Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't want to store music or video "in the cloud"... Why do I need to stream something from a digital locker? My phone/iPod IS my digital locker. If I lose it, it's all backed up on my Mac... I already have Dropbox if I want to store documents or put photos online and that is FREE... I fail to see how it will be worth having.
Those methods all require active input from the user and planning in advance. Apple's service can happen automatically in the background whenever you purchase a new track.
Not saying it's necessarily worth the money they will want to charge for it though.
I think that iCloud is going to look like the iTunes sync window. It will be slightly modified to include syncing with your Mac, and all devices. I don't think that iCloud is as simple as iTunes in the cloud.
By having the sync window on the web, as an app on you Mac, and an app on your iOS device, you will be able to simply click a check box to have Song A on any or all of your devices.
It will not just be iTunes content though it will include everything contact, documents, iTunes, keychain, bookmarks, mail accounts, books, etc.
So in other words you will use iCloud to move data around your devices, keep them in sync, and access your data/media from anywhere. iCloud will be a standalone app for interfacing with your data/media, and whatever you select to sync through iCloud will be sent to an apple server. This will eliminate the interface that can be confusing to some people. You will not move items to the cloud, you will just sync like you do in iTunes, iCloud does the cloud work for you.
Exactly and who's to say capacity will grow. Knowing Apple we'll probably have iPads and iPhones 1.25 mm thick in 5 years with the same 16, 32 and 64GB capacities. Ok, maybe 32, 64 and 128 GB.
If the past is anything to go by then storage will increase at an ever faster rate until we run into physical laws that prevent it from doing so. This week a quantum transistor was built on a 2nm scale. That would indicate cpus will continue to get faster and memory densities will increase.
From what I can gather iCloud will be a banner under which all Apple's online attempts (MobileMe, iwork.com, Ping etc) will sit and will allow other things to be added like AirDrop (Apple's attempt at DropBox-style filesharing) and iTunes streaming. The part of iCloud that the media seem to be excited about is the iTunes streaming, but all I see that as, is a way to short-cut to having all your media in your pocket while storage capacities increase. For most people, bandwidth charges are going to make that whole thing prohibitively expensive. Not everyone has unlimited internet bandwidth as part of their accounts, and it really isn't that difficult to decide what music/films etc you want on your iPhone and load them up.
If the past is anything to go by then storage will increase at an ever faster rate until we run into physical laws that prevent it from doing so. This week a quantum transistor was built on a 2nm scale. That would indicate cpus will continue to get faster and memory densities will increase.
You are ignoring, unlike Apple, the commodification of mobiles. They are getting cheaper. The low level iPad has 3.2% of the storage capacity of the low end iMac. And iPads are relatively expensive in the mobile space. The low end iPod ( selling at less than £200 retail) has 8G = 1.6% of the capacity of an entry iMac. Assume those ratios continue, and it will be a decade before mobile phones have the same capacity as desktops, if ever. If Apple wants a cheap iPhone, they can go now ignore disk size.
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For most people, bandwidth charges are going to make that whole thing prohibitively expensive. Not everyone has unlimited internet bandwidth as part of their accounts, and it really isn't that difficult to decide what music/films etc you want on your iPhone and load them up.
Yeah, except they dont fit. My iPad can take boat loads of apps, or one HD movie. Which means I dont watch as much as I could on the iPad - these days, never. My movie folder on my Mac is - I just checked - 100G, and the music folder is 22G. Both are larger than my iPad's existing space.
I dont have any HD, just about 35 standard movies, less than 1,500 songs. Not a huge collection. None of the movies are on my iPad, and the music is a pain to drag across, it has to be manual these days. Which isnt something the average user, like my mom who has an iPad, cares about. I dont think I could even download a movie these days, as I have so many apps on the iPad.
So the future is:
local storage for apps, and whatever they store.
Streaming for music and movies.
Temporary downloads - space permitting - of movies and music. So you can go offline for a while.
And it is useful on WiFi. I will be able to use my iPad as a movie viewer again. On wifi. No need to connect to iTunes. No need to worry about making space for apps.
This is the bees knees. People who dont get it, dont get the iPad and iPhone. The major concern of the iPhone and iPad - connecting to iTunes, manual manipulation of stuff - is now of the past ( if the rumours are true). This makes it much more valuable for the normal consumer.
I bet, by the way, that Jobs makes some of these points on Tuesday.
...And you registered this month -- just to tell us abut your long history with Apple Cloud solutions and how "that was a complete waste of money".
Thank's for enlightening us!
I have better things to do with my life than make 3638 posts on here. So yes, I did register solely to express how much I feel this latest Apple initiative is an utter waste of time and money. I am so incredibly sick of all these iLemmings claiming everything Apple does is a triumph, when the truth is a long way from that.
You are ignoring, unlike Apple, the commodification of mobiles. They are getting cheaper.
I'm not ignoring it, I acknowledge it. What I am also acknowledging is the commoditisation of flash memory. As time goes on, storage capacity goes up and price goes down. There will come a point when the price of 1TB is pretty much the same as 16GB and occupy the same space on the board, as nobody will bother to retool to shrink the size of a 16GB chip.
Until the point when wireless Internet access is available in most of the world at ultra fast speeds and for minimal or no cost, then the incentive will be on those that make solid state memory to keep increasing the capacity and lowering the cost.
I'm not ignoring it, I acknowledge it. What I am also acknowledging is the commoditisation of flash memory. As time goes on, storage capacity goes up and price goes down. There will come a point when the price of 1TB is pretty much the same as 16GB and occupy the same space on the board, as nobody will bother to retool to shrink the size of a 16GB chip.
Until the point when wireless Internet access is available in most of the world at ultra fast speeds and for minimal or no cost, then the incentive will be on those that make solid state memory to keep increasing the capacity and lowering the cost.
Let's get remedial here. Which do you think will happen first - the commoditisation of smart phones, reducing prices, or the commoditisation of flash memory so that a 1T of flash costs the same as 16G.
Let's get remedial here. Which do you think will happen first - the commoditisation of smart phones, reducing prices, or the commoditisation of flash memory so that a 1T of flash costs the same as 16G.
It's an ongoing process where both are underway at the same time. How exactly do you measure whether smart phones have finished being commoditised? Price? How ubiquitous they are? How disposable they are? As a definition of commoditisation we have:
The act of making a process, good or service easy to obtain by making it as uniform, plentiful and affordable as possible. Something becomes commoditized when one offering is nearly indistinguishable from another. As a result of technological innovation, broad-based education and frequent iteration, goods and services become commoditized and, therefore, widely accessible.
So on one hand we have a drive towards this, and on the other hand we have companies trying to distinguish their products from the rest, which drives the introduction of new features or increased capacity, only to see the commoditisation of those features also. That is why I say we will eventually have phones with 1TB of storage. I honestly cannot predict an exact date this will happen. At a guess I'd say 5 years, but it might happen in 2.5 years, it might take a little longer. One thing is for certain, it will happen.
Honestly, why do people have such a hard time with the idea that at some point flash memory will hit 1TB and be sufficiently affordable to put in a phone? Heck, I remember when I thought having a 100MB hard drive was a big deal. Now we are up to 4TB drives.
Back to the subject of iCloud, it is a feature to try and distinguish Apple's offerings from their competitors. The question is whether enough people actually want or need it to make it worthwhile.
Comments
Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't want to store music or video "in the cloud"... Why do I need to stream something from a digital locker? My phone/iPod IS my digital locker. If I lose it, it's all backed up on my Mac... I already have Dropbox if I want to store documents or put photos online and that is FREE... I fail to see how it will be worth having.
Those methods all require active input from the user and planning in advance. Apple's service can happen automatically in the background whenever you purchase a new track.
Not saying it's necessarily worth the money they will want to charge for it though.
By having the sync window on the web, as an app on you Mac, and an app on your iOS device, you will be able to simply click a check box to have Song A on any or all of your devices.
It will not just be iTunes content though it will include everything contact, documents, iTunes, keychain, bookmarks, mail accounts, books, etc.
So in other words you will use iCloud to move data around your devices, keep them in sync, and access your data/media from anywhere. iCloud will be a standalone app for interfacing with your data/media, and whatever you select to sync through iCloud will be sent to an apple server. This will eliminate the interface that can be confusing to some people. You will not move items to the cloud, you will just sync like you do in iTunes, iCloud does the cloud work for you.
Exactly and who's to say capacity will grow. Knowing Apple we'll probably have iPads and iPhones 1.25 mm thick in 5 years with the same 16, 32 and 64GB capacities. Ok, maybe 32, 64 and 128 GB.
If the past is anything to go by then storage will increase at an ever faster rate until we run into physical laws that prevent it from doing so. This week a quantum transistor was built on a 2nm scale. That would indicate cpus will continue to get faster and memory densities will increase.
From what I can gather iCloud will be a banner under which all Apple's online attempts (MobileMe, iwork.com, Ping etc) will sit and will allow other things to be added like AirDrop (Apple's attempt at DropBox-style filesharing) and iTunes streaming. The part of iCloud that the media seem to be excited about is the iTunes streaming, but all I see that as, is a way to short-cut to having all your media in your pocket while storage capacities increase. For most people, bandwidth charges are going to make that whole thing prohibitively expensive. Not everyone has unlimited internet bandwidth as part of their accounts, and it really isn't that difficult to decide what music/films etc you want on your iPhone and load them up.
If the past is anything to go by then storage will increase at an ever faster rate until we run into physical laws that prevent it from doing so. This week a quantum transistor was built on a 2nm scale. That would indicate cpus will continue to get faster and memory densities will increase.
You are ignoring, unlike Apple, the commodification of mobiles. They are getting cheaper. The low level iPad has 3.2% of the storage capacity of the low end iMac. And iPads are relatively expensive in the mobile space. The low end iPod ( selling at less than £200 retail) has 8G = 1.6% of the capacity of an entry iMac. Assume those ratios continue, and it will be a decade before mobile phones have the same capacity as desktops, if ever. If Apple wants a cheap iPhone, they can go now ignore disk size.
For most people, bandwidth charges are going to make that whole thing prohibitively expensive. Not everyone has unlimited internet bandwidth as part of their accounts, and it really isn't that difficult to decide what music/films etc you want on your iPhone and load them up.
Yeah, except they dont fit. My iPad can take boat loads of apps, or one HD movie. Which means I dont watch as much as I could on the iPad - these days, never. My movie folder on my Mac is - I just checked - 100G, and the music folder is 22G. Both are larger than my iPad's existing space.
I dont have any HD, just about 35 standard movies, less than 1,500 songs. Not a huge collection. None of the movies are on my iPad, and the music is a pain to drag across, it has to be manual these days. Which isnt something the average user, like my mom who has an iPad, cares about. I dont think I could even download a movie these days, as I have so many apps on the iPad.
So the future is:
local storage for apps, and whatever they store.
Streaming for music and movies.
Temporary downloads - space permitting - of movies and music. So you can go offline for a while.
And it is useful on WiFi. I will be able to use my iPad as a movie viewer again. On wifi. No need to connect to iTunes. No need to worry about making space for apps.
This is the bees knees. People who dont get it, dont get the iPad and iPhone. The major concern of the iPhone and iPad - connecting to iTunes, manual manipulation of stuff - is now of the past ( if the rumours are true). This makes it much more valuable for the normal consumer.
I bet, by the way, that Jobs makes some of these points on Tuesday.
...And you registered this month -- just to tell us abut your long history with Apple Cloud solutions and how "that was a complete waste of money".
Thank's for enlightening us!
I have better things to do with my life than make 3638 posts on here. So yes, I did register solely to express how much I feel this latest Apple initiative is an utter waste of time and money. I am so incredibly sick of all these iLemmings claiming everything Apple does is a triumph, when the truth is a long way from that.
You are ignoring, unlike Apple, the commodification of mobiles. They are getting cheaper.
I'm not ignoring it, I acknowledge it. What I am also acknowledging is the commoditisation of flash memory. As time goes on, storage capacity goes up and price goes down. There will come a point when the price of 1TB is pretty much the same as 16GB and occupy the same space on the board, as nobody will bother to retool to shrink the size of a 16GB chip.
Until the point when wireless Internet access is available in most of the world at ultra fast speeds and for minimal or no cost, then the incentive will be on those that make solid state memory to keep increasing the capacity and lowering the cost.
I'm not ignoring it, I acknowledge it. What I am also acknowledging is the commoditisation of flash memory. As time goes on, storage capacity goes up and price goes down. There will come a point when the price of 1TB is pretty much the same as 16GB and occupy the same space on the board, as nobody will bother to retool to shrink the size of a 16GB chip.
Until the point when wireless Internet access is available in most of the world at ultra fast speeds and for minimal or no cost, then the incentive will be on those that make solid state memory to keep increasing the capacity and lowering the cost.
Let's get remedial here. Which do you think will happen first - the commoditisation of smart phones, reducing prices, or the commoditisation of flash memory so that a 1T of flash costs the same as 16G.
Let's get remedial here. Which do you think will happen first - the commoditisation of smart phones, reducing prices, or the commoditisation of flash memory so that a 1T of flash costs the same as 16G.
It's an ongoing process where both are underway at the same time. How exactly do you measure whether smart phones have finished being commoditised? Price? How ubiquitous they are? How disposable they are? As a definition of commoditisation we have:
The act of making a process, good or service easy to obtain by making it as uniform, plentiful and affordable as possible. Something becomes commoditized when one offering is nearly indistinguishable from another. As a result of technological innovation, broad-based education and frequent iteration, goods and services become commoditized and, therefore, widely accessible.
So on one hand we have a drive towards this, and on the other hand we have companies trying to distinguish their products from the rest, which drives the introduction of new features or increased capacity, only to see the commoditisation of those features also. That is why I say we will eventually have phones with 1TB of storage. I honestly cannot predict an exact date this will happen. At a guess I'd say 5 years, but it might happen in 2.5 years, it might take a little longer. One thing is for certain, it will happen.
Honestly, why do people have such a hard time with the idea that at some point flash memory will hit 1TB and be sufficiently affordable to put in a phone? Heck, I remember when I thought having a 100MB hard drive was a big deal. Now we are up to 4TB drives.
Back to the subject of iCloud, it is a feature to try and distinguish Apple's offerings from their competitors. The question is whether enough people actually want or need it to make it worthwhile.