iCloud Drive Stumbles ⇥ macsparky.com

David Sparks:

I don’t know what to think about Apple and the cloud at this point. I think this is really important to Apple’s success (and my ability to get the most out of their products). Nevertheless, they keep stumbling. I know what they are doing at this massive scale is hard. However, Apple’s secretive nature combined with these obvious problems makes it appear they just don’t care, which I don’t think is true but nonetheless frustrating when it interrupts my flow. I suspect the truth is that the iCloud team is pedaling like mad and don’t want to publicly acknowledge these problems but instead just fix them.

I want to believe that iCloud’s reliability is getting to a point where us nerdier types can comfortably recommend it to our friends and family. But the bungled launch of iCloud Drive combined with quiet changes and backwards incompatibility puts at risk much of the cloud services goodwill Apple has been trying to salvage.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take iCloud to become reliable, but it will almost certainly be shorter than the amount of time it will take me to feel comfortable relying upon it. And I should be able to rely upon it. While I may feel that my local storage is more secure, the truth of the matter is that it cannot compete with server farms mirrored worldwide. Though I could pick up some Amazon storage or use Dropbox, an OS-integrated solution makes far more sense to me if it were done right.