Day: 13 October 2011

Breaking: Hiccups Occur When Millions of People Trying to Upgrade to iCloud ⇥

“You might ask, ‘Why should I believe them, they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe?'” Jobs said to loud laughter from the crowd as he touted iCloud. “It wasn’t our finest hour, just let me say that. But we learned a lot.”

Apparently not, at least by the volume and variety of complaints users have posted to Apple’s support forums for iCloud.

It’s the first day; of course there are going to be a few issues. Clearly there was a huge traffic spike, and Apple has caught up with demand.

Why does Gregg Keizer get paid to write this crap?

Apple Slowed the Internet Down ⇥

The traffic was around twice what we would see on a typical Wednesday evening. There was as much traffic as we would see for a major sporting event (such as England playing in the World or European cups). Such volumes have never been seen before for a software upgrade.

Translation for the kids: Apple accidentally the internet.

Cleaning… ⇥

Marco Arment:

There’s no longer anywhere to store files [on devices with iOS 5] that don’t need to be backed up (or can’t be, by the new policy) but shouldn’t be randomly deleted.

This is something I also noticed when I was reading through the iCloud developer guidelines. There needs to be a way to cache data locally, for an indeterminate amount of time, and which doesn’t need to be synced. That used to be the (App Name)/Caches/ folder, because it wasn’t synced to iCloud and wasn’t “cleaned up”.

Update: Hacker News user euroclydon makes a very good observation:

Seem like the Dropbox app will have this quandary but on an even larger scale.

More Media Tablet Hype ⇥

Horace Dediu, calling out Gartner’s crappy reporting:

Note how the message changed over time. At first the effect was thought to be temporary (presumably due to “hype”). Three months later the “hype” was leading to “hesitation” in the channel. Three more months and there was “a hit” on Mini-notebooks but only for those needing a second or third device for “consumption”. In the fourth report it seems that “consumers” (vs. business users) are really interested in this. The fifth report suggests that the effect is “minimal”. The latest report suggests that this is a “localized effect”.

Apple shipped 28.7 million iPads in 15 months [1]. That’s some “localized effect”.

  1. See Wikipedia citations numbers 7-11. That’s only the total until June 25, though. It’s probably over 35 million by now.