Saving things to the drive is not the problem. It’s about accessing it later on. The file system is poor and confusing.
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Apple VP Overseeing iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime Infrastructure Leaving Role
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I think Apple should stop farming out our iCloud storage to third parties. I think Apple should create their own so that they can have more control and hopefully, more security and accountability with the service.
Although that makes total sense, that will be against Apple’s high margin mindset. Apple becomes the trillion dollar company that they are partly due to them being a master of outsourcing, thus keeping a lot of the revenue as profit and minimizing cost. Apple literally outsource almost everything, including any sort of manufacturing. Apple probably now is the richest electronics company that makes zero products themselves.
Seems like a lot of the Apple Top Guys are leaving. That can’t be good for operations. With the times we live in, I can’t really see many improvements to these services.
That is probably the biggest “What?!?” in my mind when it comes to Apple; where are they going?
Siri is less than it should be
iCloud is less than it should be
Apple Services is less than it should be
”It just works!” is a thing of the past
The deeper you look the less private and secure Apple is
Advertisements are creeping into the landscape
Now you have a slow but steady stream of top folks departing
Not sure where Apple is heading.
Siri is less than it should be
iCloud is less than it should be
Apple Services is less than it should be
”It just works!” is a thing of the past
The deeper you look the less private and secure Apple is
Advertisements are creeping into the landscape
Now you have a slow but steady stream of top folks departing
Not sure where Apple is heading.
Doubling down? They do that daily and have for nearly 50 years. They're a hardware company, always have been, always will be.
Some of Apple's services are hardware independent, while others are designed to enhance the hardware. Music and TV+ are aimed at everyone. iCloud is not, for obvious reasons. There'd be no advantage to using iCloud over other options if you don't use Apple hardware.
Apple also keeps Messages and FaceTime proprietary because they clearly believe that these services help them gain/retain customers.
I prefer Apple Music to Spotify because Apple Music plays nicely with my huge lossless library at home. No other music service supports user files as well as Apple Music.
But, generally speaking, I agree with you. I also think this is by design. As you've already noted, services are a way to support hardware. When it comes to bundled apps and services, Apple rarely tries to match or exceed what third parties offer. They want developers to support their platforms. This has been true for a long time now. Apple's bundled apps and services are designed to satisfy the basic needs of most users, not compete with third parties. iCloud revenue comes from people needing storage space, not people paying for a great note taking service.
I agree. All of these pay services are pretty much the same when it comes to user experience.
And this surprises you?? They've always been a hardware company. Hardware IS their business.
Absolutely. Apple's services business is directly tied to the iPhone, be it music in your pocket or storage for all of your photos. But if the iPhone were to tank, I think Apple would have much bigger problems than a decline in services revenue!
It doesn't really surprise me, no. The recognition of Apple being primarily a hardware company was my point, however clumsily stated, in response to the original post that said that other companies, including Microsoft, are moving more in a service direction.
Apple has increased its service offering quite significantly, but I thought it was important to contextualise that Apple isn't really a service company in the traditional sense for all the reasons you and I stated. I agree that there are products, you mentioned Apple Music, that try to be hardware-independent, but even there I'm not convinced its really working out. I could be wrong.
But generally I don't think Apple has succeeded or even tried pushing most of its services beyond those who own Apple hardware.
I hope not. If the messages can be displayed on a web page, then they are not encrypted. iMessage encrypts messages client-side for each recipient's public keys (a different key for each device), then passes the encrypted message to Apple's servers for the recipient's devices to retrieve them. As I understand it, Apple cannot currently decrypt or read iMessages, which is how it should be: the messages are in plaintext only at the endpoint devices. If Apple could display the messages on a web page on any computer, then Apple would necessarily be able to read your messages, and that's a bad idea.
How iMessage sends and receives messages securely
iMessage sends and receives messages securely in Apple devices.
My dad used to say he liked Apple specifically because it felt like Jobs used things himself and wanted to make sure his own experience would be excellent.
I have the same feeling. You can see from the old Jobs era keynotes, in how the old senior team presenting, you can feel the energy and you believe they’re using what they’re presenting themselves.
Now, all the talking heads feel that they’re just reading scripts, not really deeply involved in what they are presenting themselves. I mean how can these people use their own buggy OSes?
My top two are mail accounts / settings and notifications.
It’s not just Apple either. Why don’t signatures sync in outlook? It doesn’t seem hard.
I’m sick of clearing the same notification on multiple devices.
Once they finally allowed calendar colors to sync these became the biggest annoyance.
Up next: dock settings.
CloudKit is working great though. Fastest and most stable sync service out of any that I’ve had apps use.
Going by leaked emails he’s the only one that understands you need to be cross compatible with other devices he’s the only one using nonapple devices and seeing the big picture. He just has to put up with the apple only snobs and they overrule him. See Eddie vs Craig on iMessages.
Very interesting. Eddie was right, but the ship has sailed and Apple missed the golden opportunity. It was during the WhatsApp TOS change fiasco, where I had a lot of friends on Android talking about dumping WhatsApp. Many were dipping their toes on Signal. This was the prime opportunity for Apple to come in with iMessage, but they didn’t. Now the dust has settled and WhatsApp remains king.
Apple is becoming the big and sluggish corporate they were making fun of before.
I don't know Cue personally. Looking at what he oversees, and the state in which those services are and have been for the past decade, I think it would be very smart to distribute at least half of those responsibilities to different people.
As a side note, whether their policy on iMessage makes sense depends on where you are.
From a European perspective, locking iMessage to Apple devices means the service doesn't really get used by anyone because almost no one has Apple-only friends, family or colleagues and using a service that defaults back to SMS and MMS seems like getting deliberately stuck in the late 00s and early 10s.
From a US perspective, it's understandable that you'd try to keep people on your platform. I'm not convinced iMessage works so much better than other messaging services that if an Android user could use it natively, it would awe anyone into buying an iPhone. American users seem to buy iPhones because they can't use it and everyone else seems to be incapable of figuring out how to use a third-party-messenger.
Without any usp, iMessage will be drowned in the sea of other platform agnostic services. The narrow opportunity was privacy, and that window opened up wide during the Whatsapp ToS change fiasco. That period also boosted Signal to the mainstream consciousness. But Apple didn't make a move, and that opportunity won't happen again. I believe iMessage will forever be an Apple-exclusive service.
Been keeping my eye (on the waiting list) for Sunbird Messaging (https://www.sunbirdapp.com/).
Looks like the potential next gen app for messaging.
I don't know, since they are basically all the same more or less I'm not sure what USP another messenger might have. You say platform agnostic but if that really mattered in places where iMessage is widely used it, it would have happened already. Elsewhere iMessage is negligible already.
Short of a massive shift to Android or another OS platform I'm not sure what would trigger that move away from iMessage.
Hi all,
Wanted to drop a quick note here, just had an experience that made me think of this conversation we had a couple of months back.
I just logged on iCloud.com on my Windows computer at work to manage some files on iCloud Drive and it's really obvious all their web interfaces are 💩 on purpose. On iCloud Drive alone, no right click, no file copy / paste of any kind, no nothing. They are like 15 years behind the competition. Dropbox was more advanced when it launched in 2008.
Why would someone pay their +25% price hike they just announced for such low quality products ?
They arrogantly spit on the face of their billion+ customers with the sole purpose of making more money, locking all of us into their ecosystem. They couldn't care less about user experience.
I feel so much better.
Wanted to drop a quick note here, just had an experience that made me think of this conversation we had a couple of months back.
I just logged on iCloud.com on my Windows computer at work to manage some files on iCloud Drive and it's really obvious all their web interfaces are 💩 on purpose. On iCloud Drive alone, no right click, no file copy / paste of any kind, no nothing. They are like 15 years behind the competition. Dropbox was more advanced when it launched in 2008.
Why would someone pay their +25% price hike they just announced for such low quality products ?
They arrogantly spit on the face of their billion+ customers with the sole purpose of making more money, locking all of us into their ecosystem. They couldn't care less about user experience.
I feel so much better.
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It’s been that bad since the iTools and .Mac days. They don’t do it on purpose, they just aren’t good at Web services. They even butchered their own Apple Store online for awhile by removing the ‘Store’ tab and making you go to individual product pages to purchase items.
Apple builds great products, not great services. I’m surprised Apple Music has become as good as it has.
Apple Music is benefitted by the vast ecosystem, if you think about it, it doesn't offer anything ultra special or beyond what other music services do, it just hooks nicely to Apple devices.
I know that is the only reason I use iCloud, because it is simpler to use with my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro, but it is terrible compared to the competition.
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I stick with Apple Music because of the Music app on my Mac. Apple Music is the only streaming service that fully supports a user's local, DRM-free library as well as streaming. I basically use Apple Music to try before I buy. I still buy lossless DRM-free copies of the albums I really like. I haven't found another service that supports people who still buy music as well as Apple Music does.
I totally agree when it comes to iCloud Drive vs. Dropbox, etc. But iCloud is a lot more than cloud storage.