Allan HoffmanI'm used to writing about Apple's world-changing successes.
The iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. These products have revolutionized entire industries and the way we communicate. They've come to define Apple as a company known for breathtaking innovations and magical technology. Even detractors want to know: What's up next for Apple?
Unfortunately, this is not a column about another Apple success.
This is a column about an Apple failure.
It's called iCloud, and it's nothing like it was advertised to be. Not even close. Apple unveiled iCloud last June, with Steve Jobs, in what would be his final keynote at an Apple event, explaining how the company would be moving "the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud." With iCloud, you'd be able to have automatic and effortless access to your photos, documents, contacts, and more from all of your devices. I really wish I could say iCloud lived up to his words -- I've been rooting for it -- but it hasn't.
At the time, an article at CNBC proclaimed the significance of iCloud: "This is the most important Apple announcement in recent memory." The article was prescient in noting the risk for Apple in failing at its foray into cloud computing -- that is, the use of online services and storage to manage our digital lives. If iCloud succeeded, Apple would be competing with Google on that company's home turf. And if not? "Jobs will have given the world a peek at Apple's Achilles heel."
That's what appears to have happened.
The various pieces of iCloud have been released in recent months, and I'm not impressed. In fact, I've been frustrated, more than anything else, when using iCloud. Apple talked this up like it would do for the cloud what it did for music and the phone, and it hasn't, not by a long shot.
To give you a taste of what was promised, here are just a few quotes from Steve Jobs from the iCloud announcement:
"Now everything's in sync with me not even having to think about it."
"Everything happens automatically, and there's nothing new to learn."
"It just works."
Let's get this straight:
You have to think about it (and even then, things may not be in sync).
It's not automatic.
There's a lot to learn.
It doesn't work (well, not always, which is pretty much the same thing).
Just consider my own hassles in getting iCloud to sync my contacts between my iPhone, my MacBook and the web-based iCloud service. As Jobs noted in his keynote, when you update a contact anywhere, whether on your Mac or an iPod, it should be updated on all devices. Seems simple enough.
"The truth is on the cloud," Jobs said.
But the truth isn't in the cloud, at least not for me. I'm not sure where it is. I haven't found it.
I just know this. When I delete a contact in my Macintosh address book, it's not deleted in the cloud -- where the truth, Apple-style, should reside. Or, I should say, sometimes it's deleted there (and on my iPhone), and sometimes it's not. In this case, "sometimes" means the service doesn't really work.
I wanted to do a gut-check to make sure my experience with iCloud wasn't a complete aberration.
It's not.
As one commentator, Brad Peters, put it recently at Forbes.com, iCloud is "difficult to use," "erratic" and "broken in places." My brother-in-law had a similar take. He said he was "utterly befuddled by the transition," lost random contacts ("there was no rhyme or reason to it") and found the photos-in-the-cloud piece of iCloud not at all intuitive.
And this is from diehard Apple fans (with degrees from Harvard and Yale, I should note). What do you need to get iCloud to work? A computer science degree from MIT?
We've come to expect a lot from Apple, especially in terms of simplicity and ease of use. But iCloud just doesn't cut it.
It just works?
Not yet it doesn't.
Allan Hoffman may be reached via his website, allanhoffman.com.