iCloud, Apple’s ‘automatic and effortless’ cloud service, is coming, along with iOS 5, this fall – so it’s not far off at all now. And from what I can see round the web in forums and social networks, most people think it’s going to be just awesome. I hope so too, as a heavy iOS […]
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Anyone Else Feel Skeptical About iCloud?

Sep 12th 2011 by

iCloud

iCloud, Apple’s ‘automatic and effortless’ cloud service, is coming, along with iOS 5, this fall – so it’s not far off at all now. And from what I can see round the web in forums and social networks, most people think it’s going to be just awesome.

I hope so too, as a heavy iOS users of course I do. But I don’t find myself feeling the same ‘Soon I won’t need Dropbox’ sort of sentiment I see so many folks expressing. I feel more than a little skeptical about how good, and how easy to use, iCloud will be.

Anyway, here are my three main reasons for feeling less than convinced about how much I’ll use iCloud as opposed to other services:

1. I used MobileMe. It was just plain terrible. Confusing to use, iDisk was ridiculously slow, and it never felt worth anything near $100 a year. The consensus seems to be that Apple knows MobileMe was crap, now they’ve got ginormous new data centers, and this time they’ll get everything right. That seems a terribly optimistic view to me. Where’s any sort of track record to base that on? Apple doesn’t have one in this area, except for MobileMe, and that’s hardly a recommendation.

2. Apple will put their typical restrictions in – they’ll shape the way we’re allowed to use our iCloud space. Oh, I don’t doubt that some of it will be automatic and effortless – but that sounds a little like iTunes backup or file sharing. Effortless also means powerless in many ways when it comes to these features – in terms of the lack of flexibility in how we use them.

3. Dropbox has been nothing but flat-out excellent since Day 1 of using it. It could not be simpler to use, and doesn’t put any unreasonable restrictions in place on how I use its service. I upgraded to a premium account with 50GB of space a few years ago, and I feel much better about paying them $100 a year than I ever did with MobileMe.

I’m still very keen to try out iCloud and I hope I’m wrong and it ends up being far better than I expect. I don’t expect my use of Dropbox to be changing anytime soon though.

What do you all think? Are you gearing up to make iCloud your primary cloud service soon after it goes live?

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