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"I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release"

"what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world"

You're not the target market.

For most users this is a distinction without a difference -- except that with the cloud they don't have to remember to leave their home computer turned on and online 24/7, and they don't have to be responsible for their own backups.

It's not (at all) easier for Apple to move these features into their data center -- it's easier for (the vast majority of) Apple's users.

Users who know how to do what you want to do -- run a home file server -- already know how to do what you want to do.

>don't have to be responsible

Put another way: "don't have the choice any more".

And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.

No, not particularly. A lot of the world is on ADSL or worse; I now have 200Mb/s symmetric fiber which is fantastic, but until recently I could only get 6Mb/s download, 0.5Mb/sec upload.

Half of all British people can get at most 1Mb/s upload.

That's not good enough to give decent performance. In particular, an iPhone photo is about 2MB, and that's half a minute (or 15 seconds) to download (for this use case).

It's not fast enough to stream most video, for example.

Making it easier would have massive infrastructure requirements.

>Put another way: "don't have the choice any more"

An odd way to describe an optional feature.

>And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier

You've heard of Back To My Mac, no? That's a thing that exists. Pretty simple to use. Free. Built right in to the OS.

It would have been much easier, from a technical standpoint, for Apple to have extended that sort of file sharing to Photos or iTunes, than to go around building huge datacenters and etcetera.

But it wouldn't have been what most people want. Most people don't have the home bandwidth to be hosting their own media. Most people don't want to have to leave a server running 24/7. Nearly all of the drawbacks to cloud storage you've cited in this thread would be considered by most people to be _features_.

(Privacy is the sole exception. It's also the reason I, personally, don't happen to use iCloud. But I don't think Apple is stupid for choosing to implement functionality for the majority of people, even if I don't happen to be part of that majority.)

>as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.

Feel free to want what you want; I'm just pointing out that what you want is idiosyncratic.

Apple has been giving away their Operating system for years I'm not sure where you get the $99 'bleeding edge' operating system.

I paid $99 for it back in the day. I guess its actually $25 to purchase a DVD of it here in Europe.

EDIT: I'm behind the times, and showing my age - but I've spent $hundreds on OSX over my experience as a Mac user. Its been an investment - small, but nevertheless significant.

And this: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/

.. just fuels the fire. Because the OS is free, Apple are no longer putting as much effort into expanding its feature-set - instead choosing to make services for the iDevice market. Its clear to me, anyway: Apple are no longer a serious OS vendor. They're very definitely a consumer electronics vendor, though..

Its good that in your post about how you hate Apple products you made sure to get a ton of things wrong and bias them all in a way that makes Apple look worse than they actually are. It seems like your own irrational hate is the actual problem here.

I appreciate your opinion of my psychology, but lets stay on subject: is the Cloud really something we should be promoting, or is there an opportunity here to eat Apples' lunch and develop a better service? Because I think that the Cloud is very, very naive and frankly quite dangerous - I think this, because I've seen and felt the repercussions for what happens when the Cloud server goes down and people can't get work done. It does happen - and will happen.

So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...

Have you seen what happens when AWS goes down? It does, and will happen. Therefore by your measure it and all the startups that use it are naive and dangerous.

Have you seen what happens when a Cloud gets hacked into, and the photo's get leaked? I have and it isn't pretty.

So? Let people have control over their data back again. Promoting the denigration of these rights at the call of convenience just means that within a year or so, we'll probably be re-inventing this discussion again, only it'll be about how great it is that OS vendors have started integrating things like ipfs.io ..

> Have you seen what happens when a Cloud gets hacked into, and the photo's get leaked? I have and it isn't pretty.

I've seen people lose the only copy of important documents when their hard drive crashes, too. The average computer user doesn't have any concept of off-site backup.

> Let people have control over their data back again.

When did they lose it? I've yet to encounter a platform where cloud storage is required or the only option.

> Let people have controls over their data back again...

I think you're confused about iCloud. People do have controls over their data, and no rights are denigrated. Perhaps you are mistaking it for Google, or Facebook where there is no desktop equivalent.

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Well, you did have to pay $99 for the OS. It hasn't been free here in Europe. I do still think the Cloud is bad news and I do still think that Apple - and other OS Vendors - are intentionally misleading the public down this path to suit their own purposes.

I also still think that there is an opportunity to build the anti-cloud, and I'm quite interested in how this could be done.

I don't know why you think the hostility is necessary - got some other way to make your point that everything is okay, the Cloud is great and we should stop worrying and learn to love it? I'm not seeing it.

It is apparent in small things like the inability to easily send videos to the AppleTV from a Mac - a doddle with the iPad or iPhone but a dreadful experience on the Mac (use iTunes if it'll support it, perhaps?)

That "modicum of tinkering" is what sets you (edit: and I) apart from the other >99% of Apple's customer base and is why Apple has the cloud strategy they have: No tinkering required.

Why can't OSX just do all the tinkering itself, so that I can use my own computer to save media that belongs to me - this is the point. I think my OSX machine is more than capable of serving my own personal cloud to me and the few friends/family that I'd like to be sharing things with - at least, its perfectly possible.

I think the reasons this isn't a feature of OSX, itself, as an operating system is that its simply not profitable for Apple to do this - they're giving the OS away for free, after all, now. (So I've been informed.) So they can't profit from new features of OSX.

And so this whole cloud thing is to me, a distraction from poor attention on the part of Apple to the responsibilities they have as vendors of an Operating System - I get it, though. This isn't hip any more. Its far more profitable to be the BOFH's for so many millions of cloud-addled new users.

Did you have to forward ports on your router to get it to work "from anywhere in the world"? If so, you've already gone beyond the capabilities of 99% of the userbase.

I'll admit that it was necessary, and I also had to set up a DDNS account and configure the rPi to use it - but this was very easy, and if Apple can wrap all this up in a fancy GUI, the way they wrapped up a similarly complex set of functionality with the Airport Utility and Apple TV products, I fail to see how it can be any more difficult for the average user than clicking a few buttons.

I think the economic desire is just not there - Apple have given up being an OS-vendor and are in the 'next generation' phase of things where they're producing commodity, throw-away hardware for consumers. This is all a brave new world, but my point is: I think there's a missed market opportunity here, for someone, to produce the anti-cloud.

I've been following your comments on this thread and completely agree with you with one tiny exception. Apple does not see itself as producing commodity gear. They still see their gear as luxury/non-commodity AND see their cloud as a benefit/value-add and profit center.

The problem -for me- is that Apple simply isn't that good at the cloud. Their competitors seem to beat them on both features and price here. You only go with iCloud for inclusion/integration with your other Apple devices, not because it is a superior cloud service.

They could be the "anti-cloud" company if they really wanted, but I think it is easier and more profitable for them to jump on the bandwagon and offer it themselves. To be an "anti-cloud" vendor would require them to sell against overall technology / consumer trends. They don't need to do that when they can extend their profits offering the same, and especially if it doesn't hurt the "luxury" status/profit margin of their main goods.

I think you are being extremely unrealistic about how much configuration regular users are willing or able to do.

Apple is pretty good at taming technological complexity. The functionality the parent's suggesting could be incorporated into Airport and/or MacOS. Going further, even DynDNS-type services could be something that Apple offers. None of this is to say that there's any economic incentive for them to do it, or that the feature/service would have mass adoption, just that Apple could do it, if they wanted to.

On a long enough curve, nearly every user becomes a "power user," and if you look back, a lot of stuff that was once strictly "advanced configuration," becomes simplified, or eventually just abstracted away and the domain of mere IT mortals. Apple and others could play a role here.

I think you're being naive about how it can be dealt with, technically, by those responsible for pushing OS features forward. But I remain convinced that we'll see robust, decent peer-to-peer system services being integrated into our OS's in the near future, rendering the Cloud impotent in the battle for peoples data.

Very very sad but true :-(

Because it makes things way easier for most people. No need for a Mac, backup included, sync automatically, etc. Dont forget setup is typing in your apple id and that's it.

This is made for "the rest of us."

Sorry, is ownership of your data not important? Is control over where and when your data is available, and by which means it is shared with the world, not important? Maybe this is more of a European thing, but the backlash against cloud computing is very much still in full force - there are people actually not buying computers because all this Cloud nonsense is being shoved down our throats - are these not 'the rest of us'?

I didn't realize, though, that you don't need a Mac to run Photo for OSX. That's a curious development - what I guess you mean is, all you need to buy (from Apple) is an iDevice, and they'll then own everything you do with it from that point onwards .. to the extent that they'll make it easy for you to gain access to your media/content. (Psst.. as long as you keep paying the subscription.)

Oh, and btw, I already pay a subscription for access to the Internet. Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns.

I have a Mac. I want to share my media/content with the world. The Mac is perfectly capable of doing that - and I trust it more than any other computer in the world, because its sitting there, on my desk, in my house, under my lock and key, with my network equipment, passwords for which I control. I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again. Alas, this doesn't seem too hip these days, in the technology world ..

The thing is, no one is forcing you to use this solution. You can use your internet connection, install a HTTP server, and do whatever you want. When they start infringing on that, then yes, we have an issue.

Your DIY solution is still too complex for your average user.

Comments below address this except photos is a product across all of apples devices. This article just happened to be for the os x version.

I think you are overestimating how technically savvy most users are and how much people care about "control" over their personal data.

> Maybe this is more of a European thing, but the backlash against cloud computing is very much still in full force - there are people actually not buying computers because all this Cloud nonsense is being shoved down our throats - are these not 'the rest of us'?

I don't think the proportion of people not buying computers because of "all this Cloud nonsense" is that big, and to be honest, if they cared that much, they won't buy Apple devices with their locked down bootloaders. Apple never had those customers to begin with, and they seem to be doing fine without them.

> Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns.

You can. You just have to do it yourself if you wanted that. Install a web server and some gallery software -- easy for most Hacker News readers, impossible for my grandma. Heck, she had a hard time understanding the concept of email. These users just want to take and share the latest photos they took, not figure out why NAT traversal doesn't work with their $20 Comcast-supplied router.

> Sorry, is ownership of your data not important? Is control over where and when your data is available, and by which means it is shared with the world, not important?

Again, to Hacker News readers, maybe. However, not to my grandma. She takes pictures of flowers and pets on her daily walk and shares it with her friends. Why does she care about "what means it is shared with the world" so long as her friends and family can see it?

> I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again.

For the average user, I would say that the cloud is much more reliable than whatever they can control themselves. I think if you allow people to run their own servers, you will find that things would be inaccessible and/or compromised most of time. Remember -- the average user manages to install all sorts of nasty adware and spyware on their own system unprompted, and I am not sure they are going to be much better at managing servers.

Before I bought my grandparents iPads, they used Windows PCs. Invariably, I will receive a call every couple of months asking me to debug their computer or router because they managed to screw it up one way or another. Now they do everything on iPads, and it is great for them (safer, easier to use) and great for me (no need to play tech support any more). iCloud Photos and the like are targeted at these people.

> I think my OSX machine is more than capable of serving my own personal cloud to me

Yep it sure is. That's why there are many software options available for exactly this purpose. It's your responsibility to use them if that's what you prefer.

Well, your media-sharing device doesn't "just work" -- you had to tinker with it.

I'm with you; I don't want this cloud business. I think that the ideal solution would be a small device with a purpose-built OS and hardware device that provides storage wirelessly and via some fast wired connection and is small enough and has enough battery to serve as the backend to my phone, TV, and desktop/laptop. I've always wanted this, and I think that the problems with the state of the public networks and the free-but-with-advertising services model are going to grow impossible to ignore for some larger percentage of the user base than are currently concerned. Maybe.

Apple wants this to work with anyone with a Mac and an internet connection. Directly connecting might have NAT issues, or you might turn your host computer off (or close your macbook without having power sleep on) preventing connection. These types of issues frustrate the average user since they don't know or care what's preventing it from working.

.. and what I'm saying is that its the job of the operating system to make these issues less frustrating and irrelevant in terms of problems. If the average person understood that they could gain access to their content/media safely while on the road, and if the OS had a low-power mode that could traverse NAT's (it does exist and can be done easily and safely) then it wouldn't be necessary to be building secret mega-data centers in the desert to hold all the worlds data - it'd be distributed, and thus safer/better, instead, among all of the existing computers - which face it, are mostly under-utilized in the grand computing scheme of things.

Well, I guess I can see this as an opportunity more than anything else: design an application that will give users power over their own cloud. What a pity that there's no easy way for the iDevices to be gaining access to this, or maybe there is, indeed a way ..

I keep my photos on my laptop. With your concept, I have to think about whether my laptop is open and online. If I'm traveling with my laptop and my phone and I want to get a photo, I have to figure out how to get my laptop online. No thanks.

Well this is definitely a fair argument for the Cloud - it prevents you from needing to buy another smaller, cheaper computer to leave at home and do all the serving duty. Even though that would be an effective solution to your problem (it can be done quite cheaply), because the Cloud is there - you probably won't consider it.

I could do that but I don't want to do that. Most people don't want to do that, or can't.

So they have to leave their laptop plugged in and connected to the network - I think most Macs sold are laptops - which is a pain in general (prevents you from just closing the lid and forgetting about the laptop whenever you want), but especially difficult in various travel-related situations - say, one has brought the laptop with them but has left it in the hotel safe (or the hotel has poor Wi-Fi, etc.)... [1]

...and they have to be able to traverse the NAT, which is possible in some way on most, but not all connections (suppose Apple could proxy, but then you get back to data centers)...

...and they have to have good upload speed, if the browsing process from the client phone is to be sufficiently interactive, which, sadly, is relatively uncommon even on connections with good download speed, not to mention the many connections that are just crap...

...and if the server's drive fails, their treasured data is lost, so they should make sure to keep backup drives around (or online backups, but ditto data centers)...

...and they have to have a Mac (or PC) to act as a server, which an increasing number of iOS users don't (yet they still want to be able to store more photos than fit on their phone)...

For what? Saving a few dollars on a cloud plan for your expensive iOS devices? Preventing the NSA from snooping on your vacation photos? (Most people don't care, but for those who do, an easier solution for Apple would be implementing client side encryption. Of course, this does not currently exist, except for iCloud Keychain.) Saving energy? (Apple's data centers use purely renewable energy, your home probably doesn't.)

Reliability, resilience to cloud outages? That's a fair point, and an option to use a desktop as a backup would be nice, but I guarantee you most users would still opt to use Apple's secret mega-data centers in the desert. (Also, Apple's servers are more reliable than they were in the past, and since we're talking about new engineering effort - if they were as reliable as, say, Google, would this still really be an issue?)

The logic causing you to use a RPi makes sense to you (and I bet part of it is the flexibility that's available to a sysadmin/programmer but wouldn't be to an average user in any scenario), but for most people's use cases, I think it simply doesn't make any sense. So it's no surprise that Apple isn't working on it.

[1] A separate device like your Raspberry Pi, or Apple's AirPort Express, would solve this problem, but not the others.

The operating system is doing this, it's just not in a way that appeals to you. Luckily, we can write software for the OS that fills in the gaps.

This is huge for me.

I call myself an ameteur photographer, which really just means that I have an expensive camera and took a photo class or two a long time ago.

This solves an enormous problem of safely storing all of my photos.

Sure I have come up with workflows in Aperture to sync to a cloud device, create vaults, make manual backups, etc--but this can hardly compare to a workflow of click a button to enable. Additionally, as I spend more and more time overseas it becomes increasingly impractical to lug around devices for backups.

My only worry is if this new application will be a good replacement to Aperture

Unfortunately, it's not even close to being a good replacement for Aperture.

As far as seamless backup, a local-network Time Machine drive, plus Backblaze cloud service, is a very easy and cost-effective way to get both superfast local backup and off-site backup. And, after a very small amount of setup, it "just works" without any specific workflow.

Unfortunately, living overseas on just a laptop means limited laptop storage, and no desire to lug a time machine or hard drives around.

All of this means complicated (for me) workflows of bringing in photos as referenced objects, backing the photos up to the cloud in a way I can easily re-reference them, then backup the aperture library to the cloud with thumbnails--which is still a quite large upload on sometimes questionable connections, and then delete the referenced objects locally once I am on to the next project, making sure they all got to the cloud ok first.

Not impossible. Just the prospect of a toggle button for iCloud photo sync is a very welcome idea.

I feel like my current flow is just waiting for me to make a mistake.

Considering that a self-hosted and an Apple-hosted iCloud are functionally identical as far as most users are concerned, and that any user who actually cares will take the time to do what you've done, I don't imagine Apple will ever waste their time with it.