Have your say about Apple issues
The section of the mag where you get the chance to speak your mind on everything Apple-related
One aspect of my Apple experience I particularly like is the coherence across devices. For example, I can access my Numbers spreadsheets from my MacBook Pro, Mac mini, iPad Air, iPhone 5 – and when I’m at work on my Windows laptop I can access them via a web browser. Well, until September, I could…
One morning I opened up iCloud.com on my Windows laptop, and was advised that to continue to use iWork apps via a browser I had to upgrade to iCloud Drive. The conundrum is: if I don’t upgrade, I can’t use iWork apps via a browser any more; if I do upgrade to iCloud Drive, I will only be able to access my documents from iOS 8 and OS X 10.10.
I was away from home at the time, so doing an immediate iOS 8 upgrade wasn’t desirable. But even if I upgrade to iOS 8 at an early opportunity, OS X 10.10 isn’t out yet. So with no prior warning, Apple had forced a choice upon users. If only they would enable iCloud Drive access on OS X 10.9… after all they released a software upgrade for Windows!
In my mind, this is clearly not the experience Apple is famed for. Friends made comments like “it would have never happened on Steve’s watch”, which left me wondering, now Apple has lost its productand user-experience-focused technology entrepreneur and handed over the reins to its former COO, will it start losing its way? Jamie Cameron
Matt Bolton says: We actually talked about the iCloud Drive switch in our YouTube show, but the short version is that, yes, we completely agree Apple has handled the move to iCloud Drive really poorly. To have launched something like this with any chance that it could wipe your files or leave you without access to them is ridiculous. I think Apple should have left out the iCloud Drive options in iOS or anywhere else until it was actually ready to launch, at which point it could have pushed out an update.
Whether this would have happened under Steve Jobs’ watch is more complicated. The MobileMe trainwreck happened during his time, after all – it seems like Apple still struggles to understand the cloud to this day.