Well I spent today some time to figure out what's the deal will Apple's iCloud. Unless they have missed to mention some truly amazing features, I can only call it a "Rohrkrepierer"... or to put it into English 'a lot of talk about a tiny improvement'.
Let me walk you trough the services the way I understand them and what my thoughts are about them.
What iCloud essentially does is it pushes your stuff, that you have purchased via iTunes, to all your devices once those devices are connected via wifi to the internet. This is the free option. On top of that it also scans your entire iTunes library and matches it with stuff on Apple servers. Those items it can't find on it's servers it uploads to iCloud in order to push it to your devices. This service will cost you $ 25 a year. And of course it syncs your emails, calenders and documents. It only keeps photos for 30 days in the cloud and that's a big NO in my book.
Not a single of those options is particularly new. They all exist in the one or other form. Especially when it comes to cloud storage space there are lot of options out there that keep my stuff for free for up to 90 days and don't cost me a single dime.
What iCloud boils down to is a multi-device sync service in a shiny new package. It certainly doesn't deserve the media fuzz they made about it!
If on the other hand they had created a 'cloud version' of all my files, Apps, Photos, music, docs etc. and let me access it from any device or push it to a device of my choosing, that would have been a huge improvement.
There's even more bad news. iCloud will kill Apple's web-hosting if iWeb websites by June 2012. I haven't been a huge fan of the web-hosting service, since it buggy at times and could be quite a pain especially with large and multi-media content rich websites. I would have liked to see an overhaul of the web-hosting service. Killing the entire service is not the right decision, especially not without offering any alternative. As buggy as the web-hosting service was at times, I did like the good implementation of iWeb and web-hosting service. Since I was going to recreate my personal website after my move to Europe anyways, Apple's web-hosting would have been a serious contender. Guess that's no longer an option.
There is some good news as well. I really enjoyed reading about all the new and quite exciting changes coming with OSX Lion. Really looking forward to the release of it. Full Screen Apps, direct incorporation of the App Store, the Resume- & Version Function definitely top the list of things to look forward to with OSX Lion. And a price of $ 29.99 0r $ 49.99 for OSX Lion Server is a huge Plus in my book.
The decision between OSX Lion and OSX Lion Server will be determined if I will continue to have a shared hosting account within a cloud networking environment or if I will be hosting my personal website myself. The main reasons for hosting the website myself is, that I'm not really a fan of could networking. I will explain that in more detail in a later post.
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