Is iCloud totally worthless?

The Only problems I see with iCloud is that you can only sync iWork documents plus Box, Dropobx SugarSync do't work with iCloud. I like Page Numbers an dKeynote far ore than Docs to go or the other iOS office suite. Page, Numbers and Keynote don't work with them. I reall wish they did, The only way around is to pay $50 a year for WebDav to be able to save iWork documents to Dropbox which only gives you 2 gigs of free storage.

Sky....

The hype on this web page:

http://www.apple.com/icloud/what-is.html

Clearly shows and multiple times states "seamless"

integration to Macs and everything automagically

appearing everywhere. This is totally untrue with

relation to Macs and exteremely misleading!

Took me one week to abandon iCloud. After Dropbox founders turned down Apple's $800 million offer in 2009, Apple talked their way onto this stage. They just didn't deliver. It's unfortunate and frustrating. Until Apple delivers everyfile-everywhere as simply as Dropbox and Evernote they are not only not competing, they are irrelevant. Seems a sign of big-ship company thinking — just with great marketing... If it weren't for the product and OS clarity, this sign would be troubling...

100% correct. Think how bad it would be if you had a windows device in the mix.

oh great, I wish I had looked at these forums before 'upgrading' to lion and migrating to the cloud...

good thing idisk still works for now but I also think it is wrong to limit the uploading to just iworks program files😠

idisk was great for keeping files/sharing files from both my macs and pc's but this cloud thing is absolutely useless.

Brains wrote:

oh great, I wish I had looked at these forums before 'upgrading' to lion and migrating to the cloud...

good thing idisk still works for now but I also think it is wrong to limit the uploading to just iworks program files😠

idisk was great for keeping files/sharing files from both my macs and pc's but this cloud thing is absolutely useless.

A post like this is the complete antithesis of the OP's username. 😉

It has been repeatedly explained on here that iCloud is NOT 'limited' in the way you indicate and just because you cannot see any value to you does NOT make it worthless. It DOES provide a great deal of value to most users and it will get better.

For those who LOVE DropBox so much, go use that. What's the point in Apple competing in that (rapidly becoming) overcrowded marketplace.

This is a never ending argument, as long as so many people are intent on proclaiming something worthless just because it doesn't do what THEY want. But that doesn't mean it's useless for everyone else. That point of view is ignorant and arrogant, assuming yours is more important than everyone else's.

As far as I and many others are concerned, iCloud does what it is supposed to do. It has dropped some functionality in the transition from MobileMe, but it also dropped $99/yr. C'mon, it's FREE.

Some people are just never satisfied.

Ah now I was with you until you came out with this: "That point of view is ignorant and arrogant, assuming yours is more important than everyone else's." Because that's pretty much the definition of Apple's approach to product development and you can't excuse it in one scenario and comdemn it in another. It's because Apple has a very narrow view of the way its customers may want to use its devices that these sorts of problems exist. And even though their products have intensified in complexity thousands of times over, the dogged adherence to "it just works" and a failure to accurately explain (or to explain with much lead-time for analysis) how the product is intended to be used has created a customer base who expect to be able to do whatever they want with their miracle device. In reality, while the devices can do an incredible amount, they will only be able to do so if you think in a very narrow, prescribed (yet oddly not really documented) way. Apple needs to wake up and realise that while their customer base has exploded, the "normal" Apple customer mentality of years ago - when every Apple owner was also a devoted adherent to the 'cult of Mac' - is no longer the default customer mindset. Magical engineers working away in isolation can no longer be the way forward. Apple needs to learn to connect with its customers. Heck, even these support forums are peer-run...working with customers at arms length can't be sustained.

Its a frustratating experience after such a hype and long wait for icloud. The iwork documts are only can be syncronised among IOS devices but not to Mac. this make the whole thing as useless as practiaclly we all work on our home or work machines to create docs and IPAD is only used as obile device to access them and just take some mino notes. I did ended up getting pages and numbers for both IOS and Mac and to only find later that the I have to manually drop every time file updated in mac to icloud else I can't see updated version in ipad.

what was wrong with Idisk? why they apple have to take it off ?

well looks like apple is also going Microsoft way and creativity and innovation has run out of the steam and they have also started recycling the old ideas in new packge

In summary i did not got anything new as all the functionality was available by combine use of google and dropbox

expensive mistake on me to buy all these software beleiving apple is going to deliver what they say ........

Its looks like Vista version of icloud!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since this thread goes on, I thought I would pipe in here again and answer the original question with; no it is not totally worthless.

Is it lacking? Definitely, yes.

Have users been misled to believe it would be perfect? Yes, it looks like it. Everything has been cleverly worded, so they can go back and point at the exact words and claim that "we didn't say so, did we?" - but the overall impression one was left with was that there would be smooth, elegant and effortless syncing across all devices, included Macs and PCs. So far, that is not so.

Thus, it really doesn't matter that it is free. Lots of us were paying customers but the service we paid for was closed and we were not given a paid-for replacement, which I think we would have gladly accepted.

MobileMe had its problems and so had iDisk, but at least to my impression, they had been ironed out.

And what upsets most people, is the fact that we were led to believe that it would be a different solution than the one we have been left with. Those who claim that Apple always have made it clear that it wouldn't sync between Macs, PCs and iOS-devices, should show us when and where that was clearly stated, without leaving room for misunderstanding.

When that is said, as a Mac-user since 1998, I would like to say that this myth about Mac-users all being fanatic fanbois, is a myth which have two reasons for it. One is that it is mostly created by non-Mac-users who for some reason or other, haven'´t liked the fact that there has existed an alternative to Windows. Which in itself must be considered as a kind of "fanboism", as I see it:)

The other reason is the fact that Mac-users were often confronted with myths and false assumptions concerning the platform we had chosen, yes, downright ridicule. Since we actually were quite satisfied with our choice and also had many opportunities to compare it with the alternative, which we found to be of lesser quality, we of course took a position of defence and tried to explain things and debunking the myths and all the FUD. Hence the impression that we were fanatics.

The fact is that most of us always have been critical to Apple, believe it or not. But our criticism was mostly based on knowledge and not on myths and FUD.

Well, enough about that.

It seems to me that this thread shows that most people tend to end up with extreme points of view, which mostly contradicts each other. The reality is mostly more complex.

So, the answer to the question is still: no, iCloud is not totally worthless.

Is it lacking? Yes.

Should it be improved? I definitely hope so. It is very prosmising as it is and if it really gets syncing between absolutely all devices, I think that nothing out there will beat it, be it DropBox, SugarSync or whatever.

It is actually a shame that Apple left it like it is, half baked. They should have tagged it as a beta, just as well as they did with Siri.

Mate, get realstic, $99 price saving is not what apple stand for and we all pay double the price to buy mac book and IMac?

I bought apple device for seamless computing, there is no new functionality and more over what all was availble is being taken away !!!!!!!!!

very true

If we have to live with all this pain then what's wrong with dropbox ?

why to pay for the pages iwork ?

aussieguyinnyc wrote:

Ah now I was with you until you came out with this: "That point of view is ignorant and arrogant, assuming yours is more important than everyone else's."

I agree with you, AussieGuy. The arrogance to assume ignorance goes both ways. I'm unconcerned about the pro or con on both sides of the, "It Just Works" promotion. Clearly though, iCloud does not work for many users.

There are a lot of suppliers willing to jump in to fill the need, but sadly there is no free lunch. Gallery, document storage (regardless of type of doc, location of the file), and accessibility of same from anywhere are equally important to me all in one place and with one fee if necessary. Tried some of the other services all of whom have their particular restrictions/charges.

I realize now that I may have to use multiple services or my own web site for some of these functions, not that that's a bad thing. Apple has clearly fragmented their own market (which I think that iDisk owned) for those willing to pay the price, into something which present both an opportunity and a deeper niche for others.

It is a slippery slope, seeking a wider audience (seeming their intent) because they want to make money at it. By fragmenting, I for one, would rather not pay $20 here and another $10 there, etc. for all the various services I may want. Free is good but why not in one place for much less?

Here's my suggestion: for a single charge of alot less than iDisk, say, $20/year offer 20GB storage of any document (maybe with tiered escalators for larger amounts), and in that same space all your galleries, videos, docs. Use the iOS apps in a different bin (as they are now?) of iCloud if needed, with different limits.

And oh, yes. The others who say here that iCloud is totally worthless, or totally the best thing out there- you folks are on the fringes of this question (it's fine to ask the question though). The gamut and quantity of answers totally shows the variety of opinions. iCloud is a work in (I hope) progress. It's good that we go shopping. I think Apple has eyes on the market.

I hope they morph iCloud into a fine product.

Is it one now? No. 😟

Is it totally worthless? No.😝

Can it be great? Yes.😉

Message was edited by: HenryS

Wilfred Hildonen wrote:

Well, I am afraid that the only "solution" is to drag and drop documents created in iWorks, to your account on icloud.com. Then it will "effortlessly" sync to your iPad or/and your iPhone. If you continue to work on your iPad, for instance, it will of course sync with the documents on icloud.com - but if you want to go on working on your Macbook, say, or your iMac, then the "effortless" syncing requires you to manually download the document to your Download folder and open it in Pages etc. on your Mac.

Hey Wilfred,

I don't see the drag n drop as being possible in iCloud. Maybe still in MobileMe where you save to iDisk. Then you have to open it from iDisk on a iPad, if this is even possible. Exactly how can this work otherwise??

Thanks for that perspective, Wilfred. Having only been a Mac user for aout 5 yrs my experience has mostly been with the "fanboi" mentality...the guys that started frothing at the mouth when I suggested that perhaps, after about 30 years of use, unceremoniously dropping "Save as" and implementing a command that sort of sounds like it, but that is actually really "Save" re-badged was perhaps a bit foolish. Then again, I actually started going through the OS X HI Guidelines documenting all the cases where Lion was exactly contrary to what was written, so I shouldn't talk about fanatic!

Ultimately I think Apple sees the future as multiple, web-connected devices that are always on and that there is n, "one" device used as a primary workhorse. I can see why they think that, but I also think it's partially a future of their own making, but regardless, it's also - for me - a currently unobtainable future. Australia's high data costs make the way Apple seems to want to have media streamed rather than stored locally an unsupportable model. And frankly I also don't want them in control of my property and able to decide, at any point, to remove something I had legitimately purchased from their media library. However I accept that the Australian market is a small one, and I am quite "traditional" in my thinking so perhaps I am not their key customer any more (despite working in both education and creative arts, two of their traditional homes!) I just wish they were more flexible with who they are catering for as customers. I thought iOS was great because it translated all that was good about OS X to mobile devices. Now it seems like they are translating iOS back into OS X...and you only need to run a phrase back and forth through Google Translate a couple of times to see that when you translate a translation, what was intially clear and simple becomes muddy, unlcear, and unusable.

iCloud is even worse than worthless for us.

We have devices running iOS5 that can use iCloud but if we do that all our pre-Lion devices, which is all our Macs, lose access to sync services, like the Macbook Core Duo that I'm typing this on.

We have two Macs, out of the six in this household, that can run Lion but with the lose of Rosetta we would no longer be able to run needed software so upgrading this Macs to Lion is now an option.

If iCloud can't or won't be brought to Leopard or Snow Leopard then at least allow sync services to continue between MobileMe and iCloud.

Plus there is the issue of removing all together services that were part of MobileMe that people are depended on. For me that is keychain sync and mail rules sync.