Why It Matters
All cloud everything is computing’s future. All of your stuff stored where you can get to it from any device, anywhere. No syncing. (Or rather, invisible syncing.) No muss. Never worrying about folders, ever, ever again. Never having to sweat backups, ever, ever again. And for a company that’s puffed up its chest over and over and over as the emperor of simplicity, Apple’s flight into the cloud should be great. We want it to be great.
Using It
iCloud’s not one of those “It just works” bolts of lightning from Apple. It duplicates a lot of what MobileMe did before. Signing up is easy — you just power up iCloud, for free, with the Apple ID you probably already have. But from there, you’ve got a blizzard of sliders, toggles and settings ahead of you. (Be ready to punch in your password again and again across devices, between iCloud and iMessage.) You’ll need to enable it on your phone, decide what you want synced (calendars, contacts, photos, oh my). You’ll need to do the same thing on your computer, and anywhere else you want the data beamed. Between the system preferences, iOS settings and website, there’s a lot of configuration — no one-stop-shop for controlling your cloud. It’s less than elegant, but once triggered, requires no maintenance or monitoring. On the other side of that coin, if you’re used to maintaining fine-grained control over how your data changes and is updated, as you could with MobileMe, that’s totally gone with iCloud. It’s totally invisible, even if you do want some visibility.
Like
If you go through the effort, iCloud will give you a worry-free backup net, as advertised. Mostly. It’ll suck your contacts, calendar appointments, email, app data and everything else on your iOS devices, safely into some giant data centre in the sky. In case of gadget disaster (phone in the toilet! stolen iPad!), you’ll be able to retrieve your settings from any computer, anywhere, and restore your replacement like a creepy clone of a dead loved one. One of us did it with an iPhone 4S, pulling in the previous iPhone 4′s settings perfectly. Downloads show up on all your devices, perfectly. When it’s on, you’re imbued with some nice peace of mind — the knowledge that Apple’s handling things that used to be a pain in the arse for you. I don’t ever have to think about syncing my iPhone, ever again. That’s a great feeling.
It’s also genuinely smile-inducing to delete a contact on iCloud.com and watch it vanish from your Mac’s Address Book and iPhone contacts. Or to steal your friend’s phone and rename them with Siri, then watch them get annoyed when they show up in their address book as “Baby”. The whole thing’s not totally seamless, but iCloud helps rake together the data leaf pile we’re all a part of now. And we all need that.
Oh, and it’s totally free, unless you need more storage.
No Like
As it exists right now, iCloud’s missing some major chunks. Why do I have to migrate my entire life from the calendars I use now to a new iCloud calendar? Why can I edit Pages documents between my phone and my iPad, but not pick up where I left off on my Mac? And why the breezy hell does Photo Stream, the vaunted picture sharing component of iCloud, only sync and spread what I’ve snapped in the past 30 days? If I lose a phone I’ve owned for a year (or more), I care about a lot more than what I’ve seen over the past few weeks. Furthermore, why can’t anything be deleted off of Photo Stream? It’s… creepy. Just hope you don’t accidentally sync something scandalous, because, tough luck.
And if you’re coming from MobileMe, there’s definitely stuff that’ll be missed: syncing settings from your Mac, like you could with MobileMe. Or how about instead of shoving iDisk into the background, Apple revamped it into something that worked as amazingly as Dropbox? There are other random holes too, like no Snow Leopard support (at least not yet).
Overall, iCloud’s a little too wispy — too filled with gaps and not-quites and almost-awesomes, to be the start of the post-computer epoch just yet. Again: it’s a convenience service. A limited one that’s free. But something that’s meant to ease shouldn’t come with its own frustrations.
Should I Use It?
It’s free and useful, so, yes. It’s not the glittering future of everything yet, but it’s a fantastic, free backup service. There’s no reason not to flip on no-brainer backups like app settings. But if you’re looking for a simple switch that’ll simplify everything — a Steve Jobs “boom” moment for everything on every device you’ll ever own — it isn’t here yet.
MotorMouth
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 11:22 AMThis sounds a lot like what happened to me when I got my WinPhone 7 phone 8 months ago. Adding/deleting/editing contacts in Hotmail propagates to my phone automagically. I don’t use the calendar in Hotmail but I just checked and it is also synced to my phone’s calendar, so it’s all two-way.
Of course, there has also been wireless sync from day 1, so it seems Apple are taking WP7 very seriously and attempting to keep up with Microsoft. Sadly for Apple, Mango has pushed WP7 ahead again, even before they got iOS 5 out the door.
The difference, of course, is that Microsoft are useless at promoting their products while the snake-oil marketers at Apple can sell ice to Eskimos (and won’t hesitate to do so). Just look at the public perception of “Windows Live” compared to iCloud. The latter has been marketed as a tangible thing, something to aspire to with a iOS 5, whereas Windows Live has grown out of a collection of pre-existing services and is a kind of amorphous blob of stuff that few people can see any real value in. The reality though, is that Windows Live is everything that iCloud is, only you don’t need any specific OS to access it, just a web browser. i.e. Apple hold it out as an inducement to lock yourself in their dungeon and sign over your life to them, while MS are happy to let anyone who wants to use it, make as much of it as they want to. Yet it is the Dungeon-keepers who are seen as the good guys and the egalitarian enablers as the evil corporate bad guys. It’s a funny old world, innit?
Mitch Bus
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 11:39 AMI think the real problem here is that most people who care about this sort of stuff have already entrusted their data to Google (in the form of Gmail, Contacts & Google Calendars), Microsoft (Hotmail/Calendars) and file-syncing sites like Dropbox and Skydrive.
Photos are already done by Picasa, Flickr and Facebook.
So unless they can REALLY push it and add amazingly unique features, most people are happy with how their cloud system works, because it already does just work.
Then again, who knows; maybe in a week I’ll be proven wrong.
Dane
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 12:41 PM“And why the breezy hell does Photo Stream, the vaunted picture sharing component of iCloud, only sync and spread what I’ve snapped in the past 30 days? If I lose a phone I’ve owned for a year (or more), I care about a lot more than what I’ve seen over the past few weeks.”
Photo Stream is only for sharing recent photos between devices, making it easier to access iPhone photos on an iPad or Mac without needing to email or plug the device in.
iCloud still backs up all of your photos and albums, etc. If you lose your phone and restore from the iCloud backup, all of your photos come are also restored. If you’ve recently taken a photo that hasn’t made it into the latest backup before your phone is lost, then it will be on Photo Stream waiting to be restored.
This review seems a little too uninformed to be meaningful and helpful to consumers.
NickT
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 6:36 PMI think iCloud has the potential to be as useful as Dropbox in the future. It’s really down to the app developers to get updates out quickly. Soundhound is one such example, where settings & history are stored on iCloud, and used by both my iPad and iPhone. Day One is also talking about an update to do this, currently they use Dropbox. I’m sure many others will too. Pages & Numbers too, although I think the desktop versions need to be able to access them too to really shine.
The potential IS there, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more from iCloud in the future, these are early days
MotorMouth
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 6:59 PMThat’s not very encouraging, as I am yet to find a use for Dropbox. I let a mate sing me up so he could get an extra 5Gb but so far I’ve not felt the need to try it out for anything, probably because I’ve used SkyDrive before and already know how it works. I think that might be iCloud’s hurdle to jump – to get people to want to use it over what they use now.
Thanioti
Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 10:57 PMCan Apple claim the title “Cloud” by placing an “i” as the prefix?
Bharat Iyer
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 8:36 AMI like that Apple hasn’t done automatic syncing with iCloud for iWork. I’d hate for my Mac to constantly scan Macintosh HD for all my iWork files (heaps BTW), and then upload ALL of them (we’re talking gigabytes of data), and then it’d take a chunk of space out of my iOS devices. I really like what Apple has done so far, letting you drag iWork files into iCloud.
John
Monday, October 17, 2011 at 9:43 AMWhen I upgraded my 3GS to iOS5, I found that something was eating my battery – even without using it for anything, it was going flat in three to four hours. After a bit of fiddling, I worked out what the culprit was: iCloud. Deleted my account from my phone and battery life is back to normal.
Since I can’t afford to have my mobile run out of battery every three to four hours, I can’t be using iCloud.
Pariah
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 10:34 AMI applaud your willpower in not buying a 4S instead.