Is iCloud totally worthless?

What does it actually do?

Do you have a legitimate, answerable question that stems from this 3+ year old conversation?

I believe what iCloud does is fully documented on Apple's website(s).

iCloud - Learn how to set up iCloud on all your devices. - Apple

iCloud does do something, but after how many years all it seems to be is a relentlessly needy and disruptive prompt to reenter the password. It's like a car that never seems to go anywhere but always has a dead battery, you stop thinking of it as a vehicle and instead think of it as something you have to connect a battery charger to. It's originally intended useful function is entirely obscured by it's time-consuming annoyance.

One could make a list of all the serious shortcomings in Apple's products, that Apple needs to address. Instead this stuff goes on year after year. Blackberry was once a large confident company with these sorts of unaddressed shortcomings. Where are they now?

Whenever my students pointed out something annoying or useless, or an unmet but obvious need in software, computers or their phones, I'd tell them, "That's a billion dollars on the table waiting for you to come up with a solution and pick it up." And about the companies that never improved the important critical things....'they're just sitting in the middle of road blinking...they'll get run over never understanding what happened.'

Imagine a pop up message when you log on, (not it's own step with it's own delay), but just there on the screen, "iCloud, has backed up x number of your files, cleaned up junk mail on all your devices, Is it OK for iCloud to add to your Mail preferences these senders as spam to be deleted......? These music tracks that you've listened to more than 4 times in the past week will be downloaded to your iPhone so they will play without needed to use cellular data limits and delays...." and check boxes next to all of this, no I don't want to consider XYZ to be spam (even if I immediately delete almost all their messages,) and no I don't want MilliVanilli downloaded, (I only played it four times as a joke....)

Seems pretty obvious doesn't it? The iPhone was pretty obvious before there was an iPhone, Dick Tracy had one for 50 years. So why did it take Apple? Because what was obvious to Dick Tracy for 50 years wasn't obvious at all to the telecom companies making flip-phones and Blackberries. Think of your interaction with iCloud: it's just an annoyance asking for a password. What does it actually do?

Yes, Can someone please help us try to figure out to drop or upload apps/doctuments to Icloud?

i cannot also figrue out how to access my doctuments on icloud either.

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.

There are other threads here in which people have discovered the same thing; that this thing about effortless and beautiful syncing and to take your documents with you wherever you go, requires an iOS-device and leave Macs our in the cold.

I suggest that as many as possible send feedback to Apple about this to let them know that we had expected something more than this. If we would only have iOS-devices, fine, but we don't. We have Macs, too. Close to 60 millions of us, I hear.

Here is the link to the feedback-pages: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

4) There is no support for just dragging and dropping any kind of file to iCloud.

There's not supposed to be. That was never an advertised feature of iCloud.

Someone please explain, then, how iCloud is even a willing comparison to Dropbox.

iCloud has never compared itself to Dropbox. They are different services for different purposes. You could equally question why Dropbox doesn't automatically sync contacts, calendar, apps, iTunes etc between all your devices.

iCloud is extremely useful for me in doing what it is advertised to do: keeping my Apple devices in sync, and giving me access to my calendar, contacts and email away from home, for example. Hopefully Office for Mac will use iCloud features, meanwhile i'vegot Dropbox if I need it.

So far I've been able to remove Xmarks because bookmark syncing seems to be working well with iCloud. My contacts are also syncing well (something that I never got working quite right with GMail). Mail is a mixed bag; I really wish iCloud supported multiple accounts. I'll be sticking with GMail, but really had hopes I could replace it with iCloud. Find my iPhone works for my iPhone and my iPad, but I can't get Find my Mac to work for my Mac Pro or my MacBook Pro, although I don't know how it could work on those devices because they don't have GPS.

It's a mixed bag. My expectations for Mail have not been met, but additional features will likely be added in the future.

(Funny. I don't see the latest replies here although they appear in my inbox in Mail)

Update: I saw them after I posted, though. Strange.

Anyhow, as a response to the original question; no, iCloud is not totally worthless. This thing about Pages or iwork and Macs, is actually the only thing I have had to complain about. That was a very important issue for me, but the rest seems to work very well. I have had dot Mac and MobileMe for years, so the syncing isn't new to me and one had more control with the old Backup, to choose what to back up and what not and to where and what, but I am quite happy with it so far - except for this thing about iWorks and Macs...

Message was edited by: Wilfred Hildonen

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4942

But Dropbox can be made to sync important things quite easily.

I too am puzzled why iDisk had to be completely killed off, at least it was a way for me to sync, store and view actually useful files and not iStuff which really, very few people use in any serious manner.

I know speculation isn't allowed here but I am sure Apple has bigger plans for iCloud documents,I just wish they would hint at what they might be.

BTW, if you do work on documents on your Mac with

iCloud compatiple apps, don't ever sign off. If you do

it will prompt you with a notice that all your docs will

be deleted form your Mac! So, you have to copy them

somewhere where the evil iCloud can't find them, if you

want local copies.

If you add any "documents or data" to iCloud, then if you uncheck "Documents & Data" from the iCloud settings, it deletes the files from your device.

That doesn't seem right to me. Just because I don't want to store a document on iCloud, why should it delete it from my Mac?

You can still get around it by downloading all the files to your computer first, but it seems like they are trying to "Lock" me in, to using iCloud.

Julian, what would you estimate the value of iCloud to be for a Mac user who has no iOS devices?

Wilfred, I'm having the same problem seeing subsequent thread replies. As you experience, they come to my email.

Satchmo, it appears to me that iCloud is for those folks who

live a iPhone/iPad/iPod centric life. Unless I am missing a whole lot

(I am getting up there in age and suffer from CRS every now and

then) it seems those that have a Mac centric existence really

have no value in iCloud. I thought this was going to be the silver

bullet for coordinating things between my iMac and my Macbook Pro,

such does not appear to be the case, at least in its current incarnation.