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And a connection speed of only 1-3mbps (very realistic in many hotels across the western and eastern world, from someone [me] who spends 4/7 nights a week in hotels for work), where streaming reliably isn't possible or the iPad caches are too insignificant to maintain the stream well enough

I agree - the last hotel I stayed in was in a semi-rural location and I could not get 4G on my iPhone. Even so, the pitifully slow 3G I was getting was still around five times faster than the hotel’s wifi - even though their router was located just outside the door to my room. The figures I got from speedtest.net were simply laughable. In the end I just switched wifi off as it kept trying to take priority over cellular. As I have a 'wifi only' iPad, that just stayed in my bag.
 
I've been waiting for some of these features to be integrated into OS X and iOS since I bought my first time capsule and iPad back in 2011.

I don't see why the iOS devices (with their Desktop Quality 64-bit processors) are incapable of using Back to My Mac to connect up to a home Mac or a storage volume on a time capsule's hdd or a nas hdd connected to an airport router via usb.

And for those folks who don't need a Mac, I don't understand why it is not possible to back up an iOS device directly to a time capsule.

The hardware is all in place, absent a strategic decision by apple to not support such storage and access with native apple hw and sw, only the software is lacking.

At the same time, Apple seems both at risk of being behind the competition in providing such solutions as well as being frustratingly close to stealing a march on them by implementing such low hanging fruit.




+1

You took the words right out of my mouth my friend. I understand your point and totally agree... :)
 
"Cloud" must be the most over used term if 2014/2015

How can a single local backup drive be a 'cloud'

You are right in the overuse of the term.

However, it is still considered a "private" or "personal" cloud as it is more than just a NAS device. It can be accessed locally/remotely and with a little more intelligence that can be accessed via it's own API (proprietary maybe, not sure).

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/.../en-us/doc/personal-cloud-ds1838-1-1501us.pdf

I personally won't buy one but I can see some people who would love to have one of these.

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The hardware is all in place, absent a strategic decision by apple to not support such storage and access with native apple hw and sw, only the software is lacking.

I think that this is their strategy ... but I completely agree with you.
 
Steel

Seagate's most notable product this year is the Seagate Seven, which the company is calling the world's thinnest 500GB portable hard drive. At just 7mm thick, it uses Seagate's latest mobile hard drive technology and is aimed at tech enthusiasts who want the thinnest devices. With a brushed aluminum finish, the hard drive is ultra portable and is, according to Seagate, the culmination of 35 years of experience.

The Seven is steel, not aluminum.
 
Nope. Not until apple changes something.

If Apple had created this, especially the notion of a drive for having media etc accessible on your device but not on it, that space lawsuit might make more sense. They are arguiing that Apple is bloating iOS 8 to force folks to buy more icloud. But icloud isn't about extending space so much as mirroring devices as a backup. If these drives were Apple, they might have an argument. Then again, even with this being third party they might try to claim Apple did it to push these items

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Imagine that your hotel room comes with free WiFi... welcome to 2015.

Most still don't. I've been at $600 a night hotels that made you pay for in room wifi.

And even if it is free, it's not always fast. Often one network covers a whole floor if not the whole hotel. So if you are trying to watch a movie, having the option to have it on a drive might be appealing to some. If it isn't appealing to you, don't buy the drive. You don't have to after all
 
Seagate Can Keep It

Had nothing but trouble with Seagate drives no longer will I buy them from the cheap ones to the expensive all fail very early.
 
Can I move apps from my 16GB iPad onto this external drive and run them straight off that, or do they have to be resident on the iPad to run?

Apps have to be on the iPad.

Remember for this work you have to use a connection app. So you would be trying to run on IOS app off an outside drive from within another app. An app that wasnt made for such use
 

Why was I quoted here?

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If Apple had created this, especially the notion of a drive for having media etc accessible on your device but not on it, that space lawsuit might make more sense. They are arguiing that Apple is bloating iOS 8 to force folks to buy more icloud. But icloud isn't about extending space so much as mirroring devices as a backup. If these drives were Apple, they might have an argument. Then again, even with this being third party they might try to claim Apple did it to push these items

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Most still don't. I've been at $600 a night hotels that made you pay for in room wifi.

And even if it is free, it's not always fast. Often one network covers a whole floor if not the whole hotel. So if you are trying to watch a movie, having the option to have it on a drive might be appealing to some. If it isn't appealing to you, don't buy the drive. You don't have to after all

I'm simply referring to being able to access files natively from an external drive on iOS, in any form. Nothing more. I doubt anything will come of the lawsuit as it stands and I don't see why this would change things. There is no actual legitimate argument in that lawsuit anyway. Apple didn't force a single person to buy any one storage size. In with everyone in my disappointment that I couldn't save $100 for an entry level device is as strong as the next guy, but such is life.
 
This stores files on a single hard located (presumably) in your home.

How is this cloud storage? It isn't really. Just a network drive accessible over the internet.

You still have a single point of failure, unlike what true cloud services provide.

You do realize that a cloud is just a drive accessible over the internet. With Seagate, they're putting the hard drive in your home instead of California.
 
Uh, with online storage (Dropbox, Mozy, heck even iCloud), why the heck do I want to carry around this green sponge, with limited battery life, and be forced to use some junko proprietary app? Pointless.

The hard drive looks promising. Then again, Seagate needs to do something, since 256 GB USB 3.0 thumb drives are rapidly falling at or below the $200 mark. Soon they will eat Seagate's lunch if Corsair and others can get the prices a little lower.

How much does 2 TB cost with Dropbox? And not everybody is always within the reach of Wifi or an unlimited cell connection.
 
The big problem here is that these devices are all based on Seagate drives, which have failed me far more often than any other brand, consistently and throughout the years.
 
I bought a Synology Diskstation recently and it's been a huge boon to the household. I can stream media from anywhere, get to my files, admin the server (because that's what it is), create users, set permissions, move files around etc from my *phone*. It also has it's own Dropbox type app called cloudstation that works in the same way (synching a local folder and one on the server) and it has no size restrictions other than the capacity of the hard drives you put in it.

You can also connect cameras to it and use it as a home surveillance system. It hosts my music library which is accessed by Sonos, as well as Movies and TV stuff which get beamed to the Apple TV.

Personal clouds are the way to go IMHO. Central storage that you can always get to but which you own and have direct control over rocks. Also, once you've set it up, there's no ongoing monthly cost like Dropbox and iCloud.

I think every home should have a Synology Diskstation :)
 
"Cloud" must be the most over used term if 2014/2015

How can a single local backup drive be a 'cloud'

Cloud is anything accessed over the Internet. If you access this while you are away from home, it is in the cloud at that moment.
 
Imagine that your hotel room comes with free WiFi... welcome to 2015.

Imagine you're on there road in Utah or the Colorado mountains or one of the hundred thousand square miles of space left in just the US that is "off the grid".

Imagine that your power is out for the week. You have a generator, but the Net is toast until further notice.

Dale
 
Does this make 64 GB and 128 GB Redundent?

Hope the 16 GB cheaper models may force people to move the content out of the iPhone to such WiFi receiver (if it is possible). If this becomes reality, then you do not need to store it in iPhone and you do not have to buy expensive 128 GB iPhones! But I am sure this may not be possible which probably defeats the purpose other than merely storing the copy of your iPhone data! In which case, I do not see this as a compelling one to have!
 
So who here thinks it is high time apple address this issue with a dongle that lets you connect like a sd card for videos or music. I get the game is more space higher profit but clearly that is not working. They keep getting sued. So me thinks it is time for them to just let me attach a dongle for storage when I need it and not have to burn battery two times over to get to my data cause they want to force me into a larger product.
 
I'll leave alone the remarks as to whether people like or dislike Seagate. If Apple's ATV could be used without iTunes natively it would serve the consumer. If i-devices took SD cards for additional storage we would be less a slave to the alternatives like external drives and "cloud" and so on. However, to do so would give people options would be contrary to Apple's Marketing Model where they tell us how to live, what we want and that we must always buy more Apple to get the latest as nothing is all that upgradable.

Until then, Seagate along with others will offer alternatives that may or may not be as convenient as people really want and that Apple should have provided all along.
 
Imagine that your hotel room comes with free WiFi... welcome to 2015.

I'm imagining it. But that's about it. Most hotels, esp. outside the U.S. do not offer free WiFi. Marriott offers it IF you sign up for there frequent traveler program. Hilton offers it IF you book on their site or are a gold or higher in their FT program. Some Courtyards offer it, but very hit or miss. Maybe some boutique places.

What major hotel brands offer free WiFi, no strings attached? Also if you use public WiFi you need a VPN to be secure where as you are automatically secure using local storage w/ WiFi off.
 
I've been waiting for some of these features to be integrated into OS X and iOS since I bought my first time capsule and iPad back in 2011.

I don't see why the iOS devices (with their Desktop Quality 64-bit processors) are incapable of using Back to My Mac to connect up to a home Mac or a storage volume on a time capsule's hdd or a nas hdd connected to an airport router via usb.
There is home sharing which officially only works on the local network but there are ways to enable that over the internet (tried that out already ten years ago with a PC, could be more difficult on iOS). One reason it's enabled by Apple only for the local network has always been the 'fear' of (music) pirating (originally it allowed ten guests but this was later reduced, for the same reasons, to five if I remember it correctly). Then there is iTunes Match, ideally that would be extended to videos. Its advantage is that it is streaming from Apple servers not from your home computer which might have a slow upload speed or be switched off. But matching ripped movies is likely more tricky than doing it for music as the movie coverage of the iTunes store is much more patchy than the music coverage (which in itself is because of legal reasons, which only would get more complicated when Apple tried to match ripped movies).

And also for general file access, a server has speed and availability advantages over access to a home computer (the former of which online backup services like Backblaze offer). Then there are things like accessing images from within a Lightroom catalogue. You'd either do that via screen sharing (which with a touch screen is not the greatest experience) or create a LR companion app for iOS (much better).

And for those folks who don't need a Mac, I don't understand why it is not possible to back up an iOS device directly to a time capsule.
If you have a TC, it presumably is hooked up to some internet access. Isn't backing up to iCloud thus a good enough solution? The TC, as it is, is way too simplistic a device (CPU and 'OS') to back up iOS devices. It is not as if an iOS device can back itself up just to any storage connected to it (eg, on a Mac it needs iTunes to do it).

The hardware is all in place, absent a strategic decision by apple to not support such storage and access with native apple hw and sw, only the software is lacking.
As, I just said, the hardware is not in place if you think of the TC. The AppleTV might be able to do it as it runs a version of iOS but its hardware is pretty old (A5 processor, current iPhones have an A8 processor) in comparison.
 
They keep getting sued.

Apple keeps getting sued because they are a big fat juicy target. No matter what Apple does or doesn't do they are likely to get sued for it. Some cases have merit but most, as we see, do not.

It's rather ironic that the story below talks about the increasing popularity of streaming music and people think internal storage is a widely affecting issue. Surely streaming video is up there too. Storage isn't really a problem for Apple and these ext drives fill a niche for users that do need additional space that isn't critical to be stored on the device. They aren't likely to be blockbuster sellers. Apple could offer an external storage slot. I doubt that would materially increase sales but it would lower its margins or increase the consumer end cost.
 
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