A project like that takes a few years to plan and execute. So they have been working on it for years.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Working to Create its Own Cloud Storage Infrastructure
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
well, i could easily afford it but it can't be help that everyone want a higher free basic. i would say it is worth the money since it save me from the hassle of having to manually copy my photos to my mac.
Not at all. By my logic, the no brakes, 0-100mph hyperbole in your comment is silly. There's a world of difference between offering more cloud storage and giving away everything for free.
News flash - Again, hyperbole does you no favors. There's no implication of charity in my quote.
[doublepost=1458306912][/doublepost]
Good ol' ad hominem. The refuge of a weak argument.My job's immaterial. I don't use iCloud. Too many other options that offer better value. My stance is purely academic.
You are right that some people believe it's reasonable to price to pay for 20TB. I'm one of those people. Since I'm not binary, I'm also one of the people who believe that 5GB shared data is pretty chintzy for a company that has the massive profitability that Apple has. It looks especially chintzy when compared to their contemporaries.
I understand. And Apple's profitability is immaterial.
You feel people are entitled to free stuff. 5 GB is plenty for a lot of people who have modest needs - and that's free. If your needs are beyond that, simply pay for it. 3.3 cents a day - 99 cents a month. Most people can swing that.
Apple's position only looks chintzy to the teeny tiny few on tech forums who love to complain about "the greedy Apple." Being mice-nuts in the big picture perspective, I'm certain their tiny rants are off Apple's radar.
Never ceases to amaze me how some people on tech forums give Apple this enormous power over their happiness.
Apple's unholy alliance with Google! Did Steve Jobs know about this? He was the proponent of cloud based everything for his products!
I am more surprised that Apple does not have its own, complete, "cloud" servers. They highlighted their green storage centers years ago, and have always been building bigger, greener landmarks, one in North Carolina showcased recently (2-3 years?).
Cloud based computing and personal storage is based on always having access to ethernet. Those days, people like Steve Jobs had it, the rest of us, not so much. Even now, leave the big metro areas, you have to pay mega bucks to link up. Even that is not as good as it is in Europe or East Asia - Japan, S Korea, etc. Rural USA is still like Siberia as far as coverage goes.
Then came the hacking, that revealed things the US DOJ is unable to do now.
It costs much less to run a personal storage - starting at 1 TB starts at less than $100 for life, and it has the same limitations as current availability. And, the limit is not 5, 10 or 50 GB that gets expensive very soon.
My own modem, my own router, my own USB 2 (or USB 3, or SATA later) linked storage, good enough. Same limitations.
I am more surprised that Apple does not have its own, complete, "cloud" servers. They highlighted their green storage centers years ago, and have always been building bigger, greener landmarks, one in North Carolina showcased recently (2-3 years?).
Cloud based computing and personal storage is based on always having access to ethernet. Those days, people like Steve Jobs had it, the rest of us, not so much. Even now, leave the big metro areas, you have to pay mega bucks to link up. Even that is not as good as it is in Europe or East Asia - Japan, S Korea, etc. Rural USA is still like Siberia as far as coverage goes.
Then came the hacking, that revealed things the US DOJ is unable to do now.
It costs much less to run a personal storage - starting at 1 TB starts at less than $100 for life, and it has the same limitations as current availability. And, the limit is not 5, 10 or 50 GB that gets expensive very soon.
My own modem, my own router, my own USB 2 (or USB 3, or SATA later) linked storage, good enough. Same limitations.
The question is, if the execs (i.e., Tim and Eddy) knew that iCloud would be a core part of their overall strategy, why did it take them this long to get to this point? They should have built data centers and the infrastructure years ago.
As always, Eddy seems to be a step or two behind the curve... music streaming, TVOS (though admittedly, I do love the UI and remote), maps (could have bought Waze for 1/3 the price of Beats!), etc.
Apple Pay was probably the only thing that came out of his team that set the bar, and even that had more to do with Touch ID than anything else.
As always, Eddy seems to be a step or two behind the curve... music streaming, TVOS (though admittedly, I do love the UI and remote), maps (could have bought Waze for 1/3 the price of Beats!), etc.
Apple Pay was probably the only thing that came out of his team that set the bar, and even that had more to do with Touch ID than anything else.
I don't get what people are complaining about. Paying $.99/mo for 50GB is pretty good imo, especially when my device was $1000+. What is it, $1.99/mo for 100GB? - same as Google Drive. Most people spend 3x this at Starbucks every day. 300x this at Whole Foods every week (way beyond my pay grade).
I'd rather pay for iCloud even if it was more expensive because I know Google is mining the $*#! out of my data. If it was free wouldn't Apple be much more motivated to data mine / sell usage?
@ KPandian1 - I beg to differ on that one. Cloud storage is far more cost effective if you factor in that I can access my data anywhere from any device, it's off site and local, much easier to share data with friends, and has versioning (Google Drive), wife and I can work simultaneously on a document, backs up my photos instantly via my phone, etc... but to each his own. I have no problem with people who prefer local storage, but I don't think it's cheaper.
I'd rather pay for iCloud even if it was more expensive because I know Google is mining the $*#! out of my data. If it was free wouldn't Apple be much more motivated to data mine / sell usage?
@ KPandian1 - I beg to differ on that one. Cloud storage is far more cost effective if you factor in that I can access my data anywhere from any device, it's off site and local, much easier to share data with friends, and has versioning (Google Drive), wife and I can work simultaneously on a document, backs up my photos instantly via my phone, etc... but to each his own. I have no problem with people who prefer local storage, but I don't think it's cheaper.
Last edited:
Thank you, thank you. Enterprise storage is a big part of my world and I may have to quote you in response to the inevitable question from enterprise customers with n00b CIO's, "why so expensive when I can buy a 2TB hard drive at Fry's for ten bucks?!"
This stuff's not easy at scale.
This stuff's not easy at scale.
I'm not sure you know what entitled means. Whether you do or not, you're using it incorrectly by relating it to anything in any of my quotes on this topic. I never implied anything remotely advocating entitlement. You're right that most people could afford the cost of the upgrade. But the issue is not about affordability. It's about the perceived value. Trying to frame it as people being cheap completely misses the point.
You are a big fan of hyperbole. Which is cool I guess. It drowns out your message, but hey, maybe that's the intent. Either way, I'd be hard pressed to see Apple's cloud offerings in a positive light compared to their competitors. You see it differently. That's cool too.
Is this just a generalization or is it directed specifically at me? Generalization. I'm going with generalization since I don't even use iCloud. It's just one of many topics I discuss in forums.
Apple is so bad at services that I can't wait, to wait another 5 years after the intro for Apple to get it mostly right. Marketing will say its time, the rollout will happen and early users will lose all or some of their photos, etc. Been there, done that!
That is the point. The competition makes Apple look really stupid. 5 GB should not be the default option, much like 16 GB should not be the base option for their phones. They can't use the cloud as an excuse for 16 GB when even their default cloud option is awful. It's a running joke now. Google, for instance, lets you store unlimited pics and video for free with Google Photos. Granted, you can only upload up to 1080p video and your photos can't be above 16 megapixels ... but ... unlimited free storage. The competition doesn't kind of make Apple look bad. They make Apple look like a complete joke.It is ridiculously small by comparison to the competition. But if you rely on it there's always the pay option. I personally don't use clouds. I just look at them.
64GB USB3.0 flash drives are now below $30 and much faster. I also don't use dropbox unless it is for sharing purposes.
The whole cloud thing was always suspect to me, but that's just me.
Maybe it's because I worked in that industry too long
I think FoundationDB (as that precise product) is way too small for the sorts of scales Google (now) and Apple (eventually) operate at. Spanner (Google's "database") is not just cluster-sized but spans multiple clusters around the world (and uses bizarre ideas like atomic clocks plus GPS in each data center, to provide precise common time for all the machines in all the clusters).
Obviously one direction this goes is Apple creating its own cluster software to provide the sorts of massive file systems and DBs that these projects require. But another interesting direction/question is whether Apple CPUs/SoCs are used. Since the A6, I've suggested that it would make sense for Apple to create their own server SoCs, given how much Intel charges for their's. With the A9X Apple have performance parity with Intel (given that server CPUs run at 2.x GHz, not the 4GHz of high end desktop CPUs) and if Apple were willing to create the masks for an A9Z (or A10Z) with no GPU, no ISP etc, just 32 cores or so on a die, they could probably match Intel performance at a third of the power and a tenth of the price. Of course a server requires slightly more functionality than just the core, but there seems no reason Apple isn't up to designing that.
And testing out these sorts of designs inside their data centers is also a way to get to desktop Apple SoCs as more functionality is exercised (eg ethernet, SATA, USB3) that isn't present on iOS devices.
Which isn't to say that I'm predicting the return on an XServe. We MAY ultimately see that (if Apple feel they really can sell machines competitive with Intel at half the price) but maybe not ever. Apple's niche is people who are willing to pay more for the value of the Apple software and ecosystem, and servers don't match that. A more likely scenario, IMHO, would be the gradual rolling out of ever more developer services (free at small scale, paid for at larger scale) on the Apple cloud, like Apple versions of AWS and EC2, but giving higher performance and easier/more integrated APIs for developers. In other words -- you don't NEED to buy an XServe, you rent the capacity you need from Apple.
[doublepost=1458325947][/doublepost]
(a) The whole point of things like AWS is to provide IMMEDIATE capacity for rapidly expanding companies (like Apple...), but in the expectation that, as they grow large enough they'll probably create their own facilities.
(b) These services provide more than just hardware; they provide control software to co-ordinate the interaction of these many machines. The simplest versions of this control software (the stuff circa 2005 or so) have, of course, been duplicated in open source projects like Hadoop (and likely within Apple), but the most recent stuff has not yet even been made public let alone duplicated. I expect that when you're operating at Apple levels, you have the option to pay for these services (eg massive database services) that are not visible in the public offerings from Amazon, MS, or Google. And until Apple has duplicated as much of that functionality as they need, they're going to continue renting it.
Remember there isn't one thing called "the cloud". There's lots of different types of data being stored (some accessed by many people simultaneously, some by just one person; some writable but much unwritable; some is large BLOBs, some is small fragments). Apple Maps has very different requirements from iCloud Drive which as different requirements from the iTunes store.
And that doesn't even get into the non-storage side of the cloud --- different distributed computation requirements. Right now Siri is Apple's most obvious cloud computation engine, but Apple is running their own web-crawler/indexer (apparently right now to provide Siri with data, but that could one day change...). And as AI becomes more pervasive, Apple will need distributed computation to provide translation services, image recognition services, etc -- the sort of things we expect from AI.
[doublepost=1458326162][/doublepost]
I never liked the idea of "the cloud" anyway. Just a lot of hype as it boils down to your stuff on someone else's hard drive. I had assumed they at least used Apple's OWN hard drives. Wrong!!! Amazon, MS, and Google!!!
Oh for fsck's sake. You use the cloud every time you use Google, every time you use Siri, every time you check GMail.
The cloud is NOT just remote personal storage --- that is by far the least interesting and least important part of it.
I guess you can do everything you described with a local storage if you can do the settings properly. I use iCloud by default, those settings that come with all the iPhones are easy, and have no issues except when the broadband decides to flake (Comcast). So, I added the local storage too. I prefer local storage for my Macbooks (Pro and Air) and adding a small, local server for the iPhones with an external storage from the past was not a problem.
HDD are dead cheap - someone please tell Apple; their base options on the iMac are laughable.
People thought that Apple's association with Samsung was wrong - the Google alliance is evil, especially since Google is not providing something that Apple could have set-up 5 years or earlier at the same level of efficiency.
Steve is rolling ...
Agreed on every point. Yet many of us still hang on to the eco-system while aware that we're being milked.
Unfortunately Google's ad-supported business model data mines it's users, therefore they "give you" so much for free.
Every coin has two side. Some users don't care and choose that model, others prefer the security and walled garden provided by Apple. There's no wrong or right here, just choices.
Nevertheless, we're allowed to complain and maybe something will change.
Why doesn't an article from a knowledgeable Apple centric site, discussing Apple data services and data centres, mention the IBM partnership, Apple's relevant acquisitions, it's standards for privacy, security and powering the centres with renewable energy?
This post is a follow up after Apple shifted some business from one third party data centre provider to another. Isn't this the post which could have looked at Apple's data management goals and what sets it apart more broadly?
Tim Cook declared the data privacy (security) issue as part of how Apple's values its customers differently from other tech business models, like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Not important to data centre goals?
This post is a follow up after Apple shifted some business from one third party data centre provider to another. Isn't this the post which could have looked at Apple's data management goals and what sets it apart more broadly?
Tim Cook declared the data privacy (security) issue as part of how Apple's values its customers differently from other tech business models, like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Not important to data centre goals?
Last edited:
I actually thought they kept everything on their own servers. What's with all the server farms they own?
Didn't know they used google until that article on MR the other day.
Didn't know they used google until that article on MR the other day.
It really really doesn't cost $100 for life.
Your cat will outlive the useful life of a hard drive, let alone you.
I know it does not cost $100 - the number was used as a reference point. Apple uses that to step up for each level of storage on its iPhones.
I am using WD Black 1TB drives from the last decade on a McAlly case with eSATA and USB 2 ports for storage. The drive was used to run an additional storage on a PC, pulled out for this. So, my cost is just using working old hardware.
Last edited:
No issue. A device cannot be associated with more than one iCloud account at a time. When a new owner starts using a device, that device is going to be associated with their account, rather than the original owner's. If there was free storage space associated with the device, the space allocation would transfer.
The per-device approach has a nice, round logic to it, but there are some other realities folks miss. If it's per-device, when will Mac owners start asking for backup space? At that point, we're talking about needing a minimum of 100 GB (128 GB minimum storage, less OS, caches, etc.) to backup the device. "I purchased mine with a 3TB drive, shouldn't I get...."
It's easy for me to understand why Apple is keeping the cap low - there are a whole lot of devices out there, and even a modest increase to 10GB is a huge amount of storage to either build or contract-out. "Let's put the kids on a small allowance, and let them learn how to mange their money" seems a wiser approach. A bit of time spent deleting bad photos saves you money. If you insist on saving everything, then pay for cloud storage, the same way you pay for storage space for your physical goods (if you don't have enough space in your house/apartment, you rent storage space, or sell what you don't need, or throw it out...). While you can't hold the bits and bytes in your hand, if all those photos and documents were printed out, they sure would take up physical space. Digital storage space is physically compact, but it still takes resources.
There's an old saying about the quantity of stuff expanding to fill the available space...
They're going to have to learn the talent is out there.McQueen... could this be a bit of foreshadowing for Apple's cloud services? Code naming your project after a guy who lived hard and fast... and died early from a couple of heart attacks.
I don't want more storage, I want storage that's as useful as Dropbox for syncing, and storage that's useful for backups (which iCloud drive isn't since it's sync only).
You're delusional. That would probably costs them hundreds of millions of dollars.
"A project called "McQueen" is underway at Apple"
Anyone else enjoy the reference? Steve McQueen, great escape?
As I recall, he gets caught in the barbed wire .. Is this a fatalistic view from Apple?
Anyone else enjoy the reference? Steve McQueen, great escape?
As I recall, he gets caught in the barbed wire .. Is this a fatalistic view from Apple?