7 ms·

I may not be with it, or hip, or up-to-date on the current feelings compelled by the zeitgeist, but I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this rele

I may not be with it, or hip, or up-to-date on the current feelings compelled by the zeitgeist, but I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release. At all. In fact, its a reason for me to forget about the product - because if I know one thing, if an Apple product has cloud support, its going to be everywhere, and unavoidable. They'll be compelling me to use it at every step of the way - heck, probably its all enabled by default. So what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world. Why is it easier for Apple to move all these features into their data center, and not just fix their operating system at the user level to make it safe, secure - and Apple-easy - to share content directly from the machine itself? I've got an rPi at home, doing the job that Apple wishes I would do with its cloud. My rPi is available and accessible from anywhere on the Internet, with ease. Its got all my media that I want access to on the road .. and it works seamlessly with little fuss. If a $35 device can do that - admittedly with a modicum of tinkering on my (not in-experienced) part - then why can't a $99 'bleeding edge' operating system do it, without requiring that I just give all my content to a third party? Because from where I see it, Apple, you're not competing very well with m $35 media-sharing device that just plain works.

zitterbewegung 12y ago
Apple has been giving away their Operating system for years I'm not sure where you get the $99 'bleeding edge' operating system.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I paid $99 for it back in the day. I guess its actually $25 to purchase a DVD of it here in Europe. EDIT: I'm behind the times, and showing my age - but I've spent $hundreds on OSX over my experience as a Mac user. Its been an investment - small, but nevertheless significant. And this: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ .. just fuels the fire. Because the OS is free, Apple are no longer putting as much effort into expanding its feature-set - instead choosing to make services for the iDevice market. Its clear to me, anyway: Apple are no longer a serious OS vendor. They're very definitely a consumer electronics vendor, though..
  - ryguytilidie 12y ago
    Its good that in your post about how you hate Apple products you made sure to get a ton of things wrong and bias them all in a way that makes Apple look worse than they actually are. It seems like your own irrational hate is the actual problem here.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      I appreciate your opinion of my psychology, but lets stay on subject: is the Cloud really something we should be promoting, or is there an opportunity here to eat Apples' lunch and develop a better service? Because I think that the Cloud is very, very naive and frankly quite dangerous - I think this, because I've seen and felt the repercussions for what happens when the Cloud server goes down and people can't get work done. It does happen - and will happen. So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...
      - gress 12y ago
        Have you seen what happens when AWS goes down? It does, and will happen. Therefore by your measure it and all the startups that use it are naive and dangerous.
        fit2rule 12y ago
        Have you seen what happens when a Cloud gets hacked into, and the photo's get leaked? I have and it isn't pretty. So? Let people have control over their data back again. Promoting the denigration of these rights at the call of convenience just means that within a year or so, we'll probably be re-inventing this discussion again, only it'll be about how great it is that OS vendors have started integrating things like ipfs.io ..
        ceejayoz 12y ago
qopp 12y ago
Apple wants this to work with anyone with a Mac and an internet connection. Directly connecting might have NAT issues, or you might turn your host computer off (or close your macbook without having power sleep on) preventing connection. These types of issues frustrate the average user since they don't know or care what's preventing it from working.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  .. and what I'm saying is that its the job of the operating system to make these issues less frustrating and irrelevant in terms of problems. If the average person understood that they could gain access to their content/media safely while on the road, and if the OS had a low-power mode that could traverse NAT's (it does exist and can be done easily and safely) then it wouldn't be necessary to be building secret mega-data centers in the desert to hold all the worlds data - it'd be distributed, and thus safer/better, instead, among all of the existing computers - which face it, are mostly under-utilized in the grand computing scheme of things. Well, I guess I can see this as an opportunity more than anything else: design an application that will give users power over their own cloud. What a pity that there's no easy way for the iDevices to be gaining access to this, or maybe there is, indeed a way ..
  - evan_ 12y ago
    I keep my photos on my laptop. With your concept, I have to think about whether my laptop is open and online. If I'm traveling with my laptop and my phone and I want to get a photo, I have to figure out how to get my laptop online. No thanks.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Well this is definitely a fair argument for the Cloud - it prevents you from needing to buy another smaller, cheaper computer to leave at home and do all the serving duty. Even though that would be an effective solution to your problem (it can be done quite cheaply), because the Cloud is there - you probably won't consider it.
sswaner 12y ago
That "modicum of tinkering" is what sets you (edit: and I) apart from the other >99% of Apple's customer base and is why Apple has the cloud strategy they have: No tinkering required.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Why can't OSX just do all the tinkering itself, so that I can use my own computer to save media that belongs to me - this is the point. I think my OSX machine is more than capable of serving my own personal cloud to me and the few friends/family that I'd like to be sharing things with - at least, its perfectly possible. I think the reasons this isn't a feature of OSX, itself, as an operating system is that its simply not profitable for Apple to do this - they're giving the OS away for free, after all, now. (So I've been informed.) So they can't profit from new features of OSX. And so this whole cloud thing is to me, a distraction from poor attention on the part of Apple to the responsibilities they have as vendors of an Operating System - I get it, though. This isn't hip any more. Its far more profitable to be the BOFH's for so many millions of cloud-addled new users.
  - azinman2 12y ago
    Because it makes things way easier for most people. No need for a Mac, backup included, sync automatically, etc. Dont forget setup is typing in your apple id and that's it. This is made for "the rest of us."
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Sorry, is ownership of your data not important? Is control over where and when your data is available, and by which means it is shared with the world, not important? Maybe this is more of a European thing, but the backlash against cloud computing is very much still in full force - there are people actually not buying computers because all this Cloud nonsense is being shoved down our throats - are these not 'the rest of us'? I didn't realize, though, that you don't need a Mac to run Photo for OSX. That's a curious development - what I guess you mean is, all you need to buy (from Apple) is an iDevice, and they'll then own everything you do with it from that point onwards .. to the extent that they'll make it easy for you to gain access to your media/content. (Psst.. as long as you keep paying the subscription.) Oh, and btw, I already pay a subscription for access to the Internet. Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns. I have a Mac. I want to share my media/content with the world. The Mac is perfectly capable of doing that - and I trust it more than any other computer in the world, because its sitting there, on my desk, in my house, under my lock and key, with my network equipment, passwords for which I control. I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again. Alas, this doesn't seem too hip these days, in the technology world ..
outsidetheparty 12y ago
"I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release" "what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world" You're not the target market. For most users this is a distinction without a difference -- except that with the cloud they don't have to remember to leave their home computer turned on and online 24/7, and they don't have to be responsible for their own backups. It's not (at all) easier for Apple to move these features into their data center -- it's easier for (the vast majority of) Apple's users. Users who know how to do what you want to do -- run a home file server -- already know how to do what you want to do.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  >don't have to be responsible Put another way: "don't have the choice any more". And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.
  - CHY872 12y ago
    No, not particularly. A lot of the world is on ADSL or worse; I now have 200Mb/s symmetric fiber which is fantastic, but until recently I could only get 6Mb/s download, 0.5Mb/sec upload. Half of all British people can get at most 1Mb/s upload. That's not good enough to give decent performance. In particular, an iPhone photo is about 2MB, and that's half a minute (or 15 seconds) to download (for this use case). It's not fast enough to stream most video, for example. Making it easier would have massive infrastructure requirements.
  - outsidetheparty 12y ago
    >Put another way: "don't have the choice any more" An odd way to describe an optional feature. >And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier You've heard of Back To My Mac, no? That's a thing that exists. Pretty simple to use. Free. Built right in to the OS. It would have been much easier, from a technical standpoint, for Apple to have extended that sort of file sharing to Photos or iTunes, than to go around building huge datacenters and etcetera. But it wouldn't have been what most people want. Most people don't have the home bandwidth to be hosting their own media. Most people don't want to have to leave a server running 24/7. Nearly all of the drawbacks to cloud storage you've cited in this thread would be considered by most people to be _features_. (Privacy is the sole exception. It's also the reason I, personally, don't happen to use iCloud. But I don't think Apple is stupid for choosing to implement functionality for the majority of people, even if I don't happen to be part of that majority.) >as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac. Feel free to want what you want; I'm just pointing out that what you want is idiosyncratic.
epmatsw 12y ago
Considering that a self-hosted and an Apple-hosted iCloud are functionally identical as far as most users are concerned, and that any user who actually cares will take the time to do what you've done, I don't imagine Apple will ever waste their time with it.
hn_user2 12y ago
This is huge for me. I call myself an ameteur photographer, which really just means that I have an expensive camera and took a photo class or two a long time ago. This solves an enormous problem of safely storing all of my photos. Sure I have come up with workflows in Aperture to sync to a cloud device, create vaults, make manual backups, etc--but this can hardly compare to a workflow of click a button to enable. Additionally, as I spend more and more time overseas it becomes increasingly impractical to lug around devices for backups. My only worry is if this new application will be a good replacement to Aperture
- sib 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it's not even close to being a good replacement for Aperture. As far as seamless backup, a local-network Time Machine drive, plus Backblaze cloud service, is a very easy and cost-effective way to get both superfast local backup and off-site backup. And, after a very small amount of setup, it "just works" without any specific workflow.
  - hn_user2 12y ago
    Unfortunately, living overseas on just a laptop means limited laptop storage, and no desire to lug a time machine or hard drives around. All of this means complicated (for me) workflows of bringing in photos as referenced objects, backing the photos up to the cloud in a way I can easily re-reference them, then backup the aperture library to the cloud with thumbnails--which is still a quite large upload on sometimes questionable connections, and then delete the referenced objects locally once I am on to the next project, making sure they all got to the cloud ok first. Not impossible. Just the prospect of a toggle button for iCloud photo sync is a very welcome idea. I feel like my current flow is just waiting for me to make a mistake.
jfb 12y ago
Well, your media-sharing device doesn't "just work" -- you had to tinker with it. I'm with you; I don't want this cloud business. I think that the ideal solution would be a small device with a purpose-built OS and hardware device that provides storage wirelessly and via some fast wired connection and is small enough and has enough battery to serve as the backend to my phone, TV, and desktop/laptop. I've always wanted this, and I think that the problems with the state of the public networks and the free-but-with-advertising services model are going to grow impossible to ignore for some larger percentage of the user base than are currently concerned. Maybe.

zitterbewegung 12y ago

Apple has been giving away their Operating system for years I'm not sure where you get the $99 'bleeding edge' operating system.

fit2rule 12y ago
I paid $99 for it back in the day. I guess its actually $25 to purchase a DVD of it here in Europe. EDIT: I'm behind the times, and showing my age - but I've spent $hundreds on OSX over my experience as a Mac user. Its been an investment - small, but nevertheless significant. And this: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ http://www.wired.com/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/ .. just fuels the fire. Because the OS is free, Apple are no longer putting as much effort into expanding its feature-set - instead choosing to make services for the iDevice market. Its clear to me, anyway: Apple are no longer a serious OS vendor. They're very definitely a consumer electronics vendor, though..
- ryguytilidie 12y ago
  Its good that in your post about how you hate Apple products you made sure to get a ton of things wrong and bias them all in a way that makes Apple look worse than they actually are. It seems like your own irrational hate is the actual problem here.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    I appreciate your opinion of my psychology, but lets stay on subject: is the Cloud really something we should be promoting, or is there an opportunity here to eat Apples' lunch and develop a better service? Because I think that the Cloud is very, very naive and frankly quite dangerous - I think this, because I've seen and felt the repercussions for what happens when the Cloud server goes down and people can't get work done. It does happen - and will happen. So, why not speculate about a solution that could fill the needs in different ways? We already have it on our desktop machines - Torrent, et al. If only these services were being integrated as functional OS modules, instead of being ignored ...
    - gress 12y ago
      Have you seen what happens when AWS goes down? It does, and will happen. Therefore by your measure it and all the startups that use it are naive and dangerous.
      - fit2rule 12y ago
        Have you seen what happens when a Cloud gets hacked into, and the photo's get leaked? I have and it isn't pretty. So? Let people have control over their data back again. Promoting the denigration of these rights at the call of convenience just means that within a year or so, we'll probably be re-inventing this discussion again, only it'll be about how great it is that OS vendors have started integrating things like ipfs.io ..
        ceejayoz 12y ago

qopp 12y ago

Apple wants this to work with anyone with a Mac and an internet connection. Directly connecting might have NAT issues, or you might turn your host computer off (or close your macbook without having power sleep on) preventing connection. These types of issues frustrate the average user since they don't know or care what's preventing it from working.

fit2rule 12y ago
.. and what I'm saying is that its the job of the operating system to make these issues less frustrating and irrelevant in terms of problems. If the average person understood that they could gain access to their content/media safely while on the road, and if the OS had a low-power mode that could traverse NAT's (it does exist and can be done easily and safely) then it wouldn't be necessary to be building secret mega-data centers in the desert to hold all the worlds data - it'd be distributed, and thus safer/better, instead, among all of the existing computers - which face it, are mostly under-utilized in the grand computing scheme of things. Well, I guess I can see this as an opportunity more than anything else: design an application that will give users power over their own cloud. What a pity that there's no easy way for the iDevices to be gaining access to this, or maybe there is, indeed a way ..
- evan_ 12y ago
  I keep my photos on my laptop. With your concept, I have to think about whether my laptop is open and online. If I'm traveling with my laptop and my phone and I want to get a photo, I have to figure out how to get my laptop online. No thanks.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Well this is definitely a fair argument for the Cloud - it prevents you from needing to buy another smaller, cheaper computer to leave at home and do all the serving duty. Even though that would be an effective solution to your problem (it can be done quite cheaply), because the Cloud is there - you probably won't consider it.

sswaner 12y ago

That "modicum of tinkering" is what sets you (edit: and I) apart from the other >99% of Apple's customer base and is why Apple has the cloud strategy they have: No tinkering required.

fit2rule 12y ago
Why can't OSX just do all the tinkering itself, so that I can use my own computer to save media that belongs to me - this is the point. I think my OSX machine is more than capable of serving my own personal cloud to me and the few friends/family that I'd like to be sharing things with - at least, its perfectly possible. I think the reasons this isn't a feature of OSX, itself, as an operating system is that its simply not profitable for Apple to do this - they're giving the OS away for free, after all, now. (So I've been informed.) So they can't profit from new features of OSX. And so this whole cloud thing is to me, a distraction from poor attention on the part of Apple to the responsibilities they have as vendors of an Operating System - I get it, though. This isn't hip any more. Its far more profitable to be the BOFH's for so many millions of cloud-addled new users.
- azinman2 12y ago
  Because it makes things way easier for most people. No need for a Mac, backup included, sync automatically, etc. Dont forget setup is typing in your apple id and that's it. This is made for "the rest of us."
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Sorry, is ownership of your data not important? Is control over where and when your data is available, and by which means it is shared with the world, not important? Maybe this is more of a European thing, but the backlash against cloud computing is very much still in full force - there are people actually not buying computers because all this Cloud nonsense is being shoved down our throats - are these not 'the rest of us'? I didn't realize, though, that you don't need a Mac to run Photo for OSX. That's a curious development - what I guess you mean is, all you need to buy (from Apple) is an iDevice, and they'll then own everything you do with it from that point onwards .. to the extent that they'll make it easy for you to gain access to your media/content. (Psst.. as long as you keep paying the subscription.) Oh, and btw, I already pay a subscription for access to the Internet. Why can't I just use this to share my data, instead of needing an additional Cloud-fee to do the same task? I think people need to remove their blinkers here - we're being shafted with this Cloud culture blaring its horns. I have a Mac. I want to share my media/content with the world. The Mac is perfectly capable of doing that - and I trust it more than any other computer in the world, because its sitting there, on my desk, in my house, under my lock and key, with my network equipment, passwords for which I control. I don't think this Cloud business has anywhere near that level of quality of service, and if only the OS vendors were aware of the demand for this sort of thing, they'd be building in peer-to-peer NAT traversal tools, sticking a nice GUI on top, and calling themselves real Operating System vendors again. Alas, this doesn't seem too hip these days, in the technology world ..

outsidetheparty 12y ago

"I'm not at all interested in the Cloud features of this release" "what I wish I was seeing, instead, was a way for me to leave my computer online at home, and still have access to my media library, seamlessly, from anywhere in the world" You're not the target market. For most users this is a distinction without a difference -- except that with the cloud they don't have to remember to leave their home computer turned on and online 24/7, and they don't have to be responsible for their own backups. It's not (at all) easier for Apple to move these features into their data center -- it's easier for (the vast majority of) Apple's users. Users who know how to do what you want to do -- run a home file server -- already know how to do what you want to do.

fit2rule 12y ago
>don't have to be responsible Put another way: "don't have the choice any more". And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.
- CHY872 12y ago
  No, not particularly. A lot of the world is on ADSL or worse; I now have 200Mb/s symmetric fiber which is fantastic, but until recently I could only get 6Mb/s download, 0.5Mb/sec upload. Half of all British people can get at most 1Mb/s upload. That's not good enough to give decent performance. In particular, an iPhone photo is about 2MB, and that's half a minute (or 15 seconds) to download (for this use case). It's not fast enough to stream most video, for example. Making it easier would have massive infrastructure requirements.
- outsidetheparty 12y ago
  >Put another way: "don't have the choice any more" An odd way to describe an optional feature. >And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier You've heard of Back To My Mac, no? That's a thing that exists. Pretty simple to use. Free. Built right in to the OS. It would have been much easier, from a technical standpoint, for Apple to have extended that sort of file sharing to Photos or iTunes, than to go around building huge datacenters and etcetera. But it wouldn't have been what most people want. Most people don't have the home bandwidth to be hosting their own media. Most people don't want to have to leave a server running 24/7. Nearly all of the drawbacks to cloud storage you've cited in this thread would be considered by most people to be _features_. (Privacy is the sole exception. It's also the reason I, personally, don't happen to use iCloud. But I don't think Apple is stupid for choosing to implement functionality for the majority of people, even if I don't happen to be part of that majority.) >as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac. Feel free to want what you want; I'm just pointing out that what you want is idiosyncratic.

epmatsw 12y ago

Considering that a self-hosted and an Apple-hosted iCloud are functionally identical as far as most users are concerned, and that any user who actually cares will take the time to do what you've done, I don't imagine Apple will ever waste their time with it.

hn_user2 12y ago

This is huge for me. I call myself an ameteur photographer, which really just means that I have an expensive camera and took a photo class or two a long time ago. This solves an enormous problem of safely storing all of my photos. Sure I have come up with workflows in Aperture to sync to a cloud device, create vaults, make manual backups, etc--but this can hardly compare to a workflow of click a button to enable. Additionally, as I spend more and more time overseas it becomes increasingly impractical to lug around devices for backups. My only worry is if this new application will be a good replacement to Aperture

sib 12y ago
Unfortunately, it's not even close to being a good replacement for Aperture. As far as seamless backup, a local-network Time Machine drive, plus Backblaze cloud service, is a very easy and cost-effective way to get both superfast local backup and off-site backup. And, after a very small amount of setup, it "just works" without any specific workflow.
- hn_user2 12y ago
  Unfortunately, living overseas on just a laptop means limited laptop storage, and no desire to lug a time machine or hard drives around. All of this means complicated (for me) workflows of bringing in photos as referenced objects, backing the photos up to the cloud in a way I can easily re-reference them, then backup the aperture library to the cloud with thumbnails--which is still a quite large upload on sometimes questionable connections, and then delete the referenced objects locally once I am on to the next project, making sure they all got to the cloud ok first. Not impossible. Just the prospect of a toggle button for iCloud photo sync is a very welcome idea. I feel like my current flow is just waiting for me to make a mistake.

jfb 12y ago

Well, your media-sharing device doesn't "just work" -- you had to tinker with it. I'm with you; I don't want this cloud business. I think that the ideal solution would be a small device with a purpose-built OS and hardware device that provides storage wirelessly and via some fast wired connection and is small enough and has enough battery to serve as the backend to my phone, TV, and desktop/laptop. I've always wanted this, and I think that the problems with the state of the public networks and the free-but-with-advertising services model are going to grow impossible to ignore for some larger percentage of the user base than are currently concerned. Maybe.