The advantages and disadvantages of Apple Cloud iCloud

At the recent Apple Global Developers Conference, Apple CEO Jobs announced the company's strategy to guide users to use its iCloud storage service.

In many ways, iCloud is the successor to Apple ’s MobileMe service. Like Apple ’s second-generation Apple TV, which launched last fall, it seems that the company has launched a product that is largely unsuccessful, while constantly improving it and significantly reducing costs. MobileMe ’s annual subscription fee is $ 99, and most iCloud features are free and directly embedded into the next-generation Apple operating system. The continuous integration of OSX and iOS is another theme of Steve Jobs' speech, which may please those who use not only Apple PCs, but also Apple phones, media players and tablets.

The only cost of iCloud is the music scanning and matching service. In this service, the music in the existing user library that is not obtained through iTunes can be matched with the 256kbps resolution version in the iTunes library, and then downloaded. The annual cost of the service is $ 25, which is slightly higher than a quarter of the MobileMe subscription fee.

Floating on iCloud

At first glance, iCloud seems to be mainly a remote storage solution. But in fact, iCloud is both stronger and weaker than remote storage, if the final product released is consistent with what Jobs described. From an essential point of view, iCloud truly embodies the concept of networked consumers, which allows users to access their digital content, whether it is media or data, anytime, anywhere. For example, with iCloud, users can take photos with their iPhone, and the photos appear on the iPad almost simultaneously; the same is true for music, books, data, videos, etc. Services such as iCloud are a big step for the consumer industry to the third era of consumer electronics, which is the era of networked digital media following the analog and digital era.

Where iCloud is "weaker" than remote storage is how users interact with the service, and this is the real key to the product. According to Steve Jobs, iCloud runs in a way that is basically transparent to users, without the need to manually upload or download files, the files are "just there". This ease of use is an important feature of Apple, and one of the main reasons for the company ’s continued success in the past 10 years: ordinary users can play Apple-based systems without having to search for error codes online or configure a firewall. This is an inherent advantage for a closed ecosystem like Apple, which should help Apple lead its competitors in the field of cloud computing.

But a disadvantage of the closed ecosystem is the issue of supporting third-party applications in iOS, such as Flash video or Facebook. For example, Apple recently announced that it does not support popular services such as Picasa. This may not be a big problem, but it shows that Apple armor still has cracks.

In the face of major competitors such as Amazon and Google, there are still big questions about whether iCloud can succeed. Amazon and Google have also launched cloud-based services. Although they have not provided multi-device synchronization and transparent ease of use like iCloud, in the next few years, the field of cloud computing is expected to stage thrilling competition and allow consumers Benefit.