Cutting that cord | Hacker News Reader

Cutting that cord

daringfireball.net

82 pointsthreepointone55 comments

There's no sane reason that an iOS couldn't do cloud syncing as reasonably as Android does. To Gruber's points:

  > getting your stuff onto your new iPad

Apple will never do it, but Android devices commonly solve this by using an SD card that can be transferred to and from devices. My Nexus One has this hidden behind the battery, so practically speaking I'm not going to be without it. My photos, videos, and music are on there, or Flickr/Amazon/Dropbox. (Or my home computer, which doesn't factor here.)

  > updating iOS

My Nexus One updates over the air automatically out of the box, and I have an app called ROM Manager that downloads/installs third-party Android distributions also OTA. Apple's made the conscious decision to ship iOS updates as full downloads rather than deltas, which makes this an issue of distributing nearly-1GB packages. I can update to a new build of my Android distribution in under ten minutes.

  > backing up and restoring your iPad

Gruber mentions that stock Android doesn't do out of the box backup and restore, which is wrong. I just today did a factory restore of my phone and, after I set up my Google account, my phone settings were restored, along with all the apps I'd downloaded from the Market. This was done automatically without having to initiate a restore.

Gruber mentions that photos, videos, and music aren't updated, but those are stored (as mentioned) on a device-independent SD card when they're not stored in the cloud in the first place.

Android isn't perfect, but it does have this sewn up. As far as my Nexus One is concerned I don't own a full PC, and it couldn't care less. When I had an iPhone, I remember iOS releases as events where everyone in the office ran back to their laptops to see if they could connect to the download server, and then left their phones tethered for the next hour or two.

> Android devices commonly solve this by using an SD card that can be transferred to and from devices. My Nexus One has this hidden behind the battery, so practically speaking I'm not going to be without it.

How is this any different than plugging in a USB cord to sync? What are you shuttling the SD card between anyway (a PC I assume)? Physical media is not a good answer to "cutting the cord".

  > How is this any different than plugging in a USB cord to sync?

It's device independent. You can wipe the device or switch to a new one without waiting for a full sync of your potentially large media library.

"Cutting the cord" doesn't mean pretending you don't have other devices, it means eliminating reliance on them. Presumably if you don't have a PC or another device you don't have any digital media to transfer to your phone in the first place.

I mean, you can store your media on the net and stream it down at will. Or you can store it on an SD card (or whatever) and put that in whatever device you're using today. Having to sync devices to a central master PC is the issue.

> It's device independent. You can wipe the device or switch to a new one without waiting for a full sync of your potentially large media library.

I think you're confusing device agnostic with device independent. If you still require a device to sync the content with, it's not "independent".

I don't understand what your argument is. Let's restate:

iOS requires that you connect your device to your PC in order to activate service, update the OS, and to manage media on the device. This is onerous and unnecessary.

Android doesn't require this. One of the ways, but not the only way, in which this is implemented is in the use of removable SD cards, which can be loaded with media independently of the device the media is consumed on. It is not required that you do any of this to operate the phone.

You never have to connect your Android device to a PC if you choose not to.

If you choose to load your media onto your device via Dropbox or via streaming from Amazon's cloud service (or, apparently, Google's upcoming service), you don't even have to muck with loading an SD card. You may feel free to listen to Pandora and upload your photos to Flickr without ever touching a PC.

So you're saying that physical media is better than a USB cable? Like the poster above, I do not see the practical difference here. In one case, you're transferring an SD card from one device to the other. In the other, you're taking a cable and pluging in the device into a PC and letting it sync. Realistically, the USB method is just slower.

Plus, unless you're switching phones every month, the full-on sync only happens occasionally.

If you want to backup your device, you still need a separate entity(either a cloud service or a PC) anyway. You need to copy the SD card's contents to something else, and that requires a PC for storage. Restoring from a cloud storage service still requires time and bandwidth, so again, practically, that's basically the same as plugging in a device.

  > So you're saying that physical media is better than a USB cable?

I'm saying that no reliance on a PC is better than reliance on a PC.

  > If you want to backup your device, you still need a separate entity(either a cloud service or a PC) anyway.

When did this become about doing backups? Gruber's article is title "Cutting That Cord" and is about cloud-based syncing and iOS devices, and my original comment was outlining how (most?) Android devices don't rely on a home-base PC, and are architected such that you don't require full backups of your stuff. Big files (media) lives on your SD card, apps and settings live on Google's servers and are downloaded as needed.

If you get a new iPad, you have to plug it into your computer to set it up and sync everything, which is where "backup and restore" comes into play. With a new Android device, you take your old SD card and insert it into the new device and let Google sync your apps and settings. Done.

If you want to do backups of your stuff for archival or safety, that's fine, and that (of course) requires somewhere else to put your stuff. But that's not what I'm discussing.

You're not going to have all your data on that SD card, iOS or Android. I'm betting Android doesn't use that as the main data store or anything like that, just scratch files and data.

What does "main data store" mean? In fact, I don't understand what you're saying at all.

Android backs up and restores apps, app settings and preferences (including 3rd party apps if they opt-in). Files (pictures, video, mp3) stay on the sdcard.

When you did the restore, was all saved data from every app also restored? For example, progress on Angry Birds?

http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/2432/how-to-backu...

Yes, I can see why for transferring your media library, and backing up your device, you might prefer to do this over a wired connection to a PC.

But it still seems a bit crazy that I need to connect to a PC to activate the device in the first place.

Connecting to a PC should be optional for if and when I want to backup, or transfer media, over a wired connection.

If you're purchasing from an Apple retail store then they'll activate the device for you on a computer there in the store. That's still connecting to a PC, but at least it doesn't actually require owning a PC. I've heard that they'll do updates for you in store too, though you'd be running without backups in that case (and hopefully you don't live far from an Apple Store).

They will even ask you whether you want to immediately activate the device, you don't have to ask them. (They asked me and the three people in front of me when I picked up my iPad 2. By the way, no one wanted to activate the device immediately, no one bought Applecare and I think everyone except for me bought a cover.)

That tells me that Apple seems to have recognized the ridicoulosness of the whole activation procedure but has not yet been able to change anything about it.

He goes on and on about about backup and restore and bandwidth. Unless they've changed something an iOS upgrade is just an OS image - upgrading from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2 is a 350mb download, which is really stupid. Going from 2.2 to 2.3 on the Nexus one was ~40mb download (doable OTA), while 2.2.1 to 2.2.2 was something like 700kb.

He's talking about the full-phone backup that occurs before the update is applied.

The size of the OS upgrade image has nothing to do with the amount of bandwidth required to send an entire phone backup, media and all, to the cloud.

The full-phone backup shouldn't be much data, either, if done properly. After all, you don't need to back up anything that was downloaded from iTunes -- which includes the operating system, all applications, most users media files. No more than a checksum is needed for those. A directory checksum would work -- you don't even need a file checksums.

I think the main issue here is more than media files: it's the data stored for each app on the device. Music might be a common app with lots of data (and is, as you said, relatively easy), but what if you've saved a 200MB file locally with the Dropbox app? Stuff like that needs to be backed up too, the and the backup service has no way to know if an app's data is "essential" (the user made this!) or just "downloadable content" -- and, all apps would need be updated to know how to re-download after a restore.

It's a complicated problem: it's more than just storing a few hashed and re-downloading from iTunes.

An what would be the proper way to do it?

For me, this is the proper way of doing updates in a computer: - create a full backup (bootable image) in an external disk - apply the update - if happy, let's move one. if not, recreate the image of step one.

You could argue that you do not need the whole image of the computer, only the image of the system. Well, the system in a computer is from 1Gb to 4Gb.

In an iOS device, the system would be between 500Mb and 1Gb. At least, you need to back that up, and OTA is not feasible right now.

Doing that is not easy and Apple is not very good at it. I'm not surprised that they are not there yet.

What's the issue? Backups can be trickled to their destination, and so can the OS update. It's just done in the background and when it's ready, it's ready. There's no technical or user experience related reason why an iOS device needs to ever be connected to a PC.

And there goes your battery and data plan...

Assuming WiFi connection? A fair number of iPads are WiFi only anyway.

It's true that a smaller "delta" update would be doable over the air, but I think that the hookup to your PC makes the process much safer. Should your device update fail, you have backups and a way to restore back to your previous state.

We've seen what happens when an update goes awry (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/everything-tha...), and Apple is clearly playing it very, very safe and very, very slow, much to our geeky displeasure.

The iPhone 4 and iPad 2 updates are almost breaking 700 MB for the latest 0.0.1 revision. Obviously, that's not going to work for OTA upgrades.

However, the requirements for OTA updates are significantly less than for these standalone files that iTunes uses. Right now, Apple has to include the entire system software partition in the file, since it's used for upgrading from any version -- even back to the ancient iPhone 1.0 -- as well as being used for updates.

With OTA updates, though, they don't have that restriction: you can't restore a device with them, and you can't use them on a device that's not reasonably current. Instead, just including what's changed (which usually isn't particularly much) is now possible, and likely the route they would take if they choose to support OTA updates.

I prefer the whole image approach and don't mind needing to plugin for updates. I'd rather have a phone that needs plugged in to update than a phone that is bricked by a botched OTA delta update. I really wish there was OTA syncing of everything else though.

I didn't think much of the issue either, but you have a good point... if you're doing an OTA upgrade you're very likely without power.

A coworker's android phone (Droid 1) died during an OTA upgrade due to lack of battery. This bricked the phone (he had to get a replacement)... combine with the fact that his phone wasn't backed up, and he was a very upset guy for a week or so as he redid all his settings and hacks.

>A coworker's android phone (Droid 1) died during an OTA upgrade due to lack of battery. This bricked the phone (he had to get a replacement)... combine with the fact that his phone wasn't backed up, and he was a very upset guy for a week or so as he redid all his settings and hacks.

It's possible to avoid this, though. Just have the loader require the device to be in charging mode/running off of AC before it allows the update to be applied. That way, it lowers the chance of bricking due to lack of power considerably.

How does the update being OTA affect whether it bricks your phone?

Presumably because it's not going to make a full 16/32/64GB backup first.

On this "Apple should buy / copy Dropbox" thing...

Dropbox is wonderful. I love it. But Apple is slowly moving away from exposing the filesystem to the user, so if they do anything, I don't think it'll look or work like Dropbox. For example, Dropbox's solution to syncing conflicting versions is to let you browse revisions on the website. I don't see Apple doing it that way.

I would foresee an SDK level feature with each app responsible for integrating and syncing its own data. This is possible now, if the app maker is willing to host a server but the overheads of running a server long term discourage it.

Who really thinks Apple is going to build it and give it away though? Sure, there'll be efficiencies in terms of code reuse and scale if Apple provide it, but it'll cost the developer somehow (and there'll probably be another storm in a teacup when they announce it. but that's another day's work.)

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin have a compelling take about the respective strengths/core competencies of Google and Apple in this episode of their podcast, Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/10

Nobody has mentioned the effect of cloud syncing on battery life. Apple's devices have strong media creation features, and the data they create (photos, videos, and audio recordings) can be quite large. Syncing this data immediately to the cloud requires juice to power the processor and the network, even while using Wi-Fi. Even existing cloud sync of push-based email, which is relatively little data, has an appreciable effect on battery life. I wouldn't be surprised if cloud-sync increased the power cost of photo and video creation by 10x over 3G. USB sync is faster, but more importantly, requires much less power. In fact, for some devices there can be a net gain of charge through USB power. I suspect Apple is pushing off cloud sync until it can deal with this issue without compromising its high standards of battery life. Cloud sync. is quite useful for email, but for other things, most non-geeks would probably prefer better battery life at this point. Apple is excellent at making these kinds of hard choices.

Carriers may also be prohibiting Apple from adopting cloud-sync over 3G and EDGE out of fear it will crash their networks. Android, while outselling Apple, doesn't nearly have the same effect on data rates, because a lot of Android phones are sold as "free/discounted feature phones"--users aren't using them as smartphones, they're just the neatest phone they could get for cheap at the store.

He forgets to note that you don't actually need to pay $99 if you just want to sync your contacts and calendar and have push email. Google lets you do that for free, even on iOS.

It takes a little more effort to set up than on Android (you have to point your iPhone to Google's Exchange service) but it works just as great.

MobileMe isn't the only solution out there for iOS-device owners that want to wirelessly sync their contacts and calenders to the cloud and with other devices. In fact, by spending $99 less[1], you gain the option of syncing with Android/Windows devices as well. If you have an iPad and an Android phone, this is great.

[1] I know MobileMe gets you more than just calendar/contacts/mail, but these seem to be the main issues in the blog post

As a mobileme user for 5+ years now, no you don't really get much more than calendar/contacts/mail. The rest are only useful if you really, really want to live in the iLife sandbox.

That reminds me, I've gotta start scanning my mac.com email archive for people who aren't using my gmail address yet...

Doesn't satisfy the question. The only good point he has is about backing up large media catalogs. I'm not sure why this 1 kink in the wheels should mean no software OTA or no activation OTA or no app syncing OTA.

Surely backing your iPad up to your computer doesn't mean your data is backed up. It means the problem has moved from your tablet not being backed up, to your computer not being backed up. What do I sync my MacBook up to? Maybe the answer there is to stop thinking about one device as being the central hub, and distribute the backup amongst all of them.

I think the problem is more about habit. Android users didn't have a habit of plugging their phones up to their computers (if they are new smartphone users, which most are). Apple's problem is replacing the habit of doing things way X and instead do them way Y. They could just pull the rug out from under their customers and force them to accept way Y (they've done it in the past), but the habits are not just in how you back up your data. It's in how you spend your money, something Apple absolutely wants to protect. If a customer is comfortable spending their money in way X, Apple must make sure the transition to way Y doesn't end in closed wallets.

It's unlikely that both yout iOS device and your PC will fail at the same time. Backing up an iOS device to a PC is as good as any other backup.

No, a good backup best practice is to incorporate an off site point into your redundancy plan.

Oh come on. Really? You know exactly what I mean. No need to get pedantic.

It's as good as any Time Machine or similar backup, you know, the kind of backup a tiny minority of normal people may actually attempt to make.

It's, at any rate, a vast improvment over the kind of baclup most people make (none at all).

"Off site" just means in physically different locations, so that some kind of local calamity wouldn't take out both, right? It seems like having it backed up on the PC satisfies that requirement to some extent, since the iPad and the PC are likely to be in different locations a lot of the time. It's not as good as a proper off-site backup, but it's better than nothing.

Sure it's better than nothing but it's not a good backup plan. The reasoning was that Apple is holding back OTA updates because this one niche thing isn't covered perfectly (although Carbonite and others do a good job of hands-off online backup). I'm saying that if you're protecting something which isn't very good in the first place, and holding back a lot of good features because of it, that's a bad reason to do so.

It's much better than no backup. An offsite backup offers only little additional security. (Not that it's not worth it. But the difference between no backup and backup is vast, the difference between backup and offsite backup is small. It's like the difference between a $50 dinner and a $100 dinner — noticable but rather irrelevant compared to a combo meal from McDonald's.)

Worth pointing out that I made this very point in my article a few days after the iPad was launched:

http://danieltenner.com/posts/0015-ipad-an-apple-for-mom.htm...

The only question, in my my mind, is, what will these people do when their cheap old Dell finally clonks out? Right now, to use an iPad and iPhone effectively, it seems you still need some kind of base station. So when the old Dell gives up the ghost, will people buy another one? Pony up for an expensive Mac? Or simply decide that the iPad is good enough and they don’t want another laptop?

Looks like people are now arriving at the same conclusion - I guess because the number of people who are happy to have an iPad and no device to plug it into has multiplied.

It's worth noting that Nokia have had self-updating operating systems (ie. over-the-air) for years now. Admittedly, I wouldn't expect it to get much of a note in this article, but it's definitely not something that nobody has pulled off yet.

My Motorola phone did OTA updates 10 years ago. As gruber pointed out, that is likely to be the first to go from iTunes.

What he doesn't mention are the reasons Apple doesn't need to cut the cord- it helps their ecosystem. I need to install iTunes (and maybe Quicktime, maybe I check out the iTunes Store, maybe I'm doing it on my Mac). I'm sure the future is headed towards iOS devices that don't need a PC, but the alternative right now is not as painful for Apple as it is for consumers. And truth be told, plugging in a USB cable once in a while is not that painful for me either.

I'm waiting for Apple to unload some of their cash reserves for Dropbox. Could they build it themselves? Maybe but I'm not very optimistic based on iDisk.

However, I haven't had many issues with .Me syncing my mail/calendars/address book.

I'm not sure Apple would buy DropBox unless it was defensive (i.e. they wanted to keep it out of a competitors hands). Isn't DropBox a front-end for Amazon s3? While DropBox does much of the magic, it's unclear to me how feasible it would be to shift to another storage solution. Presumably Apple wouldn't want to be in bed with Amazon, would they?

I would think that they would want something built into Time Machine. Maybe Dropbox could be a switch in the preferences but it's seems like something they would build themselves.

No question that they want it-- I'd agree that they are likely to build it themselves. Apple historically doesn't buy too many businesses (beyond the occasional talent grab).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

As a Linux user I have to cringe at the thought of Apple buying Dropbox. My favorite candidate for acquiring Dropbox would probably be Amazon, assuming they just let them do their own thing.

Yes! I sincerely hope they do not think of iDisk as a worthy competitor.

But they already tried, and failed, according to Quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Apple-acquire-Dropbox

I'd like them to use Time Capsule to accomplish the offering of backup/calendar/contacts/etc to people that don't want to pay them a yearly fee.

I wish they would sell an iDock that allowed USB drives to be hooked to it for local backup / sync. Syncing to a Time Capsule would be great too.

I guess my "dream" dock would have USB for mass storage / keyboard and an hdmi port for playing synced stuff on the tv controlled from the device.

I hear what you are saying, but I'm talking about a headless system, accessed via the browser, that could handle most of these syncing and upgrade tasks over my LAN.

The idea is to move "the cloud" to my LAN. I have an always on, 12mbps/ 2mbps connection, which is plenty; and, I connect to it daily anyway. I already do this with an off-the-shelf NAS (4TB Raid), but it is too difficult to configure securely for most people (lots of SSH/ ip tables/ port forwarding).

Bonus points for a full RoR stack that would allow me to buy and install gems with minimal configuration.

I don't know, everyone's talking about cloud this, cloud that, bunch of free services that are nevertheless costly to provide, meanwhile Apple are the mofos who sell the devices that people use to get onto the cloud - at massive profit. I think their cloud strategy is pretty sound.

"The only reliable way to succeed at anything is to actually do it, repeatedly, with concentrated effort."

and I would add the important part to learn from each iteration step.

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