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Comment by eddieroger | Hacker News Reader

> MacBook Air so that after 10 years of taking high-res photos and videos I couldn’t actually fit them on your my desktop hard drive

The MacBook Air isn't a desktop, and the iPad isn't a remote control for iPhoto. Besides, wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup. Also, Photo Streams aren't the only way to get things in to iPhoto, if that's not your flavor. Image Capture will pull the full files off the camera and iPhoto can import anything it understands from anywhere (like, ~/Pictures/ImageCaptureDump). A small change in workflow would solve this guy's problems.

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> Wanting to store everything in iCloud is his usecase, and I doubt it's a popular one. Personally, I'd rather keep my library on an external Thunderbolt RAID array for speed and duplicated on an off-site backup.

I think his use-case is a lot more common than yours! 99%+ of consumers don't have an external Thunderbolt RAID array, or even know what it is. They just want their photos all in one place, accessible from everywhere, in the same way you can have your music on all devices with iTunes match.

It seems safe to assume anything involving "external Thunderbolt RAID array" is not "popular" either.

I think "All my photos are safe, and available on all my devices, including when I upgrade devices" probably IS a popular need -- but many/most people don't even realize it's not currently being met, or don't even think about it -- which may make it hard to build a business of it. They don't care from "the cloud", but the cloud seems the logical way to meet this need.

>The MacBook Air isn't a desktop

True, barely anyone has a "desktop" anymore, so solutions shouldn't rely on it.

The HN bubble cracks me up sometimes.

Yes, most people still have a desktop.

Really? I think the HN bubble would lead to thinking more people have desktops than laptops. Many casual computer users don't even have desks to put that desktop on, they just use a laptop on the couch, when they run into something they can't do on their phone or tablet.

Agreed. Since the days of the $400 laptop started, most non-techies I meet don't have working desktops anymore. Almost all techies I know have one or more.

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