Apple iCloud

A Look at Apple’s iCloud

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/a-look-at-icloud/

7:13 p.m. | Updated to note user reports of e-mail problems today.

This week in The New York Times, I reviewed Apple’s new iPhone 4S. But the new phone is only one of the big Apple news items this week. On Wednesday, iCloud went live.

This new service is the latest incarnation of what has been called iTools, then .Mac, then MobileMe.


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There are three bits of good news about iCloud.

First, it’s free. (MobileMe was $100 a year.)

Second, it does more than MobileMe.

Third, it’s solid. Like a rock. It would be understandable if you wanted to steer clear; plenty of people remember the data loss and foul-ups of the early MobileMe — but this time, it looks as if Apple nailed it.

So what is iCloud?

• A synchronizing service. It keeps your calendar, address book, documents updated and identical on all your gadgets: Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches. In other words, pretty much what MobileMe was.

This is a huge convenience. Change, add or delete an appointment or address-book entry on one device, and the change is instantly, wirelessly, automatically reflected on all the others.

iCloud also includes a free e-mail account, ending in @me.com. Same deal here: Delete a message on one gadget, and you’ll find it in the Deleted Mail folder on another. Send a message from your iPad, and you’ll find it in the Sent Mail folder on your Mac. And so on.

Some programs are available for more than one machine — including Apple’s own iWork suite (Numbers, Pages, Keynote). Those programs are available for Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad. In that situation, you can create or edit a document on one kind of machine, and marvel as iCloud automatically syncs it with all your other devices. (Well, sort of. Create or edit a document on an iPhone/iPad/Touch, and it appears on the iCloud.com site for manual downloading by your Mac; the transfer isn’t automatic. Similarly, you have to manually upload these files to iCloud.com before they are transmitted to your iGadgets.)

• An online locker. Anything you buy from Apple — music, TV shows, e-books, and apps — is stored online, for easy access at any time. For example, whenever you buy a song or a TV show from the online iTunes store, it can appear automatically on all your i-gadgets and computers. Or you can re-download it manually at any time, no charge.

• Photo Stream. Every time a new photo enters your life — when you take a picture with an iPhone/iPad/Touch, for example, or import one from a camera onto your computer — it is added to a special folder called Photo Stream. In other words, it appears automatically on all your other iCloud machines: iPhone, iPad, Touch, Mac, PC, Apple TV.

Now, your iGadget doesn’t have nearly as much storage available as your Mac or PC; you can’t yet buy an iPad with 750 gigabytes of storage. That’s why, on your iGadget, your Photo Stream consists of just the last 1,000 photos.

(There’s another limitation, too: the iCloud servers store your photos for 30 days. As long as your gadgets go online at least once a month, they’ll remain current with the Photo Stream. And it doesn’t sync over the cellular airwaves. It sends photos around only when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot or connected to a wired network.)

You don’t have to worry about that 30-day, 1,000-photo business on your Mac or PC. Once they appear here, they’re here until you delete them.

On an iGadget, once a photo arrives, you can copy it to your Camera Roll, where it’s permanently saved.

This, in its way, is one of the best features in all of iCloudland, because it means you don’t have to sync your iPhone over a USB cable to get your photos onto your computer. It all happens automatically, wirelessly over WiFi.

It’s also a great way to send photos the other direction — from your Mac or PC. You can drag photos into the Photo Stream folder there, and marvel as they show up on your iGadget.

The one weirdness is that, to preserve its simplicity, Apple designed Photo Stream to be literal and rigid. Every photo that enters your photographic bloodstream becomes part of the Photo Stream. You can’t choose which ones. And more alarmingly, you can’t delete one. All your terrible shots, all your muffed shots, all your scandalous shots become part of the stream, and therefore get propagated across all of your iCloud devices. This is not great news for politicians.

(If something unfortunate enters your own stream, you can visit iCloud.com and use the Reset Photo Stream function. Just be sure to turn Photo Stream off and on again on each of your devices, too, to make them “notice” the newly empty Photo Stream.)

• Back to My Mac. This option lets you access the files on one Mac from another one across the Internet. It isn’t new, but it survives in iCloud.

• Find My iPhone — and Mac. Find My iPhone, the one free former MobileMe feature, pinpoints the current location of your iPhone or iPad on a map. It’s great for helping you find your iGadget if it’s been stolen or lost.

You can also make your lost gadget start making a loud pinging sound for a couple of minutes by remote control — even if it was set to Vibrate mode. That’s brilliantly effective when your phone has slipped under the couch cushions. In dire situations, you can even erase the phone by remote control, preventing sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.

In iCloud, this feature can find your Mac, too. That might seem like a silly idea; how often do you misplace your iMac? But remember that 75 percent of all computers Apple sells are laptops.

• Automatic backup. iCloud automatically backs up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Completely, automatically and wirelessly (over WiFi, not over cellular connections). It’s a quick backup, since iCloud backs up only whatever data has changed since the last backup.

But in some ways, iCloud is MobileMe Minus; some MobileMe features didn’t survive the cut. For example:

• iWeb. The beauty of this easy-to-use Web-site design program was that, with one click, you could publish your work on the actual Web — the MobileMe site “hosted” your pages. (As a replacement, you might consider the free www.weebly.com service, which makes it super-simple to design a Web site.)

• The iDisk. This “virtual hard drive in the sky” was a great way to transfer big files between computers. (As a replacement, consider DropBox or SugarSync; they let you create desktop folders that behave exactly like the iDisk. You can make them appear — and synchronize them — on any computer, or the iPhone or iPad. Free for up to 2two gigabytes (DropBox) or five gigs (SugarSync).

• Photo Gallery. Apple’s online galleries were a beautiful, uncluttered and ad-free way to present your digital slide shows to your adoring fans. And now they’re gone (the galleries, not the fans). (Replacements include www.picasa.com and www.flickr.com. And, of course, there’s Facebook.)

• Data sync. Some of the things MobileMe could sync no longer sync in iCloud: Dashboard widgets, Dock items, Keychains and all the trappings of your e-mail accounts, like settings, signatures, rules and preferences.

Apple will keep MobileMe around until June 30, 2012. At that point, it goes away forever.

A free iCloud account gives you five gigabytes of online storage. Fortunately, anything you buy from Apple — like music, apps, books and TV shows — doesn’t count against that five-gigabyte amount. Neither do the photos in your Photo Stream. (You can expand your storage if you find five gigs constricting — for $2 a gigabyte a year. So you’ll pay $20, $40 or $100 a year for an extra 10, 20, or 50 gigs. You can upgrade your storage right from your iGadget or computer.)

This must sound like a lot of stuff and a lot of complexity. And it is. (Of course, you choose which features you want to use, or you can ignore all of it and just not sign up.)

Still, that’s nothing compared to the complexity that must have been involved in engineering all of this to work smoothly from Day 1. Imagine the strain on Apple’s servers when its 300 million iGadget and Mac customers descended simultaneously on iCloud on Wednesday. (Update: Actually, some people are having iCloud e-mail problems today.)

But the bottom line is that there is real gold in them thar clouds. The syncing of address book and calendar is essential. Photo Stream is fantastic — you never have to curse the fact that some great photo is stuck on another machine (although I wish there were a way to delete individual photos).

And all of this is free?

What can I say? It’s a banner week for Apple.