Syncing contacts with iTunes
05/06/11 Filed in: iTunes/iPod | MobileMe
Scotty
This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one.
If I buy into the cloud way of life, I am sure that there will be a monthly or yearly fee. What happens if for one reason or other I can not pay the fee or just plain can't use the computer anymore (senility,sight impaired,bad arthritis, bedridden). Does that mean that all of my information is lost to me? Pictures, movies, personal notes and writings, contacts etc. all gone?
___________
While the iCloud concept is all flowery and wonderful right now, the reality is this: Apple is only going to store 5 gigs of data on their servers (the cloud). This 5 gigs of data will be shared between contacts, calendars, mail, and documents. They are not storing your music or your photos. They are only providing a conduit for your photos to flow through to get to each device. It will still be your responsibility to backup your pictures. You music will be scanned and any purchased music Apple finds in iTunes will then be freely accesable through the cloud service. All of the previously mentioned services will be free. The $25 price tag will be for people to have access to their other music that had been imported via CD’s if they’d like to get to it via the cloud. Again this music will not be uploaded or stored. You’ll just have access to the copies Apple already has in the iTunes store.
It will be very common that people will believe that the iCloud will be much more than it actually is. Local backup is not going away any time soon. The eventual change over to 100% of our lives moving to an online server is still very very far away and we may not see it in our lifetimes. However, one day, our computers will only be screens to our data. And we will be able to use the monitor to connect to our entire digital world. But the pipe (or bandwidth) to the servers still has to grow a tremendous amount more before this will ever be possible.
This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one.
If I buy into the cloud way of life, I am sure that there will be a monthly or yearly fee. What happens if for one reason or other I can not pay the fee or just plain can't use the computer anymore (senility,sight impaired,bad arthritis, bedridden). Does that mean that all of my information is lost to me? Pictures, movies, personal notes and writings, contacts etc. all gone?
___________
While the iCloud concept is all flowery and wonderful right now, the reality is this: Apple is only going to store 5 gigs of data on their servers (the cloud). This 5 gigs of data will be shared between contacts, calendars, mail, and documents. They are not storing your music or your photos. They are only providing a conduit for your photos to flow through to get to each device. It will still be your responsibility to backup your pictures. You music will be scanned and any purchased music Apple finds in iTunes will then be freely accesable through the cloud service. All of the previously mentioned services will be free. The $25 price tag will be for people to have access to their other music that had been imported via CD’s if they’d like to get to it via the cloud. Again this music will not be uploaded or stored. You’ll just have access to the copies Apple already has in the iTunes store.
It will be very common that people will believe that the iCloud will be much more than it actually is. Local backup is not going away any time soon. The eventual change over to 100% of our lives moving to an online server is still very very far away and we may not see it in our lifetimes. However, one day, our computers will only be screens to our data. And we will be able to use the monitor to connect to our entire digital world. But the pipe (or bandwidth) to the servers still has to grow a tremendous amount more before this will ever be possible.
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