The Promise of iCloud

With WWDC just around the corner I have no doubt that we will soon learn new details about Apple’s plans for iCloud. However, before they make their real announcements, I’d like to throw out some speculation of my own.

  • Guest User
    • What if, similar to enabling a Guest User on your Mac, you could enable iCloud login? 
    • What if you could go up to any Mac (perhaps in an Apple store), log in with your iCloud account, and have access to all of your personal data?
    • Today iCloud has simplified the setup of a new device. You can backup your iPhone or iPad to iCloud, get a new device, and restore your backup to the new device straight from iCloud. Is something similar for your Mac so far away? Is there any reason that would only work for a new device? Why not also with a temporary user account?
    • Today logging into iCloud can give you access to your email, notes, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, documents, and music. In MobileMe you could also sync Dashboard Widgets, Dock Items, and Keychains. With the Mac App Store and the iTunes Store you can download apps, TV shows, and movies that you’ve purchased to additional devices. 
    • How much data on the typical user’s Mac couldn’t already be replicated on a different device via a few logins and a fast network connection?
    • What if a customer with just an iPhone, or just an iPad, wanted to try out a Mac? What if they could try out a Mac with all of their data already on it? What if all the apps on the Mac were similar to the apps they already know?
  • Entertainment
    • With my DVR at home I can start a movie in my living room, pause it, and continue watching in my bedroom.
    • With iBooks I can read a chapter of a book on my iPhone, and continue from the same location on my iPad.
    • Music? Movies? Games? Apps? How long will it be before I can stop worrying about what kind of content I’m dealing with and know that I’ll always be able to use it seamlessly across devices?
  • Hardware, Software, Data
    • Apple is known for making hardware and software that work together seamlessly. 
    • In some ways iCloud is the new hardware. It is the new hard disk where your data is stored. 
    • In some ways iCloud is the new software. It is what the hardware in your hands must communicate with. It is what you see on your hardware. 
    • It is both, and it is neither. It is the new third leg of the Apple stool, and it must become as strong and as well integrated as the hardware and software legs for Apple to support its new weight.
    • Apple has found new levels of success in selling devices that are not Macs, but in doing so they have introduced a whole new group of people to the problems of having multiple devices, and the need to keep data in sync.
    • Microsoft has realized that as users work with multiple devices they must see the same ‘thing’ on each device. They are in the midst of a gamble based on that very premise, but they are wrong. The ‘thing’ that must be the same is not the interface, it is the data.

To be clear, I’m not necessarily suggesting that anything directly related to these items will be announced this week. Instead, I’m speculating about the direction that iCloud is headed.

Three quotes from Steve Jobs at WWDC, in 1997:

I have computers at Apple, at Next, at Pixar, and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory - on the server, and it just is - I’m - I’ve got my stuff wherever I am. Wherever I am. And none of that is on a local hard disk. 

The iCloud of today doesn’t quite do this. What about the iCloud of tomorrow? Steve is talking about four computers that belong to him, but why stop there? Why should you need to be at your own computer to access your data, when your data isn’t on your computer at all?

And some, thin, thinner hardware clients. Hardware clients that are thinner, not necessarily software. That Apple could make that as plug and play for mere mortals as it made the user experience over a decade ago.

Thinner hardware clients? Check. In every sense of the word ‘thinner’.

I can’t communicate to you how awesome this is until you use it. And what you would decide within a day or two is that carrying around these non-connected computers or computers with tons of state in them - tons of data and state in them - is Byzantine by comparison.

Steve was talking about a problem that most people didn’t have, or at least didn’t realize they had. Even now, most people don’t work from more than one computer, or from more than one location. Or at least most people didn’t until they got an iPhone or an iPad. This is the very problem that more and more people are starting to recognize as they integrate new types of devices into their lives.

Apple loves to solve the problems you didn’t know you had.