me & her

iCloudy

Apple today announced iCloud, iOS 5, and Mac OS X Lion. All expected. I followed along on Engadget — Macworld’s live feed was too buggy with its “live” updates — and my initial thought was: “Apple is knocking this out of the park.”

I still feel as though this is a major move forward for Apple, but in seeing the inevitable “what does this mean for Dropbox, or Rdio, or Instapaper” posts trickle down through my Twitter feed, I’m left with a lot of questions, and few answers.

Perhaps someone with access to the developer preview (is there an NDA?) can provide some clarification:

iCloud vs. Dropbox

I’m not sure I see cause for concern, here. Dropbox, in my experience, allows me to set up seamless cloud access to various types of content (videos, documents, music). I’m in control of who sees that content, and how it’s accessed on various devices. I can have public folders, and private folders. My wife has access to this folder, my parents can see this other folder, etc.

My wife and I share an iTunes account across two iPhones, an iPad, a MacBook, and a MacBook Pro. As far as I can tell from what I’ve seen about iCloud sharing, if I store a document in the cloud, my wife will see it. If she takes a picture, it’s going to show up on my computer, and on my iPhone. Beyond the concerns of the Anthony Weiners of the world, my wife doesn’t want every picture I take, and I don’t need to see any of her schoolwork. I can’t imagine any scenario in which anyone would ever want to mirror all of their devices exactly, even if one person controls all of them.

The question, then: Can this sharing be controlled on a per device basis? Can I tell an app what to share and on which device to share it? What if I want to share one document, but not another? Can I share with anyone who isn’t tied to my iTunes account?

If not, the only alternative would seem to be two iTunes accounts, at which point — unless I’m mistaken? — we’d have to buy any app we both want twice. Wouldn’t this also cause havoc with sharing content to our Apple TV, from some of our devices, if the Apple TV is tied to a different iTunes account? Are we locked out of sharing any of our content because we now use two different accounts?

iCloud vs. Rdio vs. Google/Amazon

Again, where’s the overlap? Even assuming I decide I want to pay $25 for iTunes Matching — and I may — I simply don’t think the two services compete. Rdio, for me, is a discovery app. I use it to try new content, and if I don’t like it, I move on to something else. It’s instant gratification and impulse listening.

It sure looks as though iTunes in the Cloud won’t stream music from the cloud, even though it’s stored there. My initial thought was that Apple’s decision to play by the rules had paid off, primarily because it meant not having to upload gigs of music.

Plus, I thought, music stored in the cloud ideally means the only thing I need space for on my iPhone or iPad is apps. Instead, Apple is providing unlimited access to content downloads, across your devices. This is very different than unlimited streaming access to your library, across all your devices. In Apple’s iCloud world, we’re still forced to deal with managing storage? That’s kind of weak. I don’t think this is all that clear from Apple’s presentation, and it sure isn’t mentioned on their comparison chart. Nope. Just looked. No row for “stream from the cloud” with check marks next to Amazon and Google, but not in the Apple column.

It’s a trade off, for sure — personally, the hassle of uploading (some of) my music to Amazon or Google’s servers holds little to no appeal, but I’m also a bit bummed that I have to think about how much space I have on my iPhone if I want to retrieve an album from the iCloud. 

Apple vs. Instapaper

I hate to admit it, but I simply can’t weigh in, here. I’ve tried to get into the habit of using instapaper, but — as with wine — I never want to save anything for later. If I buy a bottle, it’s because I’m about to drink the bottle and if I see an article I want to read, I just read it. I want to use it, I think it’s a great product, I just can’t compare the two with any real authority. 

Sheepishly, I will admit that the last time I checked in on my Instapaper account, it was filled with examples of me accidentally clicking the “read later” bookmarklet, often while visiting sites of…ill repute. That faux pas, incidentally, is also something that need not be broadcast across every device tied to our one iTunes account.

In short, my overall concern is that Apple may try to make too many decisions for me.

(On the bright side, we weren’t forced to wonder what today’s event might mean for the future of Lendle.)