Why is this thread in Mac Hardware rather than Mac Software?

Dunno, I put it here a few weeks ago

Oh how wrong you are, the UK price is cheaper than the US price!!!

$29.99 = £18.34 add on 20% VAT and that come to £22.07 yet the price according to the UK Apple Store is £20.99
pity those poor Americans having to pay over the odds for their new OS

Hmm, 5GB is stingy, considering Microsoft's Skydrive offer 25GB for free, you only have to pay if you want more. Does the same syncing of calendar, contacts, mail etc. and will sync specific folders, so is not dependent on a specific application.

The only thing iCloud has is the versioning, which is useful.

Plus, with SkyDrive, the images stay there as long as I want, not just 30 days...

The obvious difference in the data you mention the calendar : Microsoft (as of windows 7) doesn't provide a 'native' calendar app in parallel to iCal - they did in Vista IIRC. The obvious and massive different you don't mention is music - MS don't offer anything that could even vaguely parallel to 'iTunes in the Cloud' which I hope at some point they find a snappier name for. The way I interpreted the keynote was that 5GB was for stored music - and only music you didn't buy through iTunes counts against it. And in reality anyway contacts and calendar data take up next to no space. One system I admined contained the calendar and contact data for 20,000 people in a database that was only 25GB. There may be some limit for size of mailbox, but I very much doubt they'll bother putting a quota specifically on contact or calendar data. Even if there is a 5GB quota limit total, it's pretty much (5GB minus a bit) for email in effect. And 5GB for email is actually quite a lot. If you actually need to keep more than 5GB of email, you really don't want to be storing it on a free service anyway. Remember none of them - Outlook live, Google, yahoo etc - guarantee any level of safety for your data. In theory they could lose all of it and you have no comeback. You shouldn't store your whole life in a free online service, whoever offers it.


Versioning isn't an iCloud feature, it's a Lion feature. iCloud supports it but if you don't have Lion you don't get versioning. You still get versioning if you don't use iCloud but do use Lion, although give it's free I don't know why you wouldn't (that may of course change at some point)...


It keeps your last 1000 photos - which is quite a lot in the consumer space - and it keeps any photos you tell it you want to keep (by tagging them) forever. Essentially it only throws away photos you take then don't bother looking at for a month. It's a stack system in effect. As for skydrive, if you don't access it for a couple of months it dumps everything. That's happened to me a couple of times when I forgot to access it for a while. Swings and roundabouts.

Jon

I think the whole point of icloud is not to keep all your data in the cloud but to keep it there long enough so that you get the opportunity to sync it to all your devices.

Photos are auto synced to your desktop (Windows and Mac) and kept there permanently. It gives you 30 days to do this unless you specify that you want to keep certain photos in the cloud. Oh and to sync to your mac it only needs to be turned on with an internet connection.

iTunes in the cloud doesn't actually store any music. All music is stored locally so the 5gb of storage is really only for documents. iTunes in the cloud is not a streaming service but a syncing service. When I buy a song on the iPhone it will be on my mac by the time I get home.

The only part of iTunes that does store music online is the iTunes match service. Again though this doesn't store everything. Any music that it finds a match for will be re-downloaded to your devices as an iTunes "purchase" in upto 256kbps aac quality. The only music then stored online is stuff that it hasn't been able to find a match for. With 18 million songs in their library I can't imagine that there will be many you need to store online.

If this was another dropbox then 5gb would be quite tight but the management behind this (if it works) will make it seem like it isn't online at all (I think).

One more thing...

I think the point the were trying to make is that icloud is not a directory that you can go to to put documents and photos etc... Like dropbox.

It is integrated into the software making it almost invisible to the user.

From a coder's standpoint - there are APIs in Lion to implement Versions and iCloud support within your app. That's actually a bit more than Dropbox offer - they have an Access API which quite a lot of mobile apps use but if you want to use their versioning control, you have to log in via the web and it's frankly very clunky.

The obvious difference is the way they're handling it. Dropbox syncing is automatic but you still have the 'dropbox folder' metaphor - if you want something to sync, you have to put it in there. By the sound of things, iCloud will be much more automated; it will copy files where ever you save them on your machine, as long as the app supports iCloud.

The actual key though isn't really the technology, it's the speed. The main reason hardly anyone uses iDisk as oppose to dropbox is iDisk is horrendously slow. I mean really, really slow. And worse, copying something to iDisk locks the finder to a degree; it's not threaded very well at all. IDisk is a bit of a dog. if iCloud is as transparent as they claim it is, operates with no fuss and importantly operates at decent speed, it could soon become the new defacto standard for mac users, booting Dropbox into touch.

Jon

Quick thing that I think wasn't evident in the keynote. If you buy Lion for $29 (what, 23 quid) you can upgrade to Lion server through the mac app store for $49 (what, 40 quid)? Snow Leopard Server is £420! That's an insane price drop. It's suddenly genuinely worth me considering running a Lion Server on my mac pro.

Jon

It is, isn't it. We often forget that Apple is a hardware company that happens to make its own software as well. Quite how this is going to help sell hardware, though, is anyone's guess.

Not that I need worry. Apple seem quite adept at making cash these days.

Is it because Apple make more and more money from the consumable end of the tech market (iphone/touch and iPad) plus revenue from music and apps. The actual "computer" part is making as a share of profit less and less. Though its still very very healthy profits.

They might be hoping for more of the halo effect to boost mac hardware sales. iCloud will make it a logical choice.

Lion is £20.99

An excellent price. Now what about family packs?

The price covers all Macs registered to the same iTunes account.

Mark