

Apple's iCloud will automatically store, sync data for free - sandipc
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/06/apples_icloud_will_automatically_store_sync_data_for_free.html

======
ender7
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.

~~~
jimbokun
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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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.

~~~
rufo
On the "iTunes in the Cloud" page it pretty clearly states that "All you have
to upload is what iTunes can’t match":

<http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/>

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You're absolutely right. My bad. Sounds like a useful service in that event.

------
nlawalker
"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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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.

------
powrtoch
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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
jokermatt999
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.

------
extension
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.

~~~
yalogin
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.

~~~
extension
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.

~~~
yojimbo311
The only opt-out option visible in the keynote was a master switch to turn
iCloud services on or off (it being on by default of course). I doubt they'd
make it more granular than that as it would complicate things quite a bit
while only meeting the needs of a few and isn't really in line with their
interests. It's better than no option and is obvious and accessible enough
contrary to some other way more sensitive features released from other
companies.

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.

~~~
tsumikarani
> I doubt they'd make it more granular than that as it would complicate things
> quite a bit while only meeting the needs of a few and isn't really in line
> with their interests.

What you get after the set-up, in Settings, looks a bit like this:
<http://i.imgur.com/dYXvU.png>

~~~
yojimbo311
I stand corrected. Thanks for the snapshot.

------
craigmccaskill
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?

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

~~~
craigmccaskill
Not really sure what the problem is, a screen saver manages to work perfectly
well detecting when I'm not using the computer.

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.

------
MatthewPhillips
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.

~~~
gfodor
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.

------
upthedale
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?

------
starnix17
Coolest news for developers, there are APIs for this for use with third party
apps.

~~~
rsuttongee
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?

~~~
Someone
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.

~~~
rsuttongee
You're probably right that "app files" they way steve mentioned is does refer
to the data of the apps themselves which isn't a lot of data.

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?

------
dsplittgerber
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?

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

~~~
dsplittgerber
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.

~~~
glhaynes
They said the iTunes Match songs get downloaded as DRM-free AAC 256K files, so
you will "own" it in the same way you currently "own" music purchases from the
iTunes Store.

~~~
msbarnett
Perhaps, but if you committed copyright infringement when you originally
obtained the music, none of this is going to turn back the clock and undo that
original infringement

------
redler
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).

~~~
spullara
"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
The advantages of a $60 billion cash hoard.

------
MatthewB
Shouldn't dropbox be a little nervous?

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
cjoh
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.

~~~
tptacek
Rdio is still a great deal if you're the kind of person who listens to
Yeasayer or Joan As Police Woman. It is no longer as good a deal for the kind
of person who listens to Fleetwood Mac and Lady Gaga. The problem is, there
are way more of the latter than the former.

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?

~~~
cjoh
I just don't see how they're remotely close to the same thing. But opinions
are opinions -- Rdio combines the ease of discovery of a service like Pandora
with the selection of a decent music store. And that it can locally cache
songs on a device means, well, why would I ever buy songs on iTunes again.

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.

~~~
tptacek
As a mostly-satisfied Rdio subscriber, I'm _happy_ to be wrong about this, but
I think Apple just put a shotgun blast through 80% of the "cloud music"
market. I think people who really see value in getting instant access to _any_
music every year is a small subset of the whole digital music market.

------
funkdobiest
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?

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

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

~~~
danh
Pocket Casts is also very good.

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

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

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

------
inthewoods
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.

~~~
panacea
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.

~~~
spullara
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?

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

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

~~~
jfager
1\. That's what the comment you're responding to is complaining about (if I
paid for it in the past, why would I hand over $25 bucks to pay for it
again?).

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.

~~~
tptacek
I have roughly 700 albums that I ripped off little plastic disks in the '90s,
all encoded at 192, all riddled with bit errors after being copied through 6-9
different IDE/SATA drives.

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.

~~~
jfager
I totally agree with you, I was just clarifying the other comment. I've been
thinking about uploading my whole collection to Amazon, whose music store I
much prefer to iTunes, but an order-of-magnitude price difference is hard to
justify. If all this works as advertised, it's going to be an absolutely
killer service.

------
bennesvig
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.

------
6ren
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.

------
maercsrats
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.

~~~
spullara
Yes, you can turn syncing off on 3g.

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

------
joe24pack
err ... no thanks. I'll keep my data local ... and private.

------
mrvc
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
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.

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

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

~~~
tvon
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.

~~~
corin_
For anyone who has illegal music, it's paying once not twice and it's hardly
expensive (cheaper than music subscription services).

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.

~~~
ctdonath
I'd been planning to re-rip my entire CD collection to lossless. I'd say
hassle-free upgrade to 256kbps AAC for $25 is a suitable alternative by far.

------
xbryanx
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.

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

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

