Am I the only one who doesn't really understand iCloud?

[marc11]

If your account has been compromised only with easy passwords and not strong ones then issue is your password selection. You cannot blame iCloud or apple for that. IMHO all passwords should be strong and kept safe via an encrypted password manager along with never using auto fill or allow browsers to remember passwords.

Password security is our responsibility not apples.

 

[SCARY GAY DAD]

how do you clear out the icloud storage?
it says i have 2.8gb free and the only features of icloud ive ever used were contacts, calendar and bookmarks. theres no way i have 2.2gb worth of that data.

This.

-SGD

 

[BasilFawlty]

I bought my 27" iMac just before the switch to Lion. I absolutely hate the idea of iCloud, but have a question. If I have an @me account (and I do), will i be forced to move to iCloud in order to keep that email address?

 

[BasilFawlty]

I bought my 27" iMac just before the switch to Lion. I absolutely hate the idea of iCloud, but have a question. If I have an @me account (and I do), will i be forced to move to iCloud in order to keep that email address?

I asked this in a separate thread and got an answer, which I will share here. I also called Apple and asked them. Bottom line, if I do not comply with big brother's direction and move to iCloud (which means moving to Lion from SL too I think), I will loose my .me account in June. That sucks. If I MUST move to Lion and iCloud, I understand that I must use iCloud for email, but will I also be forced to keep my contacts on "the cloud" or can I opt out of that? I'd like to continue to sync my music and contacts, calendar, etc just on my local machine like I do now. POssible? Yes, no maybe?

 

[sahnert]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yes it is possible to use iCloud for email only.
You can continue using SL, even if you use iOS with iCloud. You would just continue to sync your contacts, calendars, and bookmarks using iTunes.

 

[MadeTheSwitch]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yes it is possible to use iCloud for email only.
You can continue using SL, even if you use iOS with iCloud. You would just continue to sync your contacts, calendars, and bookmarks using iTunes.

Then why aren't my contacts and calendars syncing now with iTunes? Since installing iOS5 on my iPad, I have not been able to sync anything between the Mac and iPad. Not through iCloud and not through a cable the old way either.

 

[George Knighton]

Think of the iCloud as a personal hard drive that Apple manages and maintains for you....

Comparing iCloud to MobileME, this is something that I view as "wrong" with iCloud.

The subscription service MobileME had an iDisk that I used rather heavily in order to have documents available on all devices, iMac, MacBook, iPad, and iPhone.

Now with the slant toward iOS, the documents are only available insofar as I can tell on the iPhone and iPad, and then only if the devices have Pages, Numbers and Keynote installed.

I hope that as services are expanded they will consider allowing some of us to have paid subscriptions that will allow for various sizes of storage that we can use exactly the same way that we were using iDisk.

It looks like the whole iCloud service is designed for consumers who don't have much need for business or government availability of all kinds of documents and I view this as a shortcoming.

The average retail user is going to start using Dropbox and Google Documents before Apple gets this particular part of its act in gear, IMHO.

That's just one dumb old man's opinion, of course.

 

[ThatsMeRight]

Ditto - I was very confused, but I quickly figured out: it's not for me. Apple seemed to imply it was wonderful, magical, etc - so I figured this must be even better than Dropbox. It's not. It's basically a super-limited subset of file sync, combined with a contacts / calendar sync (for iDevices) and a way to upload your iDevice photos automatically.

I opened an iCloud account, tried to sync something, then realised that:
(a) doesnt work with my Android phone wrt contacts sync
(b) file storage for iWorks apps only, not general purpose. I don't use any iWorks apps.
(c) I couldn't easily see what's synchronised where (unlike Dropbox), and what's local only, but it doesn't matter because it's not really cross-platform anyway
(d) when I wanted to stop iCloud sharing is gave some dire warning about how it would delete my data. Not explaining if this would only be deleted from the cloud, wiped from my local machine, both, or what.

From what I understand, it's only interesting if both of the following are true:
(a) you own more than one Apple device
(b) you use Apple applications for most of your productivity
(c) you have a great fear understanding files

Andy Ithnako and other fervent Apple supporters are even having problems.

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This weeks Macbreak Weekly (274) podcast gives some mention to the (great lack) of clear documentation for developers.

This makes so much sense and this leads me to only one conclusion: it's also not for me.

I think what Apple is trying to do is to 'approach' the really, uh, 'dumb customers' with iCloud and because of that, it's really limited and thus difficult to 'understand'.