Why You Need the Cloud Right Now


I have a friend who introduced me to the gospel of Apple many years ago. This was in the early days of mp3's and to save money on music storage devices, I had bought some chunky, horrible 1 gig mp3 player (the big selling point for me was 1 gig of storage) with some poor forgotten name like the VD8300c music player or something else equally forgettable, and my friend was just laughing at my problems with trying to get my music onto this piece of junk. At that time he gave me some sage advice which has stayed with me all these years.

"Dude get an Ipod" he said.

I followed his advice and I really couldn't have been any happier. I was sort of proud to lug around two 15 pack cd cases for my 10 disk cd changer to show off my awesome taste in music. I really did have quite a lot of music with me, but the ability to carry "a thousand songs in my pocket" was such a revolutionary change that it was breathtaking.

Which brings us to the cloud....

Last night I was visiting this same friend again and not having seen him in a while tried to casually engage him in conversation.

"So um are you super excited about the cloud?" I asked my friend of many years who I have since watched more than one hour long Steve Jobs pronouncement with.

"What's so great about it" he remarked quite pointedly.

"I'm serious" he said.

"Wireless syncing" I responded tentatively, a bit confused by his lack of enthusiasm.

"I can already do that with Mobile Me" he said. "If my Iphone is anywhere near my laptop it syncs all my information" (Mobile Me costs $99 a year)

"Itunes Match" I countered. "Icloud scans your hard drive for all of your music then it automatically auto updates it to a higher bit rate. It doesn't actually send your actual files to the cloud like the competing Google and Amazon services do, instead it just reads the track listing and gives you a perfect version of that song regardless of whether or not you bought it on Itunes or where you got it from period." (Itunes Match currently charges $25 a year for non Itunes music, but there's reason to believe that won't be a permanent charge)

He laughed.

"The music industry is really gonna love that" he said. "Apple's awesome."

With ICloud they've really done it again; they're introducing a service that you didn't realize you needed but once you have it you'll wonder how you lived without it.

In addition to storing your music online (up to 5 gigs of non Itunes purchased stuff) you'll be able to wirelessly sync your contacts, calenders, mail, and photos like you could with Mobile Me but also your documents, ibooks and a complete list of every app you've ever purchased is stored in the cloud as well for easy retrieval.

And it's free, and it syncs to all your ios devices and computers, and did I mention it's free?

It's going to be revolutionary, and I just can't wait

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