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Comment by paulitex | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else feel like the cheers of success for iCloud are a little premature? It's amazing that since it's Apple we automatically believe the "No, really I mean it this time!". Shouldn't previous performance be taken into consideration (.Mac, MobileMe)? Boy who cries cloud?

Until iCloud is launched (not til the fall), all we have is old broken promises, vapourware, and some very expensive data centres.

I want iCloud to live up to the hype as much as anyone. But at this point the only thing we should be calling a success is the awesome power of the Jobs Distortion Field. He's the tech equivalent of a superstar athlete in their prime and the top of their game - evidenced by articles like these.

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I've been using MobileMe since it launched and, besides the initial problems, it's actually a really good service. It's the $99 price tag that doomed it to be a niche service. With iCloud being free, even if it's only as functionality as MM, it will probably be successful. Also, historically, Apple is pretty good at saying a product or service is going to do this or that and delivering on it. MobileMe does pretty much exactly what it promises to do. iCloud integration with iOS devices is working out pretty well in the beta so far. The only real question mark at this point is what iCloud.com is going to look like. I do think Apple needs to have a pretty strong web app offering to compliment the iOS/Mac integration.

There's nothing wrong with MobileMe or .Mac (they both have bad names -- thats the biggest issue)

They weren't huge sweeping successes because they didn't have enough features and cost a LOT. But the features they did have worked well.

MobileMe was just .Mac rebranded with more features.

iCloud is just MobileMe rebranded with more features.

Apple is smart for recognizing when they need to rebrand for communication facilitation. But don't be fooled. iCloud is just MobileMe with a facelift a few new features.

Steve Jobs apparently thinks (Or thought) there was something wrong with them.

There was, at launch - they were terrible, didn't work properly, had a ton of downtime, etc. It got a reputation for being a slow, useless, unreliable service, and while the service got much better (I've been using it almost since its inception), its reputation never truly recovered.

They were terrible about merging conflicts, made them unusable to me. Hope Apple have worked out how to do this better now...

Truth is on the cloud.

That does not solve the problem, as devices can go offline. If they come back with a change from an old version you still have to deal with a conflict.

> vapourware

There's a beta. Register and download it.

No thanks, Google will host my personal data for free, and it works on all platforms.

Actually, the cost is your click habits. Google is all about getting advertisers to sign on by saying "we have better information on all these people because we house all their data." If you are comfortable with that, that's fine.

Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.

I think you're making an assumption that Apple and MS don't track your click habits, as you put it, in addition to charging you for it. Is there really a guarantee from Apple/MS that once you stop paying them they won't keep your data?

At least Google is sorta-kinda upfront that they're doing it.

Huh? iCloud is also free up to 5GB.

How exactly do I get this beta? I have tried, updated iTunes and my iPhone, but see nothing. Do I need iOS5 to be able to use it, which I would need a developer account to get access to?

10.3 should work. Go to the Preferences, then Store, and select Automatic Downloads for Music/Apps/Books. Also, you can go to the Apple Store and under Quick Links, you'll find a Purchased link. That'll let you re-download any Music/Apps/Books. It's not really cloud-y yet, but it's a start.

Yes and yes.

All the standard stuff works without a hitch – exactly like MobileMe. MobileMe was never bad (except for iDisk which has always been slow for some reason), it was actually pretty great – but it cost money. That was its problem, not performance.

Mail, calendar, address book, bookmarks, iPad backup – all of that works without a hitch for me and it is fast. If the more important parts (documents API) work the same then I foresee no problems.

Once again, the big difference is price and the documents API, not performance. Sometimes that’s enough to make all the difference.

I agree completely. People forget about Apple's failures very quickly and continuously bring up Google's for some reason. Apple makes a lot of great products but they have as many duds as everyone. In the last year and half they've had at least 3 off the top of my head: Ping, GameCenter, and iBookstore. iBookstore isn't a total failure but it's not most users first, second, and sometimes even third choice. It was widely speculated to be a Kindle killer, but that hasn't been the case at all.

I'd also point out that Apple is entering a market that it has traditionally not done well in and is pushing an unnatural definition of cloud that consumers will be forced to either accept or reject.

You are thinking about yourself as a skilled technical person, not the general consumer of Apple products. The whole "it just works" marketing statement from Apple is key.

You and I will continue to use DropBox, Flickr, rsync, tar, scp, Aperture, svn, Eclipse, and jailbroken iPhones.

The other 95% of Apple's customers will relish the fact that all the sudden, for free, they can take a picture on their iPhone, show it to their friend on their iPad, and then show it to the entire family on their AppleTV without having to do anything but take the picture.

And you can bet that Apple learned their lessons with MobileMe.

Basically, Apple is betting the farm on providing a private back-end infrastructure that front ends all of their products. It is certainly a gamble and fraught with land-mines, but if they pull it off it will serve to take away additional market share from Google and the other big OS/Mobile companies.

1) I don't use any of those services you assume I use because we both frequent the same website.

2) 95% of Apple's customers don't have an iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (or a Mac). In fact, I would wager than the number of Apple customers who have more than 1 Apple product is south of 40%, the number with more than 2 south of 20%. Those who are entirely sold into the ecosystem, an extreme minority. Those people, the ones who might stand to gain from this service are the oddballs.

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