The Elephant in Apple’s iCloud | Hacker News Reader

The Elephant in Apple’s iCloud

macobserver.com

17 pointsjmartellaro23 comments

Apple will fix these issues. First, the average user isn't trying to upgrade the moment new software is released; I'd guess most of the people upgrading on Wednesday were the kind of people who need to have the latest iOS and OS X the minute it comes out, and those are also the types who will power through and figure it out. The average users will upgrade a few days or weeks later, and the kinks will be worked out by then.

And Apple is working to merge multiple Apple IDs. These issues presented here have relatively easy solutions and are probably close to being solved.

"the average user isn't trying to upgrade the moment new software is released"

Oh don't bet your house on that statement. Everyone in my office (and most aren't "geeks") who had an iphone/mac was waiting for the update. By 2PM they were all running it. Including me.

Everyone was eager to get it. And I agree with the OP, Apple dropped the ball. Again.

I remember the MobieMe chaos.

By 2pm they were all running it? And Apple dropped the ball.. how?

I understand there were delays, but I got a ton of updates yesterday that I really needed (iOS developer) and they all worked well together.

I asked around. Not everyone at my office did. In fact, some people didn't even know there was an upgrade.

It took 4 hours on Weds night to get myiPhone update. It only took 30 minutes the following morning for my iPad. I'd say the worst is probably over by now.

> I remember the MobieMe chaos.

Do you? It took months to get it operating at any kind of reasonable scale. The early-Wednesday upgrade stampede was resolved in a small positive number of hours which is why it's the "early-Wednesday upgrade stampede" and not an ongoing activation boondoggle.

I'm not really seeing the similarity between these two events. Yes, in a perfect world every newly launched service would immediately scale infinitely to meet overwhelming initial demand, and Apple didn't meet that bar. And yes, the error code situation can and should be made a hell of a lot clearer.

But I'm surprised that people don't think Apple has gotten a hell of a lot better at these things.

Ok agree with that. Now that I think about it. Mobile Me was a nightmare for months.

> Apple will fix these issues.

What makes you so confident that they have the expertise to do so?

I don't mean to be nasty about this, but if there is one thing Apple has consistently shown they do not understand it's networked infrastructure. iTunes has been plagued with problems for years. iDisk is unreliable, MobileMe was a disaster, WebObjects was a framework nearly universally rejected, the apple store has to close its curtains for inventory updates (wtf? It's 2011, Apple), Back To My Mac has never worked well (when it works at all), Apple's streaming video servers frequently have problems that put AppleTVs in bad states (restart required, sorry!), and OSX Server has never been a robust platform for infrastructure.

All the evidence suggests that this is Apple's big weakness. pointing this out isn't being unfair; it's being legitimately worried about their ability to execute on iCloud. No one worries if Apple can execute on the mobile or user-facing software side of the plan, because they've consistently shown they can execute there.

the apple store has to close its curtains for inventory updates (wtf? It's 2011, Apple)

Marketing. Have you heard of it?

Really. Really? You think that is the plan?

Sure. Do you honestly believe they cannot update the store on the fly?

Yes. I have no reason to believe otherwise. Do you?

I would be very surprised if they only updated they store a couple time a year. You know, they sell tons of other stuff, accessories and so on.

Seriously? No reason? They can build iPhones and iPads and grow their company to a multi billion dollar company, but they can't figure out how to update their homepage without shutting it down? Of course it's a marketing trick.

> WebObjects was a framework nearly universally rejected

I agree with that, but after developing on it for just under 2 years, I can say it has some blow-you-mind features that are way ahead of it's time.

My mind was never blown by using it.

Don't forget Ping!

On his podcast Hypercritical, John Siracusa has talked about how this just isn't a core competency of Apple's. From what I understand, Apple's datacenters are full of servers managed by Microsoft and others.

It looks like they're fully committed to the cloud now, so I would imagine they're putting a lot of resources behind this initiative, but I would also imagine that this is going to be pretty painful for a few years.

iCloud seems to work very well once it’s up and running. (I had not problem getting it to run, though.)

I'd guess most of the people upgrading on Wednesday were the kind of people who need to have the latest iOS and OS X the minute it comes out, and those are also the types who will power through and figure it out.

From this I take it you sort-of mean the more technically minded serious fan boy?

I'm not sure that's true. I'm a huge iPhone fan (not a fan boy :)) but I new it was going to be a pain so didn't bother and slept easy.

All of the non-tech staff in our office (work provided phones are iPhones) tried the upgrade - I woke up yesterday and Facebook was literally stuffed with them crying at each other about how to get it to work.

Even if it goes smoothly the upgrade path is non-trivial and a bit confusing.

Of course this backfired for me :) Because I grabbed a 4S today on my non-work contract (from a 3GS that I haven't updated in months) and have had to power through two painful moments; the upgrade of old phone, and the restore of new phone.

sigh

(on the positive side, hopefully iCloud will make the next phone upgrade painless)

I'm far from a heavy Apple user (with only a MacMini, iPhone, iPad, and an AppleTV... I only really use their gear for communications and entertainment), so the only major problems I had were with migrating MobileMe to iCloud, and the whole confusion over having two Apple IDs. The iCloud setup was rather un-Apple-ey complex, but nothing most tech-inclined people couldn't get through. (Which was part of the problem.)

Was the iCloud setup any easier for folks that didn't have a .Mac or MobileMe account to migrate?

The biggest annoyance is what it doesn't even look like it will do. I can't (meaningfully) sync my docs between my mac and my iPad. That's one of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade.

Wouldn't it be better to wait until there's a better idea of how many people had problems? typically only those with problems are vocal about them, those without don't bother. I upgraded two ipads, two iphones, an iPod touch and a couple of macs, and they're all working fine. I don't think we'll know how widespread any problems were unless Apple apologize publically, like they did with MobileMe.

I don't understand why people share an iTunes account with their spouse/family.

Does that mean they share an email address too? Why?

I don't share an id with anyone, but I have friends who share an id with their spouses so that they only have to buy songs, apps, movies, & books once, and can both have access to them on different devices. Today, one such friend spoke of how it's nice for him to be able to snap a picture of their daughter, and have it show up in the photo stream on his wife's phone.

So before iCloud it was just a cost-saving measure. After iCloud it's savings plus photo-stream sharing.

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