Comments on: With iCloud, Apple puts the pressure on ISPs

By: matt

matt — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:06:18 +0000

I feel that data caps are a bad thing and a step backwards for consumers and ISPs should look to other ways to keep up with the demands of the modern age. This is especially true in markets where consumers are not free choose their ISP openly.

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:51:23 +0000

iCloud requires Lion to work on a Mac. Lion,in turn, requires a 4GB download. My 3 Macs will have to get along without lion,since there is no way, I’m purchasing an OS without a hard copy. I think the forced download from the app store for lion is perhaps the stupidest thing apple has done since the early 90s.

By: Cyndy Aleo

Cyndy Aleo — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:37:47 +0000

The obsession is still rooted in the record companies’ archaic view of how we should pay for it. I honestly believe that Apple was meant to roll out a service similar to Spotify and the record companies balked. Of all the media industries: print, music, film/tv, they are the furthest behind in revamping their structures to deal with the digital age. They want to be paid per purchase, so we continue to think we HAVE to purchase.

Spotify would decimate them all, but look at how long it’s taking them to even get to the U.S. Then look at how many artists are now releasing their own music: on Bandcamp, on Pandora, on YouTube and Facebook, without even going to a label. It’s even more of a mess than publishing, and that’s a pretty sad commentary.

By: APS

APS — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:39:42 +0000

I don’t get what people’s obsession with owning music (or any media) is. It seems to me that it’s a hangover from the days of vinyl, tapes and CDs when that was the only way to get music, something I’m sure the record companies are all too eager to have us continue embrace in the Internet age.
So iCloud lets you upload all the music you’ve bought but a service like Spotify or Zune lets you stream (or download for offline use) 11 million tracks anywhere and gives you more new music than you could ever listen to.
If Zune or Spotify were to introduce a cloud service for your existing music that integrated into the rest of the experience that would be a major win. I personally have ripped some CDs that have never been available digitally on any service so it would be great to have them in the cloud.

By: pdthompson

pdthompson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 09:33:13 +0000

Welcome to 2008, iSheep. Finally getting the ability to sync and update without connecting to a computer.

By: Jmw1480

Jmw1480 — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:07:45 +0000

Not so sure this won’t turn out to be streaming. There’s been a lit of interpretation today, and I for one don’t believe there would be all this effort to just simply wirelessly sync. iTunes in the Cloud may be available – at least in part – today, but no one’s seen Match yet. Only time will tell.

By: Tim F.

Tim F. — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:02:46 +0000

P.S. Meant to say that I understand there is no true “streaming” but if I can swap out a subset of playlists stored locally for new playlists or autofill relatively quickly, while beginning to play new tracks as others download in background… something that I do not know yet explicitly but presume… To me this achieves “equivalence” with streaming, i.e. accessing music in the cloud that previously wasn’t on my device locally on demand.

If we are talking about it taking additional, significant time and effort to access a song in my cloud storage that wasn’t previously synced locally with my device, it can be a drawback. But my guess is Apple is aiming to make local storage w/syncing + updating through downloading/uploading indistinguishable from streaming the majority of media files with some local “pinning” — I would certainly imagine that is achievable.

By: Mukesh Aggarwal

Mukesh Aggarwal — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:16:45 +0000

with current ‘unlimited’ 200 MB (or even 2 GB) cell phone data plans and expensive overages, when people ‘sync’ with cloud, imagine how many people will be calling their phone carriers when their bill shoots through the roof.

By: Tim F.

Tim F. — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:14:21 +0000

Again, what is “persistent” streamer? In this case, you are only talking about media and renting access to it which has little to do with syncing versus streaming. (Additionally, I get the sense that there is an element of “streaming” with media content: with photos we get a feed; with audio, there is a difference between wifi/3G syncing of ripped music and iTunes (or iTunes Match) music in the cloud — I presume this is because media is the one case where your “library” is highly likely to exceed the limits of your mobile devices’s local storage. (But we still have much to learn.)

Subscriptions to music (and down the road other media) are great. But I still prefer a Spotify (which does have local storage) to a Pandora — that is: subscription services do not go hand and hand with streaming.

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:46:01 +0000

As a persistent streamer, I like the freedom of grabbing what i want, when I want it from a subscription service, but it took a long time for me to come around to that way of thinking. And yes, when my connection sucks, I am out of luck. This is a happy medium that will likely provide people with the best of both worlds, access on demand across multiple devices and a way to somewhat mitigate lousy connections.