“Apple’s iCloud has a long and troubled past, but the company keeps pushing it for iPhone and Mac users with every new operating system update,” Thorin Klosowski writes for Lifehacker. “Don’t be fooled. The service is an inconsistent mess and more trouble than it’s worth.”
“My main problems have come from three different parts of the iCloud service: iCloud Photo Library, iCloud Drive, and iCloud backups,” Klosowski writes. “iCloud Drive, which is ostensibly Apple’s more traditional approach to a syncing file storage service, is a little less baffling than iCloud Photo Library. It’s still, however, a far cry from useable. iCloud Drive uses a traditional folder structure, which means you can access files that you store on the backup service from the Finder or an app on iOS. Regardless, it has a ruleset that feels unpredictable and Apple’s attempts to make it ‘hidden’ and ‘just work’ make it more complex.”
“At best, iCloud is good for device backups. Without doing anything, you can seamlessly swap between an iPhone or iPad, or replace an old iPhone with a new one,” Klosowski writes. “iCloud’s backups stores your contacts, your list of installed apps and their settings, and your general iOS settings. It’s a solid service for device backups, but like everything else in iCloud, it does weird things for no apparent reason.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: God only knows how many photos we’ve lost through the years being shuffled through Apple’s myriad photo “solutions.” We like to pretend that all of our photos are still there. We’re delusional like that for the sake of sanity.
And, who else likes waiting for a photo you’ve just taken with your iPhone to “download” to said iPhone so that you can edit it? We’ve had that vexing issue numerous times.
Sometimes we wonder if anyone at Apple actually tries to use their Photos app and/or iCloud Photo Library?
Despite all that, there are certainly benefits to using iCloud services (Find My iPhone and backups for iOS device-only users especially) and iCloud actually has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, so we’re not going to go so far as to say, “Stop using Apple’s iCloud.” Hopefully, via “Pie,” Apple is poised to further improve their iCloud services.
SEE ALSO:
Apple looks to improve cloud services by moving infrastructure onto Apple-made system ‘Pie,’ unifying teams – October 6, 2016
