I want to look at older photos on my--<p><i>Put it in an album. Then it's always available.</i><p>Oh...kay. I guess that makes sense. What about music?<p><i>If you buy it from the iTunes store, then it syncs automatically to all your devices!</i><p>Sweet!<p><i>Up to 10 devices.</i><p>Eh, that's fine, that seems like a lot of devices. What if I don't buy it from the iTunes store?<p><i>You can sync that too!</i><p>Great!<p><i>It costs money though.</i><p>Wait. I thought you said it was free.<p><i>Non-iTunes Store music costs a yearly fee to store ($24.99). Although you're not really storing them. See, iTunes will scan your music and try to guess what music you have, and then grant you access to the iTunes Store copies of it. Unless it gets confused and thinks your Bob Dylan is Jimmy Hendricks. But that probably won't happen.</i><p>Er.<p><i>But you can "store" an unlimited number of songs!</i><p>Unlimited? That's a lot!<p><i>Yeah, you can also store things like mail, documents, and backups on there too!</i><p>Are those unlimited too?<p><i>No, those have a max of 5GB. Except for Apps, iBooks, and iTunes music. Those don't count. Oh, and neither do photos. The ones that we store for 30 days.</i><p>What happens if I use up all 5GB?<p><i>We're guessing that most people won't.</i><p>You should see my inbox.<p><i>We'll probably have a plan where you can pay more money to get more storage.</i><p>Ah, okay. So...<p><i>Yes?</i><p>It's free. Unless I want to upload my non-iTunes store music, in which case it's $24.99/yr. And it has unlimited storage for App backups, iTunes store music, and iBooks, and a 5GB limit for documents, e-mail, and "other stuff", and a 30-day cache of all of the photos I've taken. And it happens automatically in the background, provided whatever App I'm using is correctly hooked into the iCloud service, which may or may not be apparent at the time.<p><i>Yes.</i><p>Ohhhhkay.<p>---<p>My parents have started to use Dropbox ("put stuff you want in the folder") and really like it. I'm not sure they'll understand how this service works, if they understand that it exists at all.

"iCloud" seems to be an obvious name to those that have been paying attention to the current state of technology, but if you think about it for a second, it's actually pretty genius. Taking the name "iCloud", as opposed to "iSync" or something else that more clearly and directly describes the service, is a masterstroke.<p>Why? Because up until now, "cloud" has been a vague term whose value is extremely difficult to explain to consumers (trying to explain that gmail or Skydrive or Facebook are all kinda-sorta "cloud" in a few different ways will just get you "oh, so it's just the internet!"). By tying it to a clearly-defined product or service that has real value for <i>regular people</i>, Apple now owns the term "cloud" as used in general discourse.<p>It's like how in the 2002-2003 timeframe, every non-Apple MP3 player was "a different-looking iPod", but this is in reverse. Every mention of "cloud" or "cloud computing" will evoke "oh yeah, you can get your phone pictures on your PC without hooking it up!". They've given a buzzword-bingo term a real definition that a lot of people can relate to.<p>Contrast with Microsoft's "...to the cloud!", a desperate attempt to get back into the consumer space that shows just how firmly they are trapped by enterprise thinking. It'll make your kids smile! It can edit photos! It will give you movies to watch when you're bored! Even the masses won't fall for something that vague - they need clearly defined <i>products</i>. "To the cloud" reminds me of the first couple years of "the .NET initiative": wind and stars that would do everything from control your house to drive your car and make the world happy again.<p>As someone interested in technology, I despise that Apple has further conflated an already massively overloaded term, but I have to give them recognition for their marketing skills. I can't wait to see how much more difficult it's going to get to explain "cloud computing" to a CIO who has spent the last week enamored that cloud computing means that he can get his music on his iPhone and his Mac.

I'm curious to see how well the iTunes Match feature works. Naturally it will have to use audio fingerprinting rather than just trusting user-supplied metadata. The catch is that this technology is probably based on Lala (who Apple bought out), and Lala's software was <i>extremely dodgy</i>. I had records where &#60;50% of songs were correctly identified, the others "matched" to seemingly random tracks from completely unrelated genres.<p>If Apple has not <i>earnestly</i> dug into and improved on this software, users will be completely mystified and the whole thing will be a big embarrassment for Apple.

I was hoping they would have something to say about privacy/security, but they didn't so I guess there isn't any. That's too bad because I don't think I can live with all my photos being instantly sent to Apple. Probably some other document types too.

A concern I always have over services like this, is that they tend to back up at the most inopportune times. Holding a VC and your call suddenly drops? Playing an FPS or RTS game and things start to become unresponsive? Uploading your latest project files, wondering why it's going so slowly while a is client clamouring for it <i>yesterday</i>? Chances are one of your many automatic backup services just kicked in. With devices like the iPad and iPhone being 'always on' and connected to the wifi in the background, I can see this becoming a problem. When these sorts of services were confined to a desktop or laptop, you could always shut them down with a simple right click on a task bar/menu icon. Now you have multiple devices that could potentially be bogging down your network, how do you easily diagnose where the network drain is coming from?

Interesting service. I really like the cloud APIs. I know that this was available in past versions of MobileMe, but so few used MobileMe so it wasn't a big thing for developers. If people are opted into iCloud you can pretty much assume that your users have an account and plan to store on Apple's dime instead of yours.<p>It almost seems too good to be true. I wouldn't be surprised if some developers abuse this by storing massive amounts of data in iCloud and Apple sets up some limits.<p>As for the music stuff, my consumer perspective is that if "anywhere" doesn't include a web browser, you're not really offering it any where. I don't expect you to build a separate client for competing platforms, but a web player I do. Google and Amazon are already doing this. I don't always use Macs and iPads so I need a way to access my music when I'm away from those.

The music matching service does sound genuinely interesting, though I am unsure about how it works as a yearly subscription. Surely once you've matched your songs, that's it (until next time). Would the pay per use model not make more sense?<p>But as for TFA, the non-music sync features of iCloud seem underwhelming. At the risk of playing the "other-phones-already-do-it" card, Windows (both Phone and PC) already does this with the Live services and Skydrive. Contacts, Calendar, Office documents and Photos can all be synced automatically. In addition, you get 25GB of space - no silly 30 day limits as with photos in iCloud.<p>What's the current state of play for Android?

Coolest news for developers, there are APIs for this for use with third party apps.

A little arbitrage idea: How about going on an illegal downloading-binge and getting every album one possibly could ever like from the past, I don't know, 30 years? Then when you've got your several thousand albums, you go legalize it all for $29.95.<p>Sounds like value?

It seems like the music part of this offering amounts to Apple cutting a deal with the music labels that, in part, allows billions of bad old BladeEnc rips downloaded from Napster to be "laundered" into legitimate AAC tracks. Apple pays the music labels a hundred million or two, so the labels have retroactively turned the old downloaders into paying customers, of a sort. And for these laundering services, each of them reimburses Apple to the tune of $25 per year (storage and sync notwithstanding).

Shouldn't dropbox be a little nervous?

So if I have music that I wrote and have the copyrights to and give a copy of it to a friend and they then use the iCloud service. How would Apple then handle the licensing, as it seems they have some sort of deal with the big record labels to give them a cut of this 24.99, what about independent musicians?

It's a real shame that there's still no real podcast support. Granted, now the devices can sync via WiFi, but what if I'm away from my main machine and I just want to download all new episodes of the podcasts I'm subscribed to?<p>Something like this CAN'T be that hard to do - at least it shouldn't be.

“Music features are available only in the U.S.” Sigh.

Anybody surprised that there was Twitter integration but no Facebook integration? I know they probably don't want to get in bed with Facebook, but it's strange to me to have one and not the other.

Itunes Match service seems mind blowing. "Even 20,000 songs" will cost only $24.99 per year it seems.

But I don't care about owning music. I only want access to it. Rdio still seems like the better option for music, despite this being a step in the right direction.

Sounds like dropbox, but one step closer to the user: instead of interfacing at the directory level, it interfaces at the application level.<p>Also underlines dropbox's tremendous success, to be casually mentioned by Jobs to define the problem/solution.

Syncing with things can happen over 3g. Being transparent can be nice but not with unlimited plans gone from carriers. I'm wondering if there will be an option to say not to sync over 3g unless you are on wifi.

I love my iPhone but I'm sticking to dropbox. Ill probably limit icloud to music I've purchased via iTunes

err ... no thanks. I'll keep my data local ... and private.

This is great, but can cell networks handle the load? They're already struggling from a significant lack of investment and this could well be a straw that breaks the camels back.

A less than ideal setup for non-iTunes music, but IMO that was to be expected.

I'm just not that excited about pointing all my devices at a big metal cloud on the wall. Wonder if I can paint it.

Meh. I still can't go PC-less on my iPad. I have plenty of music that didn't come from updates and isn't for sale on iTunes, and I don't see anything about OS updates OTA. Exchange and Gmail already do most of the rest for me.