Apple's iCloud disaster

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 08/22/2012 - 13:37

I hope other iCloud users are having better experiences than I am. From my perspective, it's a mess that makes its mostly awful predecessor, MobileMe, look pretty good by comparison. Here are the problems I am having:

• I was paying $100/year for extra storage space on MobileMe so I could store more backups in the cloud. I still had half a year on my MobileMe subscription, but I have not received so much as an email from Apple explaining (a they are issuing a refund, b) that they gave the same amount of extra space on iCloud, or c) how to contact them to do something about it.
• The instructions for migrating from MobileMe were basically non-existent. All I got was a bunch of un-nerving emails warning me that they were going to pull the plug. Since I had mostly just backups out there, I was not too worried, but I found it very odd that they could not be bothered to tell me more about how to move stuff from one site to the other.
• My calendars still don't sync. My iPhone calendars don't match the OS X Server shared calendar, and has only briefly, from time to time. iCloud was supposed to fix this problem.
• When you purchased a MobileMe subscription, you also got a back up app you ran on your Mac called Backup. You could schedule back ups, and Backup would copy the files to MobileMe. It was painful to actually have to recover a file (one of MobileMe's problems) but it did work. Of course, Backup no longer works, and not word one from Apple about how to replace that functionality.
• iCloud supposedly integrates the to do list app on iPhones with the to do list function contained in the Mac mail client. What iCloud did was create dozens of duplicate to do lists, most of the them empty. When I delete them, they show up again later.
• I had a very useful note taking app that kept all my notes synchronized across three computers by using MobileMe. That synchronization stopped working when iCloud killed MobileMe. I just read a note from the software developers, who were clearly trying to be polite, but basically said, "Apple failed utterly to provide us with the information or tools we need to make our product work with iCloud." And I've been using their software for twenty years--these are some of the smartest software people around.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. iCloud is a big mess. The only thing I notice it does very well is keep your music in sync across several computers. I can buy a song from iTunes on my iPhone, and a few seconds later it is in my iTunes library on my laptop. Leave it to Apple to make sure the big money maker (i.e. selling music) works okay. Everything, not so much. Somebody really should be fired over this.