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

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/06/apples_icloud_will_automatically_store_sync_data_for_free.html

by sandipc • 15 years ago

216 195 15 years ago

appleinsider.com

tvon2• 15 years ago

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

stashdot3• 15 years ago

Not really - TFA leaves out iTunes Match - which appears to be an incredible service.

tvon2• 15 years ago

I may be underestimating it's worth, but my first impression was that iTunes Match would be met (by users in general) with a feeling of paying for your non-iTunes music twice.

stashdot3• 15 years ago

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

rauljara• 15 years ago

While I do think it's a good deal if you like the iTunes ecosystem, keep in mind you are paying $25 for music you already have, and you are also more fully committing yourself to iTunes. I expect Apple is losing some money on the service, but they have clearly made the calculation that locking more users in is worth it.

seanalltogether2• 15 years ago

What I don't get is why it isn't just a generic music streaming service? If I have to pay $24.99 to access music I've already purchased elsewhere, this is actually encouraging me to go illegally download music to upload to the new service instead. I'm willing to pay once for music, not twice.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

I think their assumption is that it is for music that was paid for in the past.

wmf2• 15 years ago

I guess Jobs still thinks that people want to own music. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/26/us-apple-jobs-idUS...

GHFigs2• 15 years ago

What I don't get is why it isn't just a generic music streaming service?

That's easy: iTunes is already the biggest music retailer, and there's ten billion plus tracks out there that don't need iTunes Match at all.

If I have to pay...

You don't. The $25/yr. is for an entirely optional service that you have not previously paid for.

this is actually encouraging me to go illegally download music

Nonsense. You're complaining that the service is only giving you the ability to do something you can (supposedly) already do, yes? Something you already (supposedly) paid for: what you call "access". But if you pirate, the same thing is true. If all you want to do is have "access" to the music, you already could have gotten that by pirating. iTunes Match doesn't change that at all.

jrnkntl• 15 years ago

Not really mind blowing, they will use the same setup as dropbox i presume; storing the same file only 'once' instead than on a per-user basis.

ugh2• 15 years ago

The politics are mind blowing, not the technology.

Over the last few days I have read so many comments on HN confidently proclaiming that the music labels would never ever ever do something like this.

matwood2• 15 years ago

Yep, could make itms match almost like a $25/year unlimited music service. Go find a bad recording of what you want then let it get 'matched' and you'd be legal and have a good copy.

stashdot3• 15 years ago

Exactly - many of the other commentators don't seem to be getting this. This will be killer for people with tons of lossy, mediocre, napster era mp3s who have just not gotten around to upgrading to better quality stuff purely because of inertia.

extension5• 15 years ago

Is it so much easier to pirate a bad copy of some song than an ok copy?

ctdonath3• 15 years ago

Out of sheer curiosity: what's the bare minimum required to match a Gracenote entry?

Pewpewarrows2• 15 years ago

It's because they're not storing anything new. They simply distribute the exact same file that they've had on iTunes to begin with if it detects a match of you owning it. Other services (Amazon and Google's come to mind) let you upload literally any audio file you want (to an extent), regardless of whether it's on their music store or not.

Both schemes have their pros and cons. The comparison of upload time during the keynote was a complete joke to anyone that knows anything about this sort of technology though: saying how much faster the upload on your service is that doesn't upload to begin with to services that do is just silly.

gfodor4• 15 years ago

The bottom line is normal users (ie those who "don't know anything about this sort of technology") don't give a damn. It's a few hours vs a few minutes.

mmorris• 15 years ago

They mentioned that music you have that doesn't match with anything already in the iTunes Store can be uploaded to the cloud. I don't think we have any details about the implementation yet though.

AllenKids• 15 years ago

iTunes now have both, match those Apple sells, upload the rest.

starnix17• 15 years ago

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

ben10402• 15 years ago

This actually may solve some problems I had been trying to wrap my head around in an app I'm designing.

The existing method of introducing documents into apps (using iTunes) really sucks, I wonder what the iCloud API will look like.

jonhohle• 15 years ago

If you are an iOS developer, the docs are up.

spitfire3• 15 years ago

There was for mobileme too. Transmit would sync your settings across computers using mobileme.

This seems to me like a very large relaunch of mobileme. Awesome, yes, but still just a relaunch.

ugh2• 15 years ago

But you had to convince your users to sign up for something that costs $100 per year. Now it’s free and comes by default with any device running iOS. That’s a rather significant change. (Oh, and that functionality is now open to iOS developers which are a much bigger deal than Mac developers.)

mortenjorck• 15 years ago

This is massive news for any developers that were considering adding a sync feature to their apps. Even just local sync is a headache to implement from scratch, to say nothing of cloud sync – and what Apple just announced is a complete, unified solution from system-level APIs to servers, all ready-made and awaiting some Cocoa calls.

(And not to gloat, but I pretty much called this a week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603921 )

drivebyacct24• 15 years ago

Who wasn't calling it?

Android has had this feature for over a year. Shocking, right? This is what Diaspora should have been at the base. (Note, Camlistore might be interesting for those interested in these sorts of things)

rsuttongee2• 15 years ago

I agree that this is really cool, but I'm a little confused about the details. Surely they must charge the app developers for the space they use up in their new fancy (and expensive looking) data center? Steve said that app files didn't count to your personal 5GB storage, so where does apple recoup the costs?

erikpukinskis2• 15 years ago

30%

Someone2• 15 years ago

I do not know what Steve said, but the way you state it, "app files" could be the files in the application itself, not user files made by an app. For performance and robustness, they will have more, but they need only one copy of those on their servers, and it could be the one in the App Store. The costs of storing those are a) peanuts, if you are Apple, and b) possibly recouped by the $99 developer fee.

jbrennan• 15 years ago

They recoup the costs when you buy the highly marked up hardware. I know I've certainly bought enough of it over the years. Apple has incredibly high margins on these devices, and this service is to sell more of them. It's a brilliant plan and everybody more or less wins.

MatthewB2• 15 years ago

Shouldn't dropbox be a little nervous?

tobylane• 15 years ago

Only when the windows client comes. I hope it's portable, with SSL.

bergie2• 15 years ago

Unlikely, much of Apple's current strategy seems to be in lock-in.

timdorr3• 15 years ago

They showed a Windows computer with pictures from iCloud during the keynote.

tptacek6• 15 years ago

Meh? Large scale storage on Internet servers has been around since the '90s. Dropbox is important because of the user experience, which iCloud doesn't really address. You think the Windows client for iCloud is going to be as seamless as Dropbox? I bet the difference is so big my mom can articulate it.

Rdio, on the other hand, just got smote.

galactus• 15 years ago

The difference might be big for current users of dropbox, but iCloud could make it harder to convince new icloud users to give dropbox a try.

nicksergeant2• 15 years ago

Rdio did not just get "smote", IMO. Without streaming, my desire to use iTunes matching or iCloud for music in general is lacking. Streaming is where it's at, for me.

cjoh2• 15 years ago

Not sure if Rdio's been smoted. I mean, I can get any song I want at any time on any device with rdio for a low monthly price. iTunes is still charging me to own songs, and my selection is still bound by the storage capacity of my device.

RDio is still a much better option than iTunes, Google Music or the Amazon music locker, IMO.

blakeweb• 15 years ago

I use rdio, and it's not the streaming that makes me keep paying them--it's the legal access to a mountainous library of most of the music I ever have a reason to give a listen to.

timdorr3• 15 years ago

I think Rdio will be fine, given that Grooveshark has been around in the same space, does all the same things as Rdio, and is free.

Pewpewarrows2• 15 years ago

A service that syncs any file you want across basically every platform imaginable, compared to a service for just iOS that syncs a subset of files and data from a handful of apps?

I wouldn't be worried at all.

ignifero• 15 years ago

What if there is a windows client in the works, or itunes integration? I think Dropbox should really be worried here ...

sambeau2• 15 years ago

It works on Windows and has a windows API. For instance Photo Stream uses "My Pictures" folder.

gamble• 15 years ago

Dropbox is designed to make your filesystem available on any device. iCloud is designed to make the filesystem invisible.

iCloud might win in the long term, but for now they address fundamentally different problems.

timdorr3• 15 years ago

iCloud doesn't allow me to share files between people. (I have to resort to emailing them. Yuck.)

I also can't share folders of documents relating to a particular project. As a web designer, I might have a PSD for the design, some Word docs for the copy, a PDF of some flyer I have to convert to a web page, and a Keynote presentation to pitch a particular feature to management. With iCloud, I can't view these documents as one collective project. Files are stored per application, not per project.

Dropbox does all of this today, without the need for my applications to be updated or me to rethink how I store files. I think they're going to be just fine.

kongqiu• 15 years ago

The caveats actually make me happy that Dropbox is out there, not locked in to any particular device.

That said, if this were to force Dropbox to drop their prices, I wouldn't be unhappy...

mrvc• 15 years ago

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.

headShrinker• 15 years ago

Hopefully, the necessity for a more bandwidth will breakdown conventional current concepts and models from the big telecom, opening the way for innovation from smaller faster moving companies, We need some new competition, and some deregulation in the US. The current model it too expensive and US companies are getting wiped in comparison with companies from other countries.

city41• 15 years ago

The article says back ups will only occur over wifi. I assume that will be the bulk of the bandwidth icloud needs.

maercsrats• 15 years ago

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.

spullara3• 15 years ago

Yes, you can turn syncing off on 3g.

powrtoch• 15 years ago

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 extremely dodgy. I had records where <50% of songs were correctly identified, the others "matched" to seemingly random tracks from completely unrelated genres.

If Apple has not earnestly dug into and improved on this software, users will be completely mystified and the whole thing will be a big embarrassment for Apple.

spitfire3• 15 years ago

Probably uses something like robust hashing (Technically impossible) along with matching metadata tags to match songs/artists.

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

I wonder what you think you mean by "technically impossible" since decently good audio matching software already exists (e.g. Shazam).

gfodor4• 15 years ago

Yes, the metadata problem is a big issue too. Apple mentioned that the ones they can't match will get uploaded. This probably means the same thing as it did with lala -- those "unmatched" tracks are going to end up orphaned from the rest of the album since they don't have the same metadata.

JCB_K• 15 years ago

Looking at Apple's track record, I don't expect anything else than a good-working service. Not that anything Apple touches turns into gold (MobileMe...), but seeing that this is a major new feature for them, they've probably tested it quite well.

j79• 15 years ago

The iPhone 4 antenna was touted as a major new feature as well. However, their method of testing (encasing them in thick plastic to mimic the appearance of an iPhone 3G/S) may have resulted in "antenna-gate". OR, at least given bloggers (and commenters, ahem) something to speculate about.

I do hope that they've tested it as well. And I hope that testing is extended beyond just Steve Jobs a few choice employees. Unfortunately, I highly doubt that to be the case...

chc• 15 years ago

MobileMe was a major new feature for them too. As was iTools before it. Every time Apple rebrands this suite, they make it out to be an amazing, revolutionary service, and it turns out to be kind of half-baked. From what I've seen so far, iCloud doesn't look much different. Apple makes great software and hardware combos, but has yet to prove that it gets the Internet.

cdavid• 15 years ago

I don't know how big lala was, but Apple has maybe the biggest collection of correctly tagged collection of audio, along with user's listening habits through buys, and other stuff (soon playlists, etc...). This can certainly help mitigating this problem.

What's really impressive to me is that they manage to negotiate a deal with the majors to do this.

ansy2• 15 years ago

Apple uses Gracenote for identification and tags. It is the industry standard.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3814

There are free and open implementations of the same thing as well. It hashes the track locations and lengths to create a 'fingerprint' for each CD. Then it looks up the hash in the database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#How_CDDB_works

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

Good point, matching is a difficult feature to get right. Google Music does an extraordinary job, but this is the type of problem that Google's engineers are good at solving. Apple's engineers (traditionally) aren't, so it will be interesting to see if they've spent a lot of time on getting this right, or if they only tuned to matching iTunes bought music.

EDIT: Interesting that MusicMatch Jukebox perfected matching over 10 years ago. Even after Yahoo bought and ruined it, I kept the program around simply because it did the best job of tagging music than any other software.

SriniK• 15 years ago

Same here. I keep my MusicMatch Jukebox v9. Their synths are so great. Even now, I prefer MusicMatch over iTunes.

jokermatt9992• 15 years ago

I actually keep my music matching separate, and do it in Music Brainz Picard. I went through and fixed tags for somewhere around 10,000 tracks rather painlessly. It will also rename and move your files automatically. Since it also uses user submitted data, it does a great job of finding some pretty obscure stuff too. I highly recommend it.

dsplittgerber3• 15 years ago

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.

Sounds like value?

extension5• 15 years ago

If you didn't own it before running it through iTunes match then you don't own it afterwards either.

dsplittgerber3• 15 years ago

We don't know yet, but one probably will never "own" your iTunes Cloud data the same way you own your music now, I concede that. Still, you'll have access to all your pirated music as long as you keep paying 30 bucks a year.

It's actually a brillant move. Similar to being exempted from punishment if you turn yourself in as an owner of illegal guns/tax fraud or what have you.

jfager5• 15 years ago

The music's already out there. If you really wanted to go to all that trouble, why haven't you already done it?

And do you really think that if you suddenly show up in a bunch of torrent logs you won't get sued just because you gave Apple $30? It's not like people were getting sued because record companies were breaking into their homes and looking at what was on their hard drives.

dsplittgerber3• 15 years ago

Because there was no incentive yet, obviously. Owning stuff on your harddrive is of not much use when you're constantly on the move and want to have easy access to your music and have less and less use for a stationary pc anyway. For many people, streaming services are the future and this is actually the first music industry move to make sense in a long time.

Also, it'd be interesting to see how music firms will justify suing you over alleged torrent downloads when you pay them 30 bucks for legalizing your stack.

CraigRood• 15 years ago

Theres a 25,000 file limit. iTunes purchases not included. [http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/]

jfruh• 15 years ago

You're paying $24.95 <em>per year</em> to get them in cloud. Of course, if you stop paying, you don't lose your original pirated files, but you don't get them in the high-quality versions on all your devices anymore, presumably.

lazerwalker• 15 years ago

Since the files are DRM-free, and your desktop iTunes is one of the 'devices' that syncs, presumably you'll have the iTunes-downloaded high-quality DRM-free versions of all of your songs sitting in your iTunes music folder waiting to be copied elsewhere. I'm sure Apple has some clause in the terms of service saying that when you stop paying your $25/year you need to delete those files, but they wouldn't have explicitly said it was all DRM-free if it wasn't set up to let you grab the iTunes-quality files manually and do what you want with 'em.

mkinsella• 15 years ago

Keep in mind it's $29.95 per year. They did say you get "DRM-free" music through the service. But with an annual fee, will you have to continue to pay the fee to access your iTunes Matched music?

r00fus• 15 years ago

> Keep in mind it's $29.95 per year.

Lion is $29.99. iTunes Match is $25/y (this difference adds up)

tzs• 15 years ago

There's a limit of 25000 songs that come from outside the iTunes store.

TheCondor• 15 years ago

I was thinking the same thing, what happens when you scan pirated music? There are basically two options, 1) it accepts it and gives you a high quality iTunes AAC copy that you can move to the various computers and devices you own and probably has your name and particulars branded in to it. Or 2) they can attempt to detect that it's pirated and block it somehow and I'm guessing that you get a fairly shitty user experience when that happens. I'm also going to go ahead and guess that many of the MP3s you've ripped over the last decade may also "fail" the test and be thought of as pirated.

On the other side, what's it harm? You're providing the media, they are just saving you the steps of uploading it. Now where you'd game the system is if you had like 16kbit versions of some tracks and they upgrade them for you. If that works then there is kind of a new avenue in piracy they may be opening up, you download small lo-fi versions quickly and then iTunes could fix them up for you... They aren't giving you ownership of anything, they're just helping you get the media where you want it, within some parameters.

I wonder if the labels get access to the usage patterns and records, effectively this is Neilsen type information, only way better. Who "owns" which tracks (that alone combined with iTunes buying patterns and some listening patterns potentialy gives you a huge clue in to who are the pirates) who plays what, when, where? Seems like some really really killer social apps could be built ontop of this as well as some incredible marketing information, someone somehwere is going to release a fully remastered, deluxe, Elvis everything box set and ideally (for them) they'd do it at a time when there was an uptick in Elvis listening. You also can measure various popularity trends, see how they move, maximize promotional dollars.

panacea2• 15 years ago

Wouldn't a majority of iTunes users already uploaded a list of all their songs to Apple when activating Genius?

dunk010• 15 years ago

You could just rip the trends information from Last.fm.

jimbokun2• 15 years ago

I'm guessing the music industry is looking at it the other way round.

Right now, the music industry doesn't see a cent from all the kids downloading 1000s of songs to their computer. With iCloud, they have a good chance of getting $30 a year (minus Apple's cut) from many of those same kids, who will still think they are ripping off The Man.

gabbo• 15 years ago

This is exactly what I thought. An amazingly cheap way to launder pirated music. Not that it really changes the legality...

wowamit• 15 years ago

Isn't iTunes Match more of a music streaming service? This is how Apple explains it works "Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device."

It says 'listen to'. Am not sure if you actually get legit copies of your music.

Jtsummers• 15 years ago

It gets upgraded to the same format as the rest of your iTunes purchased music. From further in the same paragraph as your quote: "And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality -- even if your original copy was of lower quality."

All the music available in iCloud is available for download, this isn't a streaming service.

pilif• 15 years ago

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?

Something like this CAN'T be that hard to do - at least it shouldn't be.

berberich• 15 years ago

I recommend Instacast[1] - best $2 I've spent in the last year.

[1] http://vemedio.com/products/instacast

danh• 15 years ago

Pocket Casts is also very good.

http://www.shiftyjelly.com.au/products/pocket-casts

JayWilmont• 15 years ago

I would assume this to be part of the "No PC Needed" feature. (If not, this is a big oversight - one of the only real issues I have with my iPad)

craigmccaskill2• 15 years ago

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 yesterday? 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?

46Bit• 15 years ago

Same annoyances with computers in general. You're urgently downloading a huge uncompressed PSD a client sent you ... and all of a sudden something you can't find the name of without buying a third-party app suddenly start hogging the network.

wtallis2• 15 years ago

By using a halfway decent router with properly configured QoS. It isn't hard. Between running lsof locally and rflow on DD-WRT, it's easy to isolate the ports used for your various backup services. Once you have that, it's trivial to put those services at the bottom of the queue for outbound bandwidth.

jlees• 15 years ago

What if a visitor on your network is using a new service with different ports from your standard? What if you're looking at a sync service that runs within the web browser or otherwise uses shared ports?

Or perhaps you're (shock, horror) a mainstream user who has no idea what any of the words in your comment mean, starting with "router"?

Sure, a power user can prioritise traffic and deal with this, but I think the original point is valid for the average user. Perhaps the onus should be on backup software writers (and anything that syncs in large enough chunks) to ensure their traffic is smooth and not bursty, in effect enforcing their own QoS.

nostromo• 15 years ago

This is a great point. I have had problems with Spotlight aggressively indexing my hard drive in the middle of a SC2 match. I've also had Time Machine pick terrible times to slow down my system.

What's incredibly annoying about these services is they don't do the obvious thing and wait until the computer has been idle for a while.

squidsoup• 15 years ago

Have the same issue with Time Machine - clearly needs a better way of detecting the system in an idle state.

hnsmurf2• 15 years ago

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.

ddagradi• 15 years ago

iOS updates will be OTA. They're tiny delta updates now too! It was mentioned in the keynote.

hnsmurf2• 15 years ago

Oh, well that's nice then. About time!

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

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.

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.

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.

gfodor4• 15 years ago

Don't forget Apple has the app store approval process and can also remove abusers from the app store. This ecosystem they've set up is what makes it possible for them to offer a service like this while not having to build (too many) countermeasures for abuse.

zoul• 15 years ago

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

mcrider• 15 years ago

I'll be sure to update cantada.ca :)

WimLeers• 15 years ago

"Available in beta now in the U.S. only" — http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/

extension5• 15 years ago

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.

ary• 15 years ago

Encryption was mentioned a few times, and there will no doubt be more technical specifications coming to light as it gets closer to launch. Perhaps you're correct and there isn't sufficient security in place. In that case opt out.

yalogin• 15 years ago

Interesting. What kind of questions were you expecting to be answered? I thought this is not a sharing service in the sense that you do not get a link to it, which means your stuff is not made public even if you want it to. So as long as the transit is encrypted (which it is) it should be fine. Also Apple is not selling you ads based on your photos, so no issues about reading or analyzing your data to get information either.

extension5• 15 years ago

I'm concerned with Apple's access to my data and was hoping they would offer a way to do encrypted storage with self-managed keys. They have, in the past, played up their privacy edge over Google, so it wasn't out of the question. But it was still wishful thinking because it's incredibly difficult to do while maintaining the "just works" quality that is so crucial to them.

I hope their opt-out is granular enough that I can still use the parts of iCloud that don't make me uncomfortable.

bennesvig• 15 years ago

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.

ender7• 15 years ago

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...

---

So...it stores all my files?

Yes. Well, sort of. If your apps use the iCloud API.

What?

Nevermind. Yes. It stores your files, and sync them across all your computers.

What does it cost?

It's free.

Awesome. And I can access them any time?

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.

Oh. But what if I want to look at older photos on my--

Put it in an album. Then it's always available.

Oh...kay. I guess that makes sense. What about music?

If you buy it from the iTunes store, then it syncs automatically to all your devices!

Sweet!

Up to 10 devices.

Eh, that's fine, that seems like a lot of devices. What if I don't buy it from the iTunes store?

You can sync that too!

Great!

It costs money though.

Wait. I thought you said it was free.

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.

Er.

But you can "store" an unlimited number of songs!

Unlimited? That's a lot!

Yeah, you can also store things like mail, documents, and backups on there too!

Are those unlimited too?

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.

What happens if I use up all 5GB?

We're guessing that most people won't.

You should see my inbox.

We'll probably have a plan where you can pay more money to get more storage.

Ah, okay. So...

Yes?

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.

Yes.

Ohhhhkay.

---

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.

follower• 15 years ago

> Non-iTunes Store music costs a yearly fee to store

My understanding is that it only costs a fee if you want to "upgrade" from your matched ripped tracks--matching means you don't have to upload it "manually".

irahul2• 15 years ago

The OP's point was more about how confusing it is. We have an example right here - if 2 of you who did read the post aren't sure about the terms, how is Apple going to target its not-so-tech-savvy consumers?

If someone gets charged for an unexpected amount once, he might not be too enthusiastic about using it - since he does not understand the pricing. The people who read the pricing will very likely deem it complicated and might run off to other services viz. dropbox.

GHFigs2• 15 years ago

Do your parents use any iOS devices? It sounds like you're explaining iCloud in excessive detail to someone who has no use for it and doesn't understand the concept of syncing at all. Someone used to iTunes is not going to be that confused when things that used to require a physical sync can now happen automatically without one.

Many things are transparent to the user, too. For instance, Apple has always had "backups" of your purchases. All they've done here is enable you to download them instead of restoring from your own copy. You don't have to learn or understand anything new for that to be useful.

jfoutz• 15 years ago

There is a lot of fine print from the "it just works" company. [1][2][3][4]

1 I am an unabashed mac fanboy since 10.3

2 I've got more than ten idevices

3 Apple sucks at the internet.

4 I'll probably try all this out launch day.

alexfarran• 15 years ago

I don't think iTunes is that simple to use. It's very easy to make a mistake and lose all your contacts. I know two people that happened to, and to be honest I cross my fingers and hope when I upgrade my iPhone. Dropbox is very easy to understand in comparison.

jimbokun2• 15 years ago

Apple is betting that they have chosen those limits such that most of their customers will not bump into them.

Customers legitimately owning more than 10 devices is a problem Apple would love to deal with.

They are betting that most people only look at the last 1,000 photos they've taken on their phone, most of the time.

They are betting you will use all of the devices where you might want to look at photos within 30 days.

$25 a year to upload any music and listen to it anywhere, is a pretty simple value proposition. The free iTunes caveat is more of an edge case, I think.

5GB...well, yeah, I can see a lot of people hitting that one. Will be interesting to see if they quietly increase this over time to keep most users under the limit, like Gmail.

We will see if Apple's bets turn out to be correct.

ssmoot• 15 years ago

> 5GB...well, yeah, I can see a lot of people hitting that one. Will be interesting to see if they quietly increase this over time to keep most users under the limit, like Gmail.

I'd bet they don't. iDisk is only 10GB, and that costs $99 annually. It's small enough that I can't store my music library or photos to it, so I'm not really sure why I keep letting my mobileme subscription renew.

cubicle67• 15 years ago

note that the 5GB doesn't include apps, photos or music.

fauigerzigerk3• 15 years ago

You cannot upload any music. It's not a deduping technology. If iTunes doesn't have it or they don't find it, you can't use it.

Someone2• 15 years ago

I think the "1000 photos + 30 days" limit can turn out to be too low for some. For example, one could go on a five week holiday (not ridiculously long for Europeans), taking about 40 photos a day and syncing to the cloud. Then, depending on how Apple handles the deletions, the first week of photos could be lost.

If they silently delete photos, I bet we will see some cases pop up ("pair lost the photos of the first week of their honeymoon")

comex• 15 years ago

Dropbox isn't unlimited either.

MartinCron• 15 years ago

You may dismiss how savvy your parents are, but they probably won't make TWO spelling mistakes while trying to reference Jimi Hendrix.

ralfd• 15 years ago

As I understand iCloud it is syncing with the cloud. You don't have to "understand it" or "sell/explain it" to users, they will just "use it" with their Apps. In the demo the Apple VP made a picture with his iPhone of the toy car and then the photos were just there on the iPad. Without explicit upload. The same with documents in iWorks. I expect third-party developers will integrate iCloud rather quickly.

That said: Dropbox can do some stuff like sharing files in the public folder with other people. I have friends who mailed me a Dropbox link for sharing photos instead of uploading it to flickr/photobucket/picasa/Facebook/iPhoto Gallery. I didn't see any feature like that in iCloud. It seems like an automagical data storage for Apps, but not like an individual "file system in the cloud".

inthewoods• 15 years ago

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.

panacea2• 15 years ago

After the Ping debacle I'm not surprised.

As I understand it, Ping was launched dead in the water because Apple and Facebook couldn't work together at the last minute.

spullara3• 15 years ago

The most amazing thing about this is that Facebook has now alienated both Apple and Google. Only Adobe is left from the big 4 as Schmidt described it. Flash Facebook Fone?

xbryanx• 15 years ago

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.

upthedale• 15 years ago

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?

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.

What's the current state of play for Android?

redler• 15 years ago

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).

spullara3• 15 years ago

"We'll foot the bill for the pirates and turn them into paying customers if you let us. We are the only ones that will even try." Must have been magic in the boardroom during the pitch.

heresy• 15 years ago

The advantages of a $60 billion cash hoard.

dr_• 15 years ago

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

joe24pack• 15 years ago

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

funkdobiest• 15 years ago

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?

nlawalker• 15 years ago

"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.

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 regular people, Apple now owns the term "cloud" as used in general discourse.

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.

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 products. "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.

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.

fauigerzigerk3• 15 years ago

In my mind the words "genius" and "masterstroke" will continue to mean something different than a big corporation choosing a fashionable and completely obvious moniker for a couple of products.

kahawe• 15 years ago

Coming from the idea of "utility computing" and Grid, I always found the "cloud" hype interesting and now it is fascinating how Apple has claimed it.

This is "storing your data somewhere/anywhere in the cloud/grid" vs. "storing your data on Apple's servers and let's just call that cloud".

Genius marketing non-the-less, they took a vague but popular term and just claimed it and put a (their) face on it.

6ren• 15 years ago

Sounds like dropbox, but one step closer to the user: instead of interfacing at the directory level, it interfaces at the application level.

Also underlines dropbox's tremendous success, to be casually mentioned by Jobs to define the problem/solution.

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

Related Stories