MobileMe Revamp to Focus on Streaming Data From Individual Machines, Not Cloud?

[sanford]

This is silly. 100GB -- all of which will be consumed by a small minority of MobileMe users -- costs pennies to serve these days. Just check out any unlimited hosting service, providing no ceiling for a few bucks a month. Flash memory still costs a bundle, sure, but data-center drive arrays, no, not really.

And Jimbo should bear in mind, they're not storing a copy of every song and every movie owned by every MobileMe user. They're storing one, or depending on streaming demands, a few copies of those songs and movies. It's your rights to play them back on-demand as you choose that you unlock by locally owning the media.

Has Lala been gone so long everyone has forgotten how it worked?

 

[satcomer]

Apple doesn't give a flying leap about MobileMe! The already released "Find My Phone" to every iPhone user so that advantage of MobileMe went out the window.

So Apple better pull a rabbit out their collective MobileMe hat or DropBox is in my futures and I will pay real money DropBox Pro services! Just don't get started on that terrible iDisk monstrosity!

 

[aloshka]

I actually like this idea

Flame me all you want, I like this idea. Especially if the iphone nano will really exist. I mean with ipad, etc, my need for full featured phone is dying. Same with a laptop. My mac pro handles everything and I use mac book air to rdp into it for any work i need.

Ideally if they would fix their remoting, i'd be happy. It's a little stupid that it's just VNC.

 

[fpnc]

This is a brilliant plan! You store your media on your hard drive in your home and Apple gets to charge you for accessing that media over the internet?

Not going to happen unless the service is completely free and open to everyone.

Besides that, as others have noted, the upload rate from most ISPs in the U.S. is pretty terrible. I've never seen more than 400Kbps uploads from either a Road Runner cable service (15Mbps download rated) or a premium AT&T DSL service (3Mbps download rated).

 

[aloshka]

This is a brilliant plan! You store your media on your hard drive in your home and Apple gets to charge you for accessing that media over the internet?

Not going to happen unless the service is completely free and open to everyone.

Besides that, as others have noted, the upload rate from most ISPs in the U.S. is pretty terrible. I've never seen more than 400Kbps uploads from either a Road Runner cable service (15Mbps download rated) or a premium AT&T DSL service (3Mbps download rated).

lol, well if you put it that way yeah it sucks. I think they should just give it away free for anyone who buys a mac. I don't really care since i'm already paying for the email address and the mobileme syncing. I don't think it's worth $69/year, but it works. If they add this service to it and not charge anymore, I think i'm all for it.

 

[sldsnk]

Wrong

I know that everyone is tired from hearing that the cloud is the future but hear me out! Where I work (very large Corp) our IT department is working hard into deploying some kind of cloud computing system. I was told that it was driven mainly by people wanting to use their iPads for work. It will be setup so everyone can provide their own hardware. Owning the cloud market means more iPad sales for apple. I bet they are working on something that will leave everyone 2 years behind trying to catch up just like what they did with the iPhone and the iPad. I may be right or wrong but Apple has more cool stuff for us to buy!

 

[JPhillips173]

First off who needs a 100 gigs?

They could offer 20GB for free, with options to pay for 40,60,80,100,150,200....

I don't know if anybody else noticed but they built a massive server farm like almost 2 years ago...
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/22/aerial-footage-of-apples-north-carolina-data-center/


My bet is a cloud based streaming service that is free (for 20GB).
I mean GMail gives you 7.5gb for free and they don't want you to buy anything(itunes), 20 is not that crazy.
As far as hosting the stuff on your machine and apple having access to it & you connecting to mobile me to get to your own home computer....... Ridiculous to say the least.

 

[class77]

Apple needs to perfect syncing on MobileMe before branching out to something else. For Pete's sake, they haven't even updated Contacts(ala Calendar & Mail) on the regular MobileMe accounts and still have massive syncing problems which I am currently experiencing. Extremely frustrating.

 

[HiRez]

We have questions about how such a service would be embraced by increasingly mobile computer users who are likely to use notebook not always awake and connected to the Internet as their primary machines

Not to mention people who don't even have or want a desktop or laptop at all, which is a number that's increasing each year. Of course this is at odds with Apple's best interests, as I'm sure they want everyone with an iOS device to buy and maintain a tethered desktop machine. That's just becoming increasingly cumbersome for many people though. If you only want an iPad, does it make sense to buy a $500+ desktop machine just to be able to use and update it, essentially doubling the price?

iDisk sucks ass, they need to just buy DropBox (which I assume would amount to pocket change for them) and be done with it.

 

[theLimit]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I hope this means an Apple iTunes Server/NAS is on the way. I've been using my old AppleTV with Leopard installed for this purpose. It's small, quiet, and uses very little power, but there's no need for a full desktop OS just to run iTunes and connect USB drives. A smarter Time Capsule would fit the bill nicely.

 

[mechanesthesia]

This is BS. I do not OWN a desktop. I believe desktops are obsolete and have been shifted to laptops and laptops have been shifted to netbooks/tablets.

But everyone know you can't leave a laptop on 24/7

 

[Eric S.]

One of the major benefits of "cloud computing" is having it managed by someone else and that it is always on and always available. If I have to manage the system myself (backups etc.) and can't put my notebook to sleep when not being used etc. or if I have to reconfigure everything again if I change that "host" computer, then it really isn't cloud computing.

Exactly; the whole reason I want "cloudy" data is that it's always available but I don't have to carry it around with me, and it's backed up by someone else.

Long live the desktop!

I agree but mine certainly isn't always on.

 

[Nuvi]

First off who needs a 100 gigs?

They could offer 20GB for free, with options to pay for 40,60,80,100,150,200....

I don't know if anybody else noticed but they built a massive server farm like almost 2 years ago...
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/22/aerial-footage-of-apples-north-carolina-data-center/


My bet is a cloud based streaming service that is free (for 20GB).
I mean GMail gives you 7.5gb for free and they don't want you to buy anything(itunes), 20 is not that crazy.
As far as hosting the stuff on your machine and apple having access to it & you connecting to mobile me to get to your own home computer....... Ridiculous to say the least.

Most could use way more then 100GB. The real idea behind the cloud is to have all your data there so its easily accessible. Regarding free MobileMe, it will never happen. Apple is not Google.

 

[GregA]

Microsoft is already referring to the act of accessing files on your home computer from a remote location as going "to the cloud!" (when they really mean "thru the intertubes"). So the terminology has already been twisted away from its original meaning.

Actually the cloud was meant to mean "somewhere out there, who knows where". It was used when there wasn't a specific server... or it wasn't important to know where. People would draw a cloud to say to obscure and simplify.

So if I wanted to get my file, but couldn't tell if it came from my home computer, or the cloud, or a friend's house - that could be considered "coming from somewhere in the cloud".

THE CLOUD IS A LIE

Seriously... People have to get real and stop all this crap about the cloud. Stream your music library 24/7? We are still decades before that becomes even likely, telco-wise...

The cloud certainly won't come as people expect. And I hate the idea of being permanently online.. our wireless networks would be crushed under the pressure.

But a system with partial syncs could work well. If my iPhone has most of what I need that's enough. If I have a MacBook Air with most of my files but can get the rest from the cloud if required - great.

For the price we all pay for MobileMe It should come with 100Gb of storage

If this rumour has any substance, I imagine we'll see multiple layers of MobileMe. That would include a free version (acting largely as a co-ordinator of connections & syncing between devices), a small storage option (caching the most used items onto Apple servers plus co-ordinate for the rest), and a large storage option (which has a full backup of my data).

It may be that by having all the data's primary location on a user's computer, but with Apple's server farm offering a "backup", that streaming music and video will be legal.

the music that I didn't buy from iTunes, which is the huge, huge majority.

Apple bought Lala, which was able to recognise a users copy of a song - then supply access to Lala's own copy of that song for streaming. I believe they also were looking at a way to recognise 2 users' identical local copies of their CDs and then just upload 1 copy for either user.

 

[Bubba Satori]

This is a joke, right?