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Comment by zyxley | Hacker News Reader

People stick with Dropbox for a simple reason: they do the syncing thing faster and more painlessly than anyone else out there.

If Apple ever gets their act together and makes iCloud actually fast and reliable a syncing service, Dropbox might be in trouble.

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It's a safe bet that 80-90% of dropbox users are on a PC.

Based on what?

Safety.

Edit: It was probably a reference to that it is "preinstalled" on retail machines.

Given Apples 7.6% share of the 'PC' market as reported in 3Q15 (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3146617) I wouldn't be suprised that the vast majority of dropbox users are on Windows, simply because the vast majority of computer users are.

It's not about users. Its about paying customers.

(Some of us on Linux)

If it's more than 10-20% of Dropbox users, that says pretty bad things about their market share.

What's the actual issue with iCloud? It takes three seconds to turn it on, and select what I want to sync. Done. Backing up, syncing calendars, contacts, and notes to all my devices with zero problem.

dropbox is so easy, people accidentally install the client on the way to their files. i dont see people accidently installing icloud. i cant see anyone making the case that icloud is EASIER to initialize than dropbox. it just ISNT better at being foolproof. no matter how foolish you are, you cant screw up getting dropbox going.

Dropbox easier to use on Windows, I will give you that. iCloud is DEFINITELY easier to use on Apple products.

Ditto. Pretty sure having iCloud on is actually the default in the El Capitan (latest OSX) setup.

It integrates really nicely to become the default document storage location for most (non-developer) apps as well.

The only trouble I had was to have it replace the "Documents" folder in the Dock so I could just treat it like a cloud version of the regular documents folder.

> What's the actual issue with iCloud?

I'll admit I haven't tried yet, but I'm going to hazard a guess that if I try to setup icloud on my Linux machines at home or my Android devices, I'm not going to get very far.

With Dropbox I get all the way, everywhere, with no hassles. Thus Dropbox has my business.

That's like saying well I'm not going to get very far running a Playstation 4 game on my Super Nintendo. You can't count software that isn't even supported on a system. Yes, DropBox has a client for many systems, but saying DropBox is better because iCloud doesn't even exist on Linux make no sense.

> but saying DropBox is better because iCloud doesn't even exist on Linux make no sense.

makes sense for me. I don't use iCloud because of that. It doesn't have the features that I need. Although "Better" is subjective. Dropbox might not be better for you, but it "makes sense" for some people

It's actually a good reason to pick DropBox over iCloud if you are running multiple OSes. So, it does make it better in a way.

Well it does make sense if he says Dropbox is just as good as iCloud on Mac and even supports other platforms. Thus it's better if you aren't only using Mac.

> What's the actual issue with iCloud?

I'm not sure I can answer generally but from a personal point of view currently my notes are not syncing with my iPhone - God knows why - and last year when my iOS update f'kd up and I had to wipe the phone my iCloud backup wouldn't restore - some kind of corruption. Luckily there was a 3 month old iTunes backup on my disk so I didn't lose all data. So it's not perfect.

iCloud data store syncing is OK, but file syncing is unreliably slow. Unlike Dropbox, it doesn't have the "two computers synced before I even turned around from one to the other" experience.

I've noticed that iCloud has a really hard time removing things. For instance, I've tried to delete some "keyboard shortcuts" for about a year now and every few weeks it manages to restore every last one to all of my devices. It doesn't seem to matter if I explicitly delete them from all devices.

Every cloud service needs a "delete, damn it, I really mean it" option, otherwise it seems their sync mechanisms are too conservative and resurrect things forever.

When (not if) it breaks, you're screwed: no way to get access to the data, the client is completely opaque and there's no logging or a way to reset it. When it stops syncing, or they “handle” a network or server error by silently logging you out, you won't know until you miss a meeting or use stale data.

The main reason I pay for Dropbox is that simple model. I have a full copy on every machine, and if my internet connection fails, they go down, or something breaks I can just copy files like normal. If I see something odd, there's a full log & the ability to revert any changes.

There are times where boring is good and your core personal data is one of them.

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