Apple's "free iCloud" services? Not really.

I guess that I am guilty of not paying enough attention to the world of Apple.  However, I have been a loyal and long suffering paying member of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe services.  I lived through all the changes such as my web pages coming down and my photo albums disappearing into incomprehensible folders.

My account was also one of those whose renewal coincided with the announcement of the new free iCloud services.  That meant that my account got extended until summer of 2012 which is probably why I have paid so little attention to iCloud.  The other reason is that the cloud that has my attention is Google's.

However, when I got the notice below last week, I thought perhaps I should spend some time investigating iCloud's free services.

Actually it turns out to not be so easy to move to iCloud unless you have already jumped onto Apple's newest bandwagon with both feet.

Apple's "free" services are actually free only if you already own an IOS device or have already upgraded to Lion.  Apple doesn't hide this fact, but I have missed any discussions that you have to be running Apple's Lion operating system to enable iCloud from a Mac.

Since I saw Windows 7 mentioned, I thought that I might be able to sneak by with that, but I had forgotten that this was Apple that was offering a "free" service.

I though surely this must not be the case so I contacted one of my favorite Apple system engineers, and he confirmed that you do indeed need to be running Mac OS X Lion.

Now I am not exactly out of date on my Macs.  I did buy an I5 iMac about fourteen months ago.  However, I have seen no reason to upgrade to Apple Lion's operating system, and a couple of good reasons to not upgrade.

First I don't like the on-line upgrade process, and second, I am afraid it might break the older version of iPhoto which I am using.  I quite like the older iPhoto, and as you can see from my posts, I detest the newer version of iPhoto. 

So I have happily stayed on Snow Leopard. While it is not perfect, I no longer have to enjoy the latest and greatest to get my work done.  I am even a version behind on Microsoft's Office on my Windows laptop though I do have the latest Office on my iMac.

It is interesting that Apple's new "free" services are only available to Apple customers with the latest and greatest operating systems.  I might sound like a technology party-pooper, but I have a very usable dual G5 tower that I bought in December 2004.  It has a couple of one terabyte drives in it, and I still use it almost daily.  I can't upgrade it to Lion.

Until late last month, I was still using my 2006 MacBook. While it isn't completely dead, it doesn't run for more than a few minutes before dying on me.  I even tried a new hard drive, but beyond backing up all my data, I had no luck in fixing the MacBook which happens to be our only other Intel based Mac.  I should mention that we still have a very usable white half moon iMac at our other home.  Our youngest daughter is also using one of those.  I bought three of those one summer.

So I guess I am stuck trying to figure out the best, or more properly, the cheapest way that I can enable Apple's new "free" iCloud services. 

When my MacBook died, I was actually thinking about perhaps buying a new laptop of some sort from Apple.  I have been carrying an Apple laptop since Apple started shipping them.  It feels a little funny to not take one into a hotel room when we are traveling.

However, I got a quick reminder of why I am sometimes hesitant to buy Apple products.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am writing a book about about my career at Apple.  In the fall just before my MacBook died, I sent Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, an email congratulating him on re-instating Apple's charitable match.  I saw it as a very positive change at Apple.  I mentioned in the note in passing that I was writing a book about Apple and would send him a copy when it got to market.

The next week, the day my MacBook died, we got an envelope from Apple's legal department reminding me of all the non-disclosures that I had signed with Apple.  They also included copies going back to the first one that I had signed in 1984.  I took the letter as a not very subtle attempt at frightening me into dropping the book.

However, I sent Tim back a note thanking him for the reminder, but also telling him that I have been writing about Apple for over seven years and until I pulled down much of the content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of articles about Apple on-line.  Not once in the seven years did I receive a note from Apple complaining about the accuracy of my posts or about my disclosing any proprietary information.

I did tell Tim that the letter from his legal folks had convinced me that there might be more friendly alternatives to an Apple product such as a Kindle Fire.

So here I am stuck between some family members who would like to keep their old email addresses that go back to the .Mac days and Apple which is requiring me to buy something before I can use their "free" services.

It is hard to believe that even Microsoft is better at free than Apple.  Microsoft's Skydrive which is truly free now even works on Firefox.  Of course Google has a host of free services which seem to work from just about any platform.  Actually Google pays me more in my Adsense account each year than I pay them for the extra storage that I need on Picasa.  They also host one of my domains for free, and their email has become a favorite of mine.

The truth is that Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the computer business. They are also among the best at mining their customers and accumulating a huge pile of cash.  Much of what Apple does is dedicated to getting you to buy their latest gear and only their latest gear.  I don't have a problem with Apple making money, but I find it wasteful to throw away perfectly good hardware that is still doing the job.  Perhaps that is one reason I love what Ubuntu is doing.

So I am wondering how Ubuntu can create a very simple distribution disk that I can download from their servers and use to install the latest and greatest flavor of Linux on my old Dell Pentium III while Apple wants me to go to their store?  The obvious reason is that Apple wants to lock me into their store and only their store.

Well I might have to figure out if I can buy an iPod touch and use that to migrate my Mobile me services.  That might be the cheapest and least painful of the solutions that are out there.

Any suggestions from others facing this dilemma would be appreciated.  I am not giving up my Android phone because I love the integration of the mapping apps with Google Maps. Besides I like the choice that the Android world gives me.  Also my Droid won't be two years old until March, and it is still doing a good job of keeping me connected.

My Apple book is now being edited by my trusted family staff, my wife and my oldest daughter.  At this stage, it is 295 pages and covers the time from September 1982 when I started selling Apple IIs in an Atlantic Canadian dealership to July 2004 when I left my position as director of Apple's federal sales in July 2004 just after sitting in a Senate hearing with Avie Tevanian.

I feel like I have done a commendable job describing life at Apple, but it has taken me seven years to get far enough from the situation to write a book, so I will await the judgment of others. I am glad that it is all down on paper.  Some of it is still hard for me to believe even though I lived it.

I am grateful that I wrote down about twenty-five pages of thoughts the fall after I left Apple.  That and a habit of using a daily planner have helped me nail down many of the important dates.  Not so surprisingly, the more I wrote about the old events, the more that I remembered.   Somehow I still haven't remembered any secrets, but that might be because I didn't know any even when I worked at Apple.

I have talked to a number of ex-Apple employees to get refreshed on a few things, but the story is mine.  Next week I am talking to agent recommended to me by someone well known in the Apple world.

Beyond that fishing has been good here this fall on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We were still in shorts weather through December 16 when I had a spectacular afternoon over on the beach.

While there have been signs of the seasons changing, somehow, the warm weather has managed to help us forget last winter.

With all the great weather, I am glad that I still have the ability to focus, or I would never have gotten my Apple book written in this fall to remember.  Hopefully my next post will have some details on how the book is going to published.  However, after the letter from Apple legal, Tim Cook will have to buy a copy if he wants one.

 

 

Comments

[Holger]

Can't wait for the book...

[R Vaught]

Very well done!

[Thomas Elam]

I hope it's available from Amazon as an e-book. One sale is guaranteed!

[me.yahoo.com/a/i_4TEB0Un.MOl5WYTY8Mt0Y-]

I ran into this with a client of mine - he didn't want to update his 17" Core Duo Macbook Pro just to get iCloud. I agree that it's annoying that iCloud requires OS X 10.7.1 or higher. Heck, it works with Windows XP!

That being said, it was not too hard to convert everything over to Google for syncing instead. Multiple calendars are a bit tough, but work well once set up.

I can understand requiring iOS 5, but requiring Lion doesn't make a lot of sense to me, except for the fact that they are trying to do more than just contacts, calendars, and mail with the new iCloud service, and some of the "new" stuff will require Lion.

[Duncan Babbage]

You detest Apple's online upgrade process but praise Ubuntu "that I can download from their servers". (You can create an install disk with the Lion download too—it's not difficult to do, and you'll quickly find the instructions online.)

You criticize Apple for the fact that Lion can't run on your older hardware. Meanwhile, you prefer Android over iOS, even though iOS 5 runs on three year old hardware whereas most Android phones ship with out of date software and never catch up to the current version, if they are give software upgrades at all.

Apple don't claim iCloud is a free service in isolation from their hardware—it's clearly advertised as free for Lion and iOS 5 users. Sure, users of Snow Leopard would rather it was otherwise. If one thing has characterized Apple, however, it's the willingness to not support 2006 machines with their latest offerings, so they are not limited to the capacities of those machines in what they build now. Meanwhile, try running Vista on a 2006 non-professional range laptop and see how you go performance wise.

Your hardware preferences are your own, and are perfectly valid. But you are picking and choosing your arguments in inconsistent ways, that are contradictory.

Good luck with the book.

[ocracokewaves]

Obviously you missed the whole point of the article.

Your comments ignore what I said in the article. I specifically said Apple didn't hide the fact that it wasn't free to anyone but Lion owners.

However, there are lots of free services out there like Google's and Microsoft's that don't require me to use a particular operating system or have the latest and greatest hardware to administer it.

Ubuntu's default way of getting an install is to make a CD. They tell you out to do it on their website. I'm not interested in finding third party instructions on how to do my Apple OS installs.

Also as I detailed in the article, I have a very specific reason why I don't want to use Lion. You would have seen that if you had paid attention to the article instead of worrying so much about Android.

You seem to think it is a bad thing to support older hardware on the Mac. I'm glad you have the budget to buy the latest and greatest stuff, but not everyone does. I am not sure what capabilities I might get with Lion, but I am sure my life is immeasurably poorer because I haven't upgraded.

One of Apple's favorite things is tell you that you will have these amazing capabilities if you upgrade to the latest OS. Every time Apple rolls out a new operating system promising some of these wonderful capabilities, I go to some Apple system engineers and ask them which applications that they see on the horizon which are impossible in the current OS. I have never gotten a good answer. In fact I am still waiting for some killer apps available only in Snow Leopard.

Perhaps iCloud itself is the one app that Lion will enable, but I can get it's features in other places without new hardware.

As to Android, which you obviously don't like, I have enjoyed all the fancy syncing ability that is promised in iCloud since I bought my Android phone almost two years ago. I am not even sure which version of Android my phone is running but I get my photos on Picasa web albums synced with my phone. It has always been that way. My contacts are synced with multiple Gmail accounts. My contacts were in sync less than two minutes after buying my ancient Android phone which you apparently believe is unusable because it doesn't have Android's ice cream sandwich.

The maps that my Android phone creates from tracking me get seamlessly uploaded to My Maps on Google maps and I can edit them and attach photos from any platform, not just the latest and greatest Mac hardware and software.

Amazon's cloud services seem to work well for music and don't need the latest and greatest hardware or software for it either.

By the way if you had taken the time to pay attention to the article, my i5 iMac was purchased in October 2010. It is way out of date at 14 months old.

The truth is something that I have said about Apple for many years, they don't really understand the Internet.

They have always made their Internet services more difficult by trying to tie them to specific hardware and/or software combinations.

Updating a specific photo album on .Mac was not an easy proposition if you ever tried it from more than one Mac. I can't remember what it is like on MobileMe because I quit using it due to how slow it was. You should give Microsoft's free SkyDrive a whirl if you want to see speed.

If you have ever tried to publish a blog using iWeb from more than one machine compared to using Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger, or Squarespace, you would understand what I am saying.

The data needs to be hardware agnostic for something to truly be an Internet service that is worthy of the name.

With real Internet service platforms, I can start writing a post on a Windows 7 box using Opera, move to my i5 Mac using Safari, and finish on my Dell Linux box with Firefox without doing anything but logging into the service. I could even do editing on that ancient and obviously unusable Android phone. You cannot do that with iWeb.

However Apple wants to tie iCloud to Lion (or a new iOS device) and wants to shut out hardware and an operating system that is only 14 months old.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as someone who just spent a lot of money on Apple hardware a little over a year ago. I don't expect them to support my seven year dual G5. It would be nice, but I know Apple better than that.

Apple's iCloud doesn't free you from specific hardware dependence, and even if you are like me and recently spent money on Apple gear, you will have to spend more money to use Apple's free services.

Actually I don't trust Apple with my photos. There is proof over the years that my lack of trust for their handling of photos and web pages has been a wise sentiment.

[ocracokewaves]

Just to prove my point on true Internet services, I just tried something which makes it pretty clear that Apple has become the new Microsoft.

I used beat up Microsoft because many of their services were tied to Internet Explorer. Guess what company has seen at least some light. It is Microsoft.

Yesterday I uploaded a number of photos from my Windows 7 laptop using a Firefox browser to my Microsoft Skydrive.. Later in the evening I added to one of the folders some photos from my Snow Leopard iMac using Safari as the browser.

This afternoon, I logged into my SkyDrive from my Oneiric Ocelot Ubuntu Dell machine with Firefox and uploaded a picture to the same album without any problems.

Then I went back to my iMac and uploaded a photo to a MobileMe album using Firefox. Next I moved over to my Linux box and tried doing the same thing.

Even though I was running the latest Firefox on Ubuntu, I got this message.

http://www.crystalcoastlife.com/notatrueinternetservice/unsupportbrowser.html

Now Linux has a very small market share compared to Windows or MacOS, but other manufacturers even Microsoft manage to support it, but Apple won't. There was a time when you could argue they don't have the money, that is not the case today. They just don't want to do it.

I suspect Windows 7 will work, but I haven't tried it yet. Apple has always reserved a special spot in its heart for Linux.

Real Internet services manage to support most if not all platforms that have wide use.

I am sure iCloud will be great for those hooked on the latest and greatest from Apple.

The rest of us will get by with those other services that have already been doing a great job for a number of years.

Dropbox is a great example of an Internet service that works for almost everything, and it is really free.

[Ben F]

To transition from MobileMe to iCloud, just find a friend with Lion for permission to log into a guest account. You might want to hold off until next June, though, because I think that you would immediately lose most MobileMe functionality on your non-Lion Macs.

My wife and I each have user accounts on the other's Mac. She wanted to bump her iPad to iOS 5, so she upgraded her Mac to Lion and transitioned her MobileMe account to iCloud. I'm standing pat for now, so her MobileMe account on my Mac is dead and her address book and keychain no longer sync between the two laptops. It's a worthwhile trade-off for her because her contacts are always up-to-date on her iPad and losing keychain sync isn't that big a deal if you're a heavy-duty 1Password user.

[Phil]

Interesting post ... I am a fairly long time Mac user and enthusiast ... bought an SE/30 while studying CS at Rutgers in the late 80s ... a few times wishing I had also bought what I paid for the Mac in Apple stock ...

I recently noticed what you said in regard to Lion. I have office 2004 ... & realized if I upgraded to Lion ... it would not work. It works fine now ... why do I need Lion? I would then just need to shell out more for Office ... o the irony in that! I also realized that I needed Lion to get iCloud ... sort of by principle I do not like the idea of needing to upgrade to get the "free" service ... in the mean time .. Dropbox does a great job!

[Katy]

I too was a faithful fan of Apple's until this recent iCloud fiasco. I run my business online and need a reliable computer that will suffer the knocks of life without becoming obsolete after two years. As an avid environmentalist I also used to think that the durability of apple products meant that hardware was not being consigned to landfill and tips and clogging up what little space we have left on this planet.
Now it seems that my 2007 iMac is about to be relegated obsolete despite working beautifully. All because I cannot upgrade to Lion and so retain my .mac email.
I'm afraid with the economy as it is I am one of many who simply cannot afford the new shinier versions of the macs out there and nor (even if I had the money) would I buy one as they no longer have the quality that we came to expect with the high price tag.
So it's bye bye Macs and hello cheap and cheerful PCs. I wonder if Tim Cook recognises that Apple are about to lose a host of customers?