“There has been a lot of speculation about what Apple will do with its MobileMe service and while the majority of the rumors claim it will be based on cloud storage, I don’t think anyone has quite nailed it yet,” Jim Dalrymple writes for The Loop. “Instead of trying to provide everyone with cloud storage, I believe Apple will use MobileMe as the brain of the cloud service. The actual storage will be on our individual machines. In effect, in the cloud.”
“The Home folder on your Mac Pro may be 300GB and your iPhone only has 32GB, but it doesn’t matter because you are only browsing the files,” Dalrymple writes. “If I’m away from my house and I want to listen to a song from my home iTunes account, I can do that. Every song in my library will be listed on my iPhone.”
Dalrymple writes, “Here’s the thing — those songs won’t actually be on my iPhone until I tap to play them. As soon as I tap to play, it will download to my phone. You can scroll through your music library and choose something else and it will download and play. In effect, what Apple’s doing is setting up a streaming service that you host.”
“I believe MobileMe as I’ve described it here will be compatible with Macs, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Windows. Basically, personal computers and iOS devices,” Dalrymple writes. “Of course, this type of service would also sync all of your contacts, calendars and other data that we’ve become accustomed to syncing on our devices.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lynn W.” for the heads up.]
Yep. The personal cloud. I’m tellin ya.
Meh. Not that brilliant, and not that far off from what Back to My Mac already does.
The problem with this “cloud” is that all your devices have to be running all the time to actually use it.
Lala tech?
Those of us using AirVideo are already doing this. I stream movies from my iMac’s drive to my iPad, both on the LAN and over the internet, provided I’m somewhere with a decent connection.
So to listen to a song I’ve got to have my home computer on, use bandwidth/data to upload it from that computer, then use more to download it to my mobile device? I think I’ll just wait and listen to it when I get home.
What if your phone had less memory because the bulk of your info was stored on the cloud? Apple could save on the chip cost (a major component of phone cost). How could the other phone manufacturers compete against this??? Somehow I don’t think they would be building a server farm like Apple is building.
Simplify use to do this by streaming from your computer via a server app that let up to ten other ‘friends’ stream from your library, too
Worked with pictures in iPhoto also.
Alas, they were shut down for some mysterious reason….
I beg of you to keep the flash hard drives in your products, Apple. The dependence of networking and the capability of service providers don’t mesh well enough for reliability. I’d love to see Apple allowing a path of 128 GB flash in all of it’s portable devices. This cloud service would be a nice perk, but in the face of service providers hating on unlimited data plans and not having known good coverage everywhere puts a big dent on this pathway.
i’ll await for what Apple actually states when the time is due before contemplating to contemplate, though. All rumors till then.
SimplifyMe
I think it will be more of a “Home Sharing” over IP than actual uploading and downloading.
It also may just be access to Apple servers to stream off those anything you have already purchased from iTunes.
This is likely a way for Apple to stop having to constantly increase memory in mobile products, because that is an expensive part. If Apple could cap memory at 32GB but basically have everything you wanted at your fingertips streaming from MobileMe, then you need to store less on the device (for non-network connectivity times).
This also gets Apple less reliant on memory manufacturers and the whims of the market. Memory is only going to be more in demand as devices get more and more mobile.
That makes sense buschlaw… it’s good for Apple perhaps. Terrible for consumers.
We have tons of visual / audial multimedia being collected as time passes on. Depending on networks won’t cut it. 128 GB won’t satisfy all of my multimedia needs, but at least I’d be able to have my entire music collection and favorite videos / applications on it and won’t be entirely dependent on the service provider when wanting to hear a tune or watch a vid on the device.
Would be great for Apple, sure, but terrible for a large demographic of Apple product consumer whores such as I (hehe).
And AT&T/verizon will love this.
How many people do NOT have the unlimited data package?
How quickly will people find out they are going to blow right past their data plan limits?
AT&T/verizon will gladly charge you the overage fees
If this is the way apple will go, better hope you can get on an unlimited data plan somehow, and if you have one already… Make sure you do whatever it takes to keep it.
I personally have never gone over 1gb data, always like 200-500mb cause I wait till I’m on wifi to do any streaming if i can.
But can you imagine having to stream your entire playlist in the iPod?
2gb will go by fast.
Why is it that every time I hear a reference to “The Cloud” I think of a 1950’s horror movie like “The Blob”? It sounds so ominous – and apparently to some it is.
haha, love your icon.
I still do not like horror movies in theaters because of the original “Blob.”
Might as well stream from your computer where it becomes part of this mythical cloud. Why consolidate everything on someone else’s computer (e.g., MobileMe server) and then stream it from there?
@correctu – agreed. We do not want to return to the “dumb terminal” days in which a network glitch meant total shutdown. Standalone computing devices should have a reasonable amount of onboard storage. What is “reasonable,” of course, will change over time. But 128GB to 256GB seems reasonable for the near term if network access is readily available and much of your content is on a home server or other device, waiting to be streamed. Well over half of my HDD capacity is occupied by iTunes and iPhoto. Much of the rest is occupied by applications.
Many people have asked me if there is a way to synchronize all the contents of several networked computers, and the short answer I have to give them is “No.” But if my home machine was set up as a hosted server that was easily accessible from my other computers, this would be good enough.
Personally, I could care less about streaming music and movies to my iPhone. The use I see for such a service would be to give every connected device access to all the files on my main machine.
This is laughable!
The USA does NOT have a network capable of doing this at the moment. No way am I going to be able to stream my uncompressed audio files from my computer to my iPhone even when connected via Wi-Fi, to say nothing of when I’m on ATT’s 3G network.
If James Carville were here, he’d say “It’s the network, stupid!”
jltnol,
I agree. We are in a digital backwater.
I don’t think people realize that the cloud is actually the Internet. Like windows is advertising their cloud they are really just advertising the Internet. The internets original name was the cloud.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is storing all their info in ‘the Fog’….
This is what I suspect the new NC data center is for.
I would like to see MobileMe add more dropbox-like syncability, though.
“Roadmapping” your existing disk-bound media media is something that can be done now through a variety of means and a feature that would provide little additional value. Keeping everything an individual bought from iTunes isn’t realistic either, but Apple needs to offer something more in its cloud service implementation.
It’ll probably be either a playlist with a GB cap available for “instant-on” cloud access or a way to sync media files between authorized computers a la Dropbox.
Frankly, the more I consider ‘clouds’, in all the versions discussed thus far, the more it seems like a horrible idea.
First, as mentioned, the US is nowhere near capable of handling such a thing infrastructure-wise. And if it was, AT&T/VERIZON/COMCAST … et al would charge us through the nose for the privilege. The former is surmountable in another decade, perhaps. The latter … we’re not living in Europe or Korea; the US would never deny a corporation the ability to gouge, so I doubt such data intensive methods will ever be cost effective for any but the very wealthy.
But most important to me is, I don’t want a ‘dumb’ iPhone or Pad anymore than I wanted a ‘dumb’ computer when THAT was supposed to be ‘the next great thing’ a few years ago. ‘Terminal computing’ was an idea born from unreliable Windows junk (no wonder M$ pushes it every 5 years or so) – it made business sense for them to get everyone to pare down a desktop you couldn’t count on, and rely on some sort of Windows Server that was more reliable. A lot less service packs to supply too.
I, as a Mac user, have no need for clouds or personal server networks or whatever the hell they call it. My iMac is reliable and capable. My iPad and Phone are the same. The cost of memory, including flash, is constantly dropping. Someday soon, I expect my portable communications and media device to be an affordable terabyte drive. What would I need a cloud for then??
In short, IMO this whole scenario of streaming everything from some remote location to everything I own is a solution in search of a problem. Probably more DRM driven than anything. After all, if ‘they’ can convince us to stream everything from some server we don’t really control, that’s one more step towards convincing us we don’t really own anything.
Not our music, or movies … or even personal memories & ideas.
No thanks.
Not likely. The carriers are already fidgeting about with the “unlimited” data plans- limiting or entirely abandoning them.
I’d be using 3X the data- BARE minimum- if everything I listened to had to come through the air.
Besides- what happens when you lose the signal?
This is total pie-in-the-sky. Maybe after another 10 or 20 years of development in the wireless service industry.