October 12, 2011: Apple launches iCloud, a service that lets users automatically and wirelessly store content and push it to their various devices.
iCloud’s arrival marks the end of Apple’s Mac-centric “digital hub” strategy — and ushers in an age of inter-device communication and non-localized files.
August 4, 2008: Steve Jobs owns up to mistakes in launching MobileMe, spinning Apple’s bungled cloud service rollout as a learning opportunity.
“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs writes in an email to Apple employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”
July 1, 2012: Apple shuts down its MobileMe web service, pushing users to switch to iCloud.
Launched in 2008, Apple’s subscription-based suite of online services and software includes features like Find My iPhone, a MobileMe photo gallery, chat facilities, an online calendar, storage and other cloud-based services.
After letting it limp along for four years, Cupertino finally decides to pull the plug, giving MobileMe users until the end of July to remove their data from the service.
If you haven’t been scared off cloud services by the Fappening or past horrors like MobileMe, you might want to try iCloud Drive, Apple’s answer to Dropbox and Google Drive. It’s a pretty great concept, an extension of the Apple philosophy from way back – documents are identified by the apps they were created by. Before, though, you needed to export a file from a drawing app to use it with a painting app. With iCloud Drive, you’ll be able to move from one app to another much more easily.
Before you begin, make sure you’ve read and understand the warning about using iCloud Drive if you haven’t yet installed OS X Yosemite on your Mac. If you haven’t installed the Yosemite public beta, apps on your iOS 8 devices will be unable to share data with companion apps on your Mac. Consider yourself warned.
If you choose to enable iCloud Drive on your iOS 8 device, and you have an OS X Yosemite beta installed on your Mac, here’s how to use it the right way.
Today’s the day you’ll probably have to start paying for iCloud storage, folks — if you’re a former MobileMe subscriber, anyway. After giving us 25GB of iCloud storage absolutely free for two years, Apple has now ended the offer and dropped all non-paying iCloud users down to the basic 5GB plan.
If you need more than that, you’ll have to sign up for a subscription from today.
If you were a MobileMe customer enticed to join the iCloud by Apple’s offer of 20GB of free storage, get ready to pony up for more: Apple is emailing people telling them to prepare to start paying for iCloud storage come September 20th.
The cloud storage wars continue with a new tweet from Microsoft’s SkyDrive Twitter account. The service, typically offering seven gigabytes of online storage for free, just made an offer Apple’s jilted MobileMe members might not be able to refuse.
In a tweet today, @SkyDrive offered anyone who could forward the Apple downgrade email to a special SkyDrive email address would receive an extra 15GB of Microsoft’s own cloud storage system for one year for free.
Remember MobileMe? When Apple transitioned to iCloud, MobileMe users with paid plans were coaxed over with 20GB of complimentary storage. Apple had originally planned to take the free gigabytes away on September 30th, 2012, but the deadline got pushed back another year.
In an email to affected customers today, Apple reminds everyone that the free storage promotion comes to an actual end this year on September 30th.
“When it expires, your iCloud storage will be automatically adjusted to the free 5 GB plan,” explains Apple. “If you exceed your storage plan on September 30, 2013, iCloud Backup, Documents in the Cloud, and iCloud Mail will temporarily stop working.”
If you need more storage than 5GB, you can upgrade your iCloud plan now.
Before the disastrous launch of Apple Maps, one of Apple’s biggest failures of all-time was the launch of MobileMe. Apple set a group of engineers out to rebrand .Mac and create a new cloud-based product that totally fell over the night it launched.
Steve Jobs famously met with the entire MobileMe team in the campus auditorium and fired the manger of the project on the spot. Then he told everyone, “you’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation … You should hate each other for having let each other down.” It was one of Steve Jobs’ most famous tough-leader moments, but according to one insider, Steve should have been yelling at himself because the MobileMe launch failure was really his fault.
Cult of Mac received an email today with some exciting news: Apple is extending the special offer of extra iCloud storage for all MobileMe customers who haven’t made the transition, yet. The extra upgrade was supposed to expire on September 30th of this year, but will now expire in 2013 on the same date.
When Apple was doing its damnedest to kick people out of MobileMe in June this year and get them to use iCloud instead, one of the incentives they gave the soon-to-be disposessed was a free offer that former MobileMe members would get 20GB of iCloud storage gratis, instead of the 5GB Apple gives the rest of us suckers. But it was only for a limited time, until September 30, 2012.
Looks like Apple may have extended their offer, though. Some iCloud usersare now noticing that they’ve got 25GB of iCloud storage to play around with until September 30, 2050, when their free 20GB should have been snatched away from them yesterday. Even more interesting is that some non-MobileMe users are seeing the same deal, and have found themselves getting a free 20GB bump in storage.
When Apple launched iCloud last year, it killed off MobileMe and provided paid subscribers with 20GB of free iCloud storage when they migrated to the new service. Most of us have been using that storage to back up our iOS devices, but like most good things, it’s coming to an end. The company has now begun emailing previous MobileMe customers to inform them that their free storage will be no more come September 30.
I don’t use iCloud too intensively, mostly because I’d have to pay for extra storage and I already got 50GB on Dropbox. But if I were an Apple employee I’d probably use it until the wheels fall off because now Apple is giving all of their employees a free 50GB upgrade for their iCloud strorage accounts.
Along with today’s launch of iOS 6 Beta 3, Apple has started to roll out iCloud.com email addresses to developers. When iOS users signed up for iCloud in the past they received an email address @me.com. Now that MobileMe has been shut down, Apple is starting to transition over to @iCloud.com email addresses.
Apple has been warning users about the imminent death of MobileMe since last year, and July 1st 2012 marks the day MobileMe shuts down for good. MobileMe’s iDisk and Gallery features have also been axed in favor of Apple’s newer iCloud offerings.
The good news is that MobileMe users still have the chance to retrieve and migrate their data to iCloud. Apple has made it easy to make the transition, and files can be saved directly from existing MobileMe Galleries and iDisks before it’s too late.
On Sunday, MobileMe will be dead, and anyone who is still using MobileMe and not Apple’s replacement service, iCloud, will be forcibly evicted. That means anyone still using MobileMe either needs to transition to iCloud and/or copy all data stored in their MobileMe accounts to their Mac or PC. Any files stored in MobileMe’s range of services that can’t be converted to iCloud will be deleted. If you opt not to use iCloud, all data in your MobileMe account will be deleted.
Although iCloud offers several advances over MobileMe, there are some MobileMe services that don’t have direct iCloud equivalents. These include MobileMe Galleries for sharing photos and videos, website creation using Apple’s iWeb, and iDisk remote storage and file sharing. File and information sync is available using iCloud, but the functionality is implemented a bit differently than in MobileMe. In addition, users still using Snow Leopard also can’t upgrade to iCloud.
It’s a tricky problem for thousands of users. There isn’t a single online service that delivers quite the same mix of features and functionality that Apple offered with MobileMe, but by combining some apps and services, you can get pretty close to MobileMe’s feature set. We’ve gone through all of the main competitors to try to find the best services for the soon-to-be dispossessed MobileMe subscriber.
As you’re probably aware, MobileMe shuts down on June 30, and along with it will go hundreds of thousands of users public webpages, photo galleries, and iDisk folders. In an effort to save this data, the Archiveteam has downloaded all of it. That’s a whopping 272 Terabytes, not Gigabytes, of data.
Cloud storage accounts for just 7% of our digital content according to Gartner the industry research firm. Given the ubiquity of cloud services and their ability to sync personal data, photos, documents, and just about everything else with our iPhone, iPads, Mac, PCs, and other devices, that number may sound a bit small. After all, the range of content that iCloud is capable of syncing in Lion and iOS 5 isn’t exactly minor.
Gartner also predicts that the percentage of the average user’s digital property will grow to more than five times that by 2016. At that point, the firm sees most users store more that a third (36%) of their digital content in various clouds. That news isn’t exactly surprising for Apple customers. Apple is making a major push for seamless iCloud integration in Mountain Lion and iOS 6. That said, the firm’s report digital storage does have a few surprises in it. In some ways the report shows that Apple is leading rather than following the personal cloud industry.
Apple began sending out MobileMe eviction notices last week. The notices remind anyone still using MobileMe that they have until the end of June to transition to iCloud and/or copy all data stored in their MobileMe accounts to their Mac or PC. Any files stored in MobileMe’s range of services that can’t be converted to iCloud will be deleted. If you opt not to use iCloud, all data in your MobileMe account will be deleted.
Although iCloud offers several advances over MobileMe, there are some MobileMe services that don’t have direct iCloud equivalents. These include MobileMe Galleries for sharing photos and videos, website creation using Apple’s iWeb, and iDisk remote storage and file sharing. File and information sync is available using iCloud, but the functionality is implemented a bit differently than in MobileMe.
There isn’t a single online service that delivers quite the same mix of features and functionality that Apple offered with MobileMe but by combining some apps and services, you can get pretty close to MobileMe’s feature set.
Apple is hell bent on detonating their MobileMe service on June 30th. If you’re still using it, they want you out, and now. Earlier this morning Apple sent email notices to customers who still use MobileMe, iWeb, and iDisk instead of iCloud and told them to pack their lovely treasures and head over to Me.com before everything gets lost in a digital fireball of destruction in 30days.
Continuing the company’s efforts to transition existing MobileMe users away from the now-defunct service to iCloud, Apple has extended the deadline for customers to take advantage of free iCloud storage amounting to 20GB. MobileMe users with 20GB or more of files have had access to 20GB of free iCloud storage for months, with the extra storage space set to expire in June of 2012. After the deadline, users transitioning away from MobileMe have the option to purchase the 20GB iCloud plan for $20 per year or default to the free 5GB plan.
In an update to its FAQ page, Apple has quietly extended the free storage deadline from June to September of 2012.
Apple finally gave the notice that it would be killing off MobileMe once and for all on June 30th, 2012. The soon-to-be-defunct service has already been replaced with iCloud, but Mac users who are still not running an OS X version older than Snow Leopard can’t hop on the bandwagon. You must have Snow Leopard installed to then install OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and gain access to iCloud. And chances are that if you’re still using MobileMe, you aren’t running the latest version of OS X.
Apple has announced that it is shutting down iWork.com on July 31st. The website was a beta product that Apple launched back in 2009 to store documents created with its iWork productivity suite. Since then, iCloud has been introduced to let you keep your documents wirelessly synced across devices, and there is no need for iWork.com anymore.
After a German court ruling earlier this month that deemed Apple’s push email services for iCloud (and MobileMe) infringe upon a Motorola patent, the Cupertino company has been forced to disable the service in Germany.
As Apple pulls us all forward into the Next Great Thing, some widely-used Previously Cool Things get left behind. It’s happened with HyperCard, PageMill, and all PowerPC-only applications. Today one reader ponders the uncertain future of his favorite program, iWeb:
I bought my first Mac in ’85… Being an Old’nAging Geezer I saw that an encroaching Class of ’61’s 50-year Reunion deserved a website so I volunteered, commandeering iWeb for the very first time (successfully aided by FileZilla and my generous wonky Mac-pal Greg) to ultimately be rewarded by several of my classmates and a few fanboys’ sporadic kudos–AND proving once again that old, time-proven saw of Macintosh’s unassailable user friendly superiority.
All that to bring me to this QUESTION: Will iWeb live?