IMO While Apple are pushing iCloud harder than they really should be allowed to, but it's nowhere near as bad as what Microsoft are doing. With Apple there's a simple opt-out in the setup wizard, and if you opt-out you stay opted-out (and are only prompted to opt-in once a year with the major OS update).
Apple is not really the best when it comes to online services. iCloud still suffers from a lot of issues, MobileMe flopped and many of their sites still run on very, VERY ancient code.
Please. Don't try to defend Photos.app, it's an abysmal piece of junk. It breaks UI metaphors. Saving its library to your pictures directory? Sure. But it's a royal pain if I don't want to store those pictures on a Mac. Which wouldn't be such an issue if Apple let you upgrade the storage. But no, you can't do that. So buy iCloud and shut the hell up, right?
I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.
I hate to have to sardonically upvote this but Apple has really been losing their way.I find both my iMac and my iPhone to be increasingly nagware-focused, especially because I have zero desire to use iCloud.
iCloud is a joke. Like eWorld. Like .Mac. Like MobileMe. You can’t do this stuff.
This, I predict, is going to turn out to be Apple's achilles heel. They make great hardware and their software is good enough but they just don't get services.
Google does services better than anybody and they're quickly closing the other gaps.
That's a fair point. Apple still delights a lot of their customers but there are still a lot of maddening UI/UX problems in a number of their products.
And iCloud is pretty far behind Google on consumer cloud services. And really, Google is only widening the gap.
It is though. Take the example of the Books app on iOS. If you enable iCloud, it uploads third-party documents and books into its cloud - so far so good. If you discontinue iCloud (or even just disable the annoying upload-and-delete-local-copy for the Books app), every one of your books disappears, being held hostage by Apple. You literally have to then copy every single book that you bought elsewhere into the Books app again.
Apple is not the problem. The (horribly proprietary) iCloud is just Apple's solution to the fundamental problem of people collecting data but not being able to manage it.
The article calls out smart devices. I've fantasized about having smart devices of my own, but in my fantasies they answer to me and collect data into my systems. Which means I need to learn a bit of embedded programming and some electrical engineering to build my own, after I've learned how to set up my own servers. I don't see this as viable for normal consumers.
Even I don't manage all of my own information. I switched to Gmail because I just can't keep up with spammers. I have a life.
Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…
For example on you phone you will get a red alert in settings … when you click it … says Try apple music for 3 months .. or will say setup apple pay … or sometimes say sign in with icloud. (even after declining multiple times)
These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.
Also on Apple Computers and Phones alike it keeps asking to sign in and use icloud. But then gives you only 5gigs of space … not enough to even backup your phone and then tries to upsell a monthly fee for expanded storage.
The software is designed to confuse users into purchasing when simply taking photos. New iphone with 64 gigs of storage 40 gigs free …. user gets message they are out of space in icloud and can purchase more space. They are quite aware that many users are not savy enough to know they don’t need to use icloud at all with photos or anything. Every time you update the phone it prompts you to “sign in” or “create and account”. Again comes off as cheap and pushy.
I can go on and on but money crunchers are definitely at the table with software these days.
That article is a year old, and somewhat off. Apple's recent cloud stuff has all worked very well for me. The only spotty things are CoreData syncing (which may be deprecated, it's certainly not encouraged) and anything that touches iTunes (which is probably the oldest infrastructure they have).
Stuff they've launched since then such as iCloud Photos has been working great. Heck Apple Pay works extremely well and that's technically a 'cloud' service.
I have to say, for all the valid hate it usually gets, iCloud is actually becoming a pretty nice “usb drive in the cloud” compared to the bullshit that is getting tacked on to Dropbox, Google Drive and to a lesser extent OneDrive.
On the other hand, I still keep a large WebDAV/OwnCloud server close for the moment iCloud turns to shit too.
iCloud is still easier to move out of and never see again than say GitHub or YouTube, both of which were not owned by Microsoft or Google before but now here we are.
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