Apple's iCloud will automatically store, sync data for free
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
---
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.
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".
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.
And in this case, it's not a walled garden per se. Apple is providing a storage service on its own terms. AppStore is more like walled garden - Apple is providing a service with its own terms which are unnecessarily limiting the producers. Even that is upto debate but we can agree AppStore is more like walled garden.
They have a pretty good track record. I mean the rules and regulations about itms media were pretty labyrinthine but it's not like casual consumers were running around tearing their hair out until dvdjon came along.
iCloud keeps all of my devices in sync for free. That's it. Very rarely, if ever, will somebody actually hit one of the edge cases where the syncing does not work as expected due to one of the above limitations. Even if this does happen, they won't be charged for it.
If I want to backup my own pirated music, it'll cost me $25/year. That's pretty simple to understand. If I agree, then I will be charged a flat annual rate. There's no way for an unexpected charge to show up with this sort of pricing model.
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.
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.
iCloud shouldn't be easy to understand because it's introducing an entirely novel concept to our digital lives, which is to lift the burden of wires and a fixed connection off consumers. This is a genuine step forward in the movement to unleash our digital lives. It's a totally novel concept so it should be difficult to understand than services like Dropbox.
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.
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.
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")
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".
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.
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.
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.
I know the music industry were interested in robust hashes in order to identify songs on file sharing networks. It turns out to be technically impossible. The file sharers would trivially obfuscate or generate false positives which ended up as a legal liability to them.
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...
The only gate near and dear our little-HN hearts!
(Other than nand-gates)
What's really impressive to me is that they manage to negotiate a deal with the majors to do this.
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.
Pirates can actually try to game the algorithm and rip albums in bad quality to minimize file size but good enough for Apple to recognize the songs as such.
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.
I hope their opt-out is granular enough that I can still use the parts of iCloud that don't make me uncomfortable.
Personally, I find that Apple has been very consistent with how they treat customer data at a corporate level and I trust their incentive to protect it and/or hide it from public view by default WAY more than I trust Googles, Amazons, and especially FaceBooks. If I'm honest with myself their vested interests in iAd do raise the hairs on the back of my neck a little bit, but it would be a significant departure (and would create more backlash than anything I can imagine them doing in the near term) from everything I've seen of their treatment of personal data to date.
What you get after the set-up, in Settings, looks a bit like this: http://i.imgur.com/dYXvU.png
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.
Also, mainstream desktop users do generally know what a router is. The people who are afraid to touch the boxes the cable guy installed and think that IE is the internet are well below average in terms of computer literacy.
Finally, backup software can't ensure that it is well behaved unless at some point it tries to estimate the quality of your connection (which is hard to do accurately), and even then it can't be well-behaved if it is used on more than one machine simultaneously.
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.
I guess the assumption is that most people don't leave their computers on all the time, so it's designed to run as a background task else it wouldn't actually get to run at all.
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.
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?
The existing method of introducing documents into apps (using iTunes) really sucks, I wonder what the iCloud API will look like.
This seems to me like a very large relaunch of mobileme. Awesome, yes, but still just a relaunch.
(And not to gloat, but I pretty much called this a week ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603921 )
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)
I was more curious about data files that are used by an app (I'm assuming we can use the iCloud API to synch those between devices) - how is that paid for? does that count towards the 5GB limit? If so, can you get more space? at what cost?
For example, right now GoodReader uses the dropbox API to allow cloud access to whatever documents you have, and I have several gigs of various .pdfs that I store there. With the iCloud API, can Goodreader abandon dropbox and let apple host them?
Sounds like value?
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.
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.
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.
And they'll justify it the same way they always have: poorly and completely out-of-whack with the actual damages inflicted.
Lion is $29.99. iTunes Match is $25/y (this difference adds up)
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.
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.
It says 'listen to'. Am not sure if you actually get legit copies of your music.
All the music available in iCloud is available for download, this isn't a streaming service.
Currently all major players are competing on who manages to build the most closed ecosystem. I hope this is a phase that will pass.
Rdio, on the other hand, just got smote.
RDio is still a much better option than iTunes, Google Music or the Amazon music locker, IMO.
More importantly, Rdio already had a lot of noise it had to spend money to cut through. What happens to their cost of customer acquisition after iCloud and iTunes Match?
Granted, I have terrible taste in music (TERRIBLE), and maybe somebody who is a bit more sophisticated will have a better experience with iTunes. For me though, Rdio answers the desire: I can listen to any song I want wherever I want whenever I want, with one flat monthly fee.
iTunes can't do that. With iTunes, I can listen to a song I want, between 5-20 minutes from now, unless I've purchased it already. And synced it. Cloud or computer, what's dumb about apple's solution is that as far as I know, they haven't taken the sync out of the equation. You're just syncing with the cloud rather than your computer.
Before this announcement, Rdio had a huge value proposition even for normal people: instant access to all the music in their collection from multiple devices. Now iTMS has the same offering, for less money, and with better integration into every platform normal people play music on.
Often times I'll be somewhere remote and want to listen to an album I haven't listened to in months. Without having to download each file first, Rdio starts playing instantly.
I wouldn't be worried at all.
iCloud might win in the long term, but for now they address fundamentally different problems.
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.
That said, if this were to force Dropbox to drop their prices, I wouldn't be unhappy...
Something like this CAN'T be that hard to do - at least it shouldn't be.
As I understand it, Ping was launched dead in the water because Apple and Facebook couldn't work together at the last minute.
2. Apple doesn't live in a vacuum and isn't stupid, they know they're effectively offering amnesty to pirates. Their bet is that they win by bringing people into their ecosystem, that $25 and a shot at future purchases is a better deal than the nothing they're currently getting from pirates.
This announcement seems great. I will get way more than $25/yr value out of having reliable access to all this music again.
I am not hung up on "how often" I've paid for this music. I bought the CDs; if I wanted to, I could have archived them as carefully as Rob from High Fidelity. I have better things to do with my life. The $25 convenience fee here is buying me a lot of convenience.
If I didn't want the convenience, I wouldn't have to pay for it. I could just rerip. Let me work out my hourly rate and see what kind of return I'm getting for nevermind I'm just going to pay Apple.
This is for people with existing collections of questionable legality or other provenance, who otherwise wouldn't join the service if it meant they had to give all that music up.
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.
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.
There's a limit of 25k songs, and Apple doesn't say if the music disappears if contract ends.
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.
No, believe me, it's not. I'm using the Google Music beta, and by my calculations, it will take multiple weeks to upload my collection.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=80+GB%2F10KBps
I know I don't have the best internet connection, nor do I have the smallest music collection, but that's a whole lot of time to be uploading at full speed (which makes my internet unusable).
Also underlines dropbox's tremendous success, to be casually mentioned by Jobs to define the problem/solution.
For anyone who has non-iTunes music legally, given the cost of music, chances are that for most people the yearly fee will be very low compared to the rest of their collection, it's basically ~2-3 albums worth. At leat for anyone who has enough music to be worth using this for (if you own 5 CDs, just sync them once, why bother), $25 will be a small piece of what they've paid for the music.