softwater wrote:
However, I agree with you about Lion. There is genuine concern about the future of the Mac OS.
The worry is iCloud, which Lion is really just a launchpad for. Apple wants to get as much of what you consume, create and the tools you create and use it with into a distributed database in which the only way you can access it is with, of course, an internent connection, and an AppleID.
Why? Because once you get used to working this way, you'll find that you can't live without it and you'll realise that the 'free' 5GB offering will not serve your purposes. You'll also find it irressistibly easy to sign up for the extra storage plans (Apple ID, just one click to buy, they already have your card details...) which are a way of replacing your cheap $50 hard disk with an expensive $30/per year subscription plan. Why should Apple only harvest money from selling you a hard disk once with your machine (or twice if you buy their TM disk), when they can harvest it every year by selling you iCloud....
Where do you people get such bizarre ideas? Without the local disks iCloud won't work. iTunes music apart, the users can only select the local data they decided to synchronize. When synchronizing back to another computer or device the data will be stored on local. It works like DropBox or Google synchronization. It isn't a cloud computing service where data and applications reside and run only on remote server. It's a data synchronization service and as such it will always have the option to work offline.
Said that, would you care to explain why DropBox, as you stated, would be less intrusive than iCloud? 1Password has the option to move the password db in DropBox. Can you think anything more dangerous? Especially after DropBox last July had a security hole where ALL accounts were accessible for few hours without any password. Also DropBox has clear access to all data, our data if they want to. It's encrypted but they have the keys to decrypt it. For legal reasons they say. Not sure if iCloud works in the same way. It probably will since it is based solely on the Apple ID.
Then, if Lion is the launchpad for iCloud, how does it happen that iCloud will be available for Windows Vista and 7 as well? More than a launchpad for Lion I'd consider it a trojan horse for Safari and especially iTunes in Windows since it will come with the incredible feature that just for few dollars per year one will mark in iTunes as bought, and so downloadable at any time in any device, all the broken mp3 s/he ripped from CD (if available in iTunes obviously). The space consumed won't add to the iCloud quota since for any song there is just a single copy in the iTunes servers for all users. That also means.. even music downloaded illegally will get the original copy from iTunes.
Don't get me wrong, but if that is the direction some people are afraid Apple is taking, thanks God that Apple isn't listening. I hope that anyone afraid of iCloud isn't using DropBox already. That would be a nonsense.
