“You can be sure that, when Apple executives field questions at a quarterly meeting with analysts — yes the ‘a’ word again — they will be asked softball or relatively obscure questions about the company’s financial performance that few care about,” Gene Steinberg writes for Tech Night Owl. “It doesn’t help that these analysts seem not to have the slightest knack for real journalism. Even though they are allowed one question and one follow-up, you’d think someone would ask about Apple’s real problems, such as the ongoing troubles impacting iCloud. Yes, iCloud may indeed have 125 million users, as Apple claims. I have no reason to doubt the number.”
Steinberg writes, “At the same time, what about the quality of the service iCloud delivers. What about the ongoing problems that are still being reported, particularly in syncing bookmarks and contacts across multiple devices? Take this all-too-famliar example: For the longest time, my Address Book has been filled with multiple entries for some names. Those listings aren’t duplicated on my iPhone, so why is it happening on my Mac? Worse, when you delete a duplicate, the deleted entry reappears. And I’m not alone in reporting such issues, and there are more.”
Steinberg writes, “Surely one of those analysts could have used the iCloud question to ask how Apple is treating ongoing reports of sync problems and email outages. What about a question about the overall customer satisfaction rate with iCloud, and how does Apple plan to eliminate the glitches? Never asked.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve certainly encountered the Address Book issue. Have you? Any other iCloud issues you wish Apple would fix?
The ability to merge calendars that are synced with iCloud and to selectively stream photos, rather than all or nothing. And also to be able to stream photos to iCloud but not need to stream all photos back down to every iOS device.
Yeah, lack of a directory and file storage ability that is “Apple” easy.
Why have to use Dropbox?
Yes, please get iDisk back!!
Amen, iDisk in combination with the iPhone app affords me a great solution for sharing large files securely with my customers.
The duplicate contacts has plagued me since the early days of MobileMe. I called support and they suggested editing the contacts, weeding out dupes etc, on MobileMe and then on the next sync replace on my devices worked for a few days and then dupes proliferated. Some contacts have 6 entries most only 4-5.
I’m still dreading the day that Apple turns off Mobile Me and my Leopard Server no longer syncs with my Snow Leopard Mac Book Pro, Lion Mac Book Air, iPhone, and iPad.
+1
I’m really going to miss those iDisk functions. I have a lot of websites with content. It’s easy, effective, and is a really great service. Bummer
I don’t know what the f*** he’s talking about. iCloud has worked seamlessly behind the scenes for me, without a hitch so far. I’ve had zero problems synching contacts on address book, reminders, email messages, calendar events, bookmarks, iWork documents, notes and any other items/apps he cares to name.
All except Photostream, because I don’t use that, as I prefer to keep my collection of porn, I mean tasteful photographs, all to myself. No, actually I prefer syncing through iTunes/iPhoto for my photos, that’s why I don’t use Phtostream.
No problems here either—that includes .Mac, MobileMe, and iCloud.
i have had the same problem– i occasionally get up to over 10,000 contacts. It may be because ive been using this service since its inception, 10? years ago, and my contacts has been constantly f-ed up. i do the find duplicated and replace the cloud based copy, but it slowly starts to duplicated with every sync. Ra
The mail system has definitely not improved since MobileMe…. Check Apple’s discussion boards, they’re always ranting about it. I finally switched away from iCloud because the constant and unexpected outages were interrupting my workflow. I now just forward everything to Gmail. I never had an issue with the calendar system but definitely with Address Book and with Mail.
The whole “It just works!” has become a cliché, and something to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Problems with email here as well. I’ll have a new email show up on my MacBook, but when I go to pull it up on my iPhone it’s not there. The iPhone says that it is “Checking for Mail” forever (several minutes) before the email comes up. Didn’t used to do this.
which isn’t a MobileMe/iCloud issue.
Shut down the mail app and fire it up again, my mom had this happen. And she doesn’t even use her iCloud email.
Remember that you rarely ever hear from the people that do NOT have any issue… But you ALWAYS hear from those that do, or just do not like the change…
Only thing I’ll miss, iDisk. But Dropbox does replace 99% of iDisk for me though.
This guy apparently doesn’t know how to ask for help….if would just go into iCloud preferences, turn off contacts and turn them back on the dupes in contacts will go away….just gotta read to find the answers….idiot.
Thanks for that, I have had the dupes on my home iMac, but not on my one at work, or on the MBA, iPad or iPhone, but hadn’t been able to find the answer on Apple support, so had just been putting up with the problem. iCloud for me has not been as ‘it just works’ as I have come to expect from 27 years of reliable Apple user experience.
that doesnt work. you have to “find duplicates” in Calendar/ iCal and remove them. Then replace your cloud based contacts with the newly fixed list….
I’d like to the see ability to hide images in photostream, much like you can in iPhoto. That way you could control in a simple way what showed up from a passive, view only point of view in things like Apple TV, but all new images would still show up in your devices so you could archive them, or edit them for future use.
Often I have images I’ve taken on my phone when I’m out and about which I don’t want to have show up on Apple TV, because they need cropping, or are lesser versions of other pictures, but I don’t want to delete them. If I could hide them, but still have them sync back to my Mac I wouldn’t have to worry about importing them from my phone and merging them back into albums, I could just do it all in one go.
Personally I’ve been really happy with iCloud. It’s a bit irritating as we still have an iPhone 3G and older Mac which don’t support it, but in use it has been perfect. With Mobile Me I did have a number of issues. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t upgrade my Mobile Me, but set up a new id, copied all my mail over, and the same for all my calendars and address book.
Periodic email outages. Duplicate contacts. This only happens occasionally so not a show stopper for me.
To me the biggest issue with iCloud is the inability to merge your previous apple ID with an iCloud account. It’s ridiculous that the only way to fully utilize iCloud is with a me.com address, but you can’t sync the information/purchases of a previous ID. I’d like to get rid of my gmail account and rely solely on my me.com account, but apple won’t let me.
i agree completely. the other problem that has now popped up is the need to have two email accounts to use the app store and (i guess) iTunes. my wife only has one email account, but for her to buy stuff on the app store or ibooks she needs a second account, so she is using mine. what does someone do who lives alone and only has one email account?
2nd this!
I am very happy usong iCloud BUT Apple must find a way to make an inatant sync of iWork documents made on the Mac that have to be instantly sent to iOS devices…
The reason the duplicates appear is that the entries had conflicting date stamps when iCloud was first turned on. In other words, iCloud inherited a mess that it can’t clean up. The solution is tedious but simple. This example is for the Calendar, but it works for the others too:
1. Turn off iCloud on all devices.
2. Archive the calendar on the device that has no duplicates and whose entries are the most accurate.
3. Delete all the calendar entries on all devices.
4. Turn on iCloud on all devices
5. Import the archive back into the calendar on that one device.
iCloud propagates the calendar to all devices. Everything is in sync, there are no duplicates, and it stays that way.
thanks, i will try this. i sometimes have trip’s of entries (myself for example) – can’t figure out how that happened.
iDisk dammit! I miss it. It’s a great thing, please bring it back. Used them all, starting with iTools.
@PatchyThePirate
Can you set gmail to forward all incoming mail to your me.com address? If so, that’s your solution.
its not a problem with fwd’ing mail.
If he had an iTunes account, with purchases, prior to getting the @me.com email… He simply CAN’T go into iTunes and update his email address from the gmail to the me account. Apple sets up a brand new iTunes account with your @me.com email, and refuses to shut it down or allow users to “transfer” an old account to the “new” @me.com address.
Something about combining two accounts into one, apple forbids it.
If apple didn’t set up a new iTunes account with every @me.com account… They wouldn’t have this issue.
Getting files from Pages currently suck ass.
No issues with contacts, but I have issues with music. Any time I buy a song via my iPhone, it’ll get automatically downloaded onto my MacBook Pro (as one would expect). The problem occurs the next time my phone syncs with my notebook, I will invariably end up with two copies of the song on my hard drive. Deleting the 2nd one that was added will remove it entirely from my phone, even though one copy still exists in my iTunes library.
So right now I always buy music via iTunes on my MacBook in order to avoid the issue.
I could also turn off automatic downloads, but that defeats the purpose of iCloud in the first place.
For those having problems with duplicate address book entries on your Mac, but not your phone…do you have Plaxo’s sync client installed? That’s what was causing the problem for me. Once I uninstalled and and deleted the duplicate entries, they never came back. I don’t think this is an Apple issue. At least it wasn’t for me.
no, i don’t have it installed.
For the most part, iCloud has worked pretty well. Better than MobileMe.
However I have encountered some address book issues. First and Last names get swapped from my iPhone to my mac. If I add the contact on my mac first it syncs fine. The problem is only when I add a contact from my iPhone.
Overall though much better than MobileMe. Especially the calendar sync.
iCloud for file storage is far inferior on the Mac than say Dropbox. First, who’s idea was it to make it a browser based service? Second, the address book issue is alive and well on my three Macs, but at least I can’t say I’ve lost any contacts. Third, if you started out way back when with a .mac account and stopped paying for that crummy service, like I did, never got a me.com account, but still use your .mac account for everything Apple (iTunes purchases, etc.) you can’t access anything you might create in iWorks and send to iCloud, because the service says it will send you an authentication email of which you must accept Apples terms, yada, yada, yada. Great, my .mac account has not had an working email since Apple shut it down years ago. And, it doesn’t forward to a me.com account, etc. So, for me to have iWork iCloud availability I have to create a new Apple ID and I’m not willing to do that, not after all of these years of using the same ID. Apple needs to find a way to fix these issues which have plagued the iCloud service. I’m not sure this the kind of quality people are expecting from such a fine company. However, if you’ve bought a bunch of new Apple hardware (Mac, phones, iPods, Apple TV) and recently set up an Apple ID, I bet things probably run pretty smoothly.
I had the address book problem when I was using MobileMe. After trying to fix it with no luck there, I’ve just ignored it. I haven’t noticed it getting worse since I moved to iCloud. I guess I should try to fix it again.
I’ve experienced contacts not syncing across devices–usually after updating a contact’s details on one device. I’ve also had the same issue with calendar sync, where I’ll update or delete an appointment and the original still shows up on other devices.
As an Apple Cloud user since Toolbox, and the
various dot Mac iterations. Happy Mobile Me user,
and now proud iCloud client, I can definitively
say that I am extremely satisfied with Apple’s
always ahead of the curve cloud offerings.
I depend on iCloud for all my professional email
needs on my MacBook Pro, on my iPad and my iPhone
in the U.S. and when traveling frequently overseas,
and I have never had a problem with it.
I also have tested microsoft’s new SkyDrive and
Google’s new Google Drive and thank you but no
thank you. Mobile me was better 10 years ago
than these newcomers are today.
I don’t trust Microsoft or Google for the mobile
cloud and electronic communications I depend on.
Keep the great work Apple and please ignore the
“journalists” and “analysts” that write nonsense
and think they can build and run a better Apple
than the one Steve Jobs himself successfully built.
My Pages documents have quit syncing. I’ve had issues off and on with it but now I can’t get them to Sync at all even after going through the steps above of shutting it off and then back on. Love the concept but hate the aggravation. I think they should add a manual sync button you can use when it gets stuck.
I have had .Mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud. I’ve decided that once my current paid subscription to iCloud ends, I’ll just keep the free service instead of paying for additional space. There’s a simple reason for this.
1. I do not use Photostream.
2. I rarely save files into the cloud because of the clunky web interface.
3. We have a corporate Dropbox account with lots of space
As I see it, the synchronization of contacts etc is fine, albeit with those pesky duplications that plague my three Macs and iOS devices. I have had to do resets on the bookmark synchronization from time to time.
Though an avid Apple fan and product user, I can’t see paying for a service that is so troublesome. I had really hoped I would have an iDisk type function (like dropbox) to use with iCloud. That is not the case. Paying for storage is therefore a useless proposition.
The solution to ur address book dupes is above.
There is a hidden folder in the Library that you can make an alias of and dump ur files in, this folder will sync all enclosed files to the cloud…
iCloud is a freaking mess. I have 2 machines running Lion. It only synced bookmarks once. Tried all kind of suggestions at Apple forums. No Luck. Try explaining to a professor how it can only sync iwork documents and they start using all kind of 4 letter word for Apple. I can go on about the short falls of iCloud.
This in no way looks like a Apple product. At least with Mobile Me when i made a change I could count on it to sync.
Hope Apple fixes this MESS in with 10.8
Entries into my calendar on my iPad 3 do not get transferred to my other iOS devices. My iPad does get the appointments made on my other devies, though. Why is this a one-way street?
On my iPad 3, I’m unable to erase my sent mail files. Well, I can delete them but they get put right back on as if I’d never deleted them in the first place. Is the iCloud trying to be like Google wherein all emails are retained forever?