iCloud vs. AWS: Apple Has Considered Competing With Amazon in Cloud

[MacRumors]

Apple in recent years has considered competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to The Information's Aaron Tilley.

In a paywalled report today, Tilley said that Apple was actively discussing the idea into the first half of 2024, but he does not know whether the talks have continued. A supposed key backer of the idea, Michael Abbott, left Apple in 2023.

Apple's potential cloud service would allow developers to rent servers powered by the M-series chips used in Macs. A service like this allows developers to power cloud-based app features without purchasing and maintaining their own servers.

According to the report, some Apple executives believed that the power efficiency of M-series chips would make its cloud service more affordable for developers compared to AWS and other similar platforms. This belief is apparently backed by Apple's own use of the servers for the likes of Apple Music and Apple Wallet.

If such a service were ever to launch, perhaps it would have iCloud branding, and it would help to boost Apple's services revenue.

Article Link: iCloud vs. AWS: Apple Has Considered Competing With Amazon in Cloud

 

[Andres Cantu]

Can’t fault them for trying to up their services revenue. That gets their stock multiple up, and thus, their stock.

 

[Spock]

I am guessing it will be like Siri competing with Alexa...

 

[kwl]

iCloud is awful for storage. I constantly have to fight with Files to have things remain downloaded and sharing via a simple link is near impossible. Especially since the cost for iCloud storage right now is substantially higher than competitors, why aren’t they passing on those cost savings now?

 

[MaverickCC]

It's a great idea, but in the end it's just not where their passion lies... and that's always been a problem in the longer run for them with this type of offering.

 

[spaxxedout]

This is clearly the company to beat Azure and AWS

Apple Drops WebObjects License Price From $50,000 to $699

www.apple.com

 

[Dr Nobody Important]

That would be a really cool idea. iCloud Drive is the best option for storing files in a safe a secure fashion. The cost of iCloud Drive storage is right on par with other storage providers. AWS is very complex to figure out how to setup simple things, reminds me of Adobe, where you need classes to figure out how to perform basic things.

 

[BabyBoii]

please do it. AWS needs a real competitor.

 

[relaxedpanda]

iCloud is awful for storage. I constantly have to fight with Files to have things remain downloaded and sharing via a simple link is near impossible. Especially since the cost for iCloud storage right now is substantially higher than competitors, why aren’t they passing on those cost savings now?

What cost savings? Apple pays Amazon for AWS, it’s the backbone of many Apple services - including iCloud Drive

 

[mhurron]

They'd have a snowballs chance in hell, Apple has always been so great with the Enterprise offerings.

 

[mhurron]

please do it. AWS needs a real competitor.

lol, if GCP and Asure aren't 'real competitors' than Apple wouldn't stand a chance.

 

[relaxedpanda]

please do it. AWS needs a real competitor.

Everyone knows this but nobody is good at it. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle have been trying for years.

Everyone wants a piece of AWS business, but nobody can match them on stability, scale, or features.

The only downside to AWS is price, not quality. There is no world where I see Apple doing anything outside their walled garden for the greater good of the internet, the best effort I see them making here would be solely for their App Store developers.

 

[fbadini]

First fix iCloud introducing an S3 compatible interface for storage.

Then you can evaluate other perks

 

[Digital Dude]

In my experience, iCloud works fine for backing up files when I’m upgrading or restoring my phone, but beyond that, I’m not interested. I use other more reliable file storage options, and iCloud ranks dead last in that regard.

 

[TheHeron]

They'd have to provide some sort of guarantee that they wouldn't kill it.

Apple could do it, and they'd easily do it better than Amazon or MicroSloth.

But with their track record, it would take something ironclad to be sure it wouldn't end with a rug pull like their past server history.

 

[tgwaste]

Apple has always been terrible at all things cloud. They still are. AWS will eat their lunch.

 

[dcjames]

Unfortunately for Apple, AWS (as well as Azure and GCP) have a huge 20-year headstart on cloud computing. It's not just about letting people run VMs. Public Clouds offer managed databases, message queuing, video workloads, CDNs, object storage, TLS certificate management, IoT fleet management, Web Application Firewalls, managed Kubernetes and container environments - and so many other services that you can stitch together to build custom workloads. And it's generally very, very inexpensive if you know what you're doing. Apple does not do inexpensive very well; and based on how frequently their iCloud services go down, they unfortunately do not do reliability as well as required to offer a Public Cloud service with contractual SLAs. On top of that, Apple is a consumer-first company and Public Cloud is about business-first. It's not going to happen.

 

[GrassShark]

There’s no way Apple could compete with AWS. They can barely do a good enough job on consumer grade cloud stuff, I don’t see how they could step things up to enterprise cloud at a price that makes any sense at all.

 

[jlc1978]

Apple doesn't need to compete across all of AWS' offerings, offer enterprise cloud solutions, or even abandon it for some of theirs. Judging fromTFA, it would be about giving developers a cheaper and easier way to integrate cloud based offering into apps so they don't have to deal with AWS. Apple could make cloud based offerings a lot easier for smaller developers by building in APIs that use Apple's offering. Leave AWS and its myriad of offerings to big players who need them and cater to smaller developers needs and wants.

 

[vegetassj4]

Apple Launches iCloud UltraCore to Compete with AWS, Insists “Services Revenue Needs Friends”
by Chip Biter, Senior Cloud Speculator

Cupertino, CA — In a move that has cloud professionals everywhere choking on their free-tier AWS credits, Apple announced today that it will be “competing directly” with Amazon Web Services through a newly reimagined iCloud for Enterprise offering dubbed iCloud UltraCore™ — because nothing says “enterprise-ready” like a name that sounds like a protein powder.

“Apple is proud to enter the cloud infrastructure space 18 years late,” said Apple SVP of Software Foghorn McGlass during a keynote that involved a lot of slowly rotating white cubes and upbeat marimba tones. “We believe developers want a cloud that’s not only powerful and secure, but also... beautiful.”

Details on the service were vague, but according to Apple’s press release, iCloud UltraCore will offer:

• Elastic Instance Pricing: Starting at just $49.99/month per core, unless you exceed 5GB of data transfer, in which case your iTunes account is locked and your Genmoji privileges are revoked.
• Seamless Integration with Apple Intelligence™: So your cloud services can auto-correct themselves mid-deployment.
• Storage so secure you can’t even access it: Apple promises “zero-touch backups,” mostly because users have no idea where anything is stored or how to retrieve it.
• Apple Vision Pro Data Centers: All operations are run via Vision Pro interfaces by unpaid interns waving at holograms in abandoned Apple Stores.

Analysts were... skeptical.

“Apple’s idea of cloud computing is what happens when Tim Cook asks Siri how to upload a keynote to Dropbox,” said Lydia Rust, senior analyst at TechFarce. “They’re building the cloud like they built iMessage for Android: entirely in PowerPoint.”

Meanwhile, Amazon responded by launching a new service called “AWS Cupertino,” a single server in a shipping container parked across the street from Apple Park that already supports 12 Fortune 500 companies, 9 AI startups, and a suspiciously fast Starbucks app.

When asked if Apple would support open standards like Kubernetes, a spokesperson calmly wiped their black turtleneck and said, “We don’t really do... open.”

Still, Apple remains confident.

“We’re not here to replace AWS,” said McGlass. “We’re just here to offer a more courageous alternative.”

No word yet on whether iCloud UltraCore will support Windows, Android, or reality.

 

[sherwinzadeh]

As a developer I'd love to be able to use macOS APIs in the cloud. Even though Swift now runs on Linux, you have to use 3rd party packages that substitute macOS features. Would love to be able to have a graphics engine in the backend running Metal processing to support some of my apps, for example. Or AVFoundation to do video processing in the cloud.

 

[john123]

I generally support Apple toying with the idea of new products and markets, but this idea is laughably bad. I see a lot of discussion about iCloud in the comments, but that use case is a tiny sliver of AWS revenue.

The “S” in AWS stands for “services,” not “storage.” Amazon would say it’s a platform. (I’ll avoid the semantics debate about what is and isn’t a “platform” myself.) Either way, AWS is much more than the things people initially think about such as S3 and Glacier (storage). A big part of the value prop is the service side (Lambda is one example).

Anyway, so sure, the entire point of k8s, Docker, and related “stuff” is scalability and ease of deployment. And so a medium size business or enterprise business probably *could* move over to Apple without a massive headache. But it also wouldn’t be trivial, as anyone who has done the AWS/Google dance already knows. So…why would you? Especially when you’re likely already hiring DevOps and SRE people with significant AWS experience?

There are situations where a company might have a good shot at unseating a monolithic competitor, and there are hundreds of examples of that kind of success. There’s no viable narrative I can think of here. The benefits would be few and the switching costs too high.

Of course, it’s possible what’s contemplated is a very tiny, limited platform. But at that point…why bother?

 

[bradman83]

Especially since the cost for iCloud storage right now is substantially higher than competitors

Apple's iCloud storage pricing is almost exactly in line with Google and Dropbox, at least in the US market.

 

[dcjames]

Apple doesn't need to compete across all of AWS' offerings, offer enterprise cloud solutions, or even abandon it for some of theirs. Judging fromTFA, it would be about giving developers a cheaper and easier way to integrate cloud based offering into apps so they don't have to deal with AWS. Apple could make cloud based offerings a lot easier for smaller developers by building in APIs that use Apple's offering. Leave AWS and its myriad of offerings to big players who need them and cater to smaller developers needs and wants.

Smaller developers are using AWS. They are not going to change. Nobody is going to switch to (or adopt from the outset) an Apple proprietary service with APIs that work with Apple's (i/iPad/mac/tv/etc)OS SDKs, just like Android Developers haven't adopted GCP en masse. Bifurcation of the backend cloud service from the app platform is a feature, not a bug.

 

[jcook793]

As someone who has been using AWS all-day-everyday for over a decade now, there is just no way in hell Apple could compete with AWS at all. It's just so far removed from what they do, they'd have to hire a massive amount of people to even get started and it would take many years to even get close to feature parity on a small subset of AWS offerings.

The popular saying is "the cloud is just someone else's computers", but if you say that then you've really not done it.