A brief history of iCloud

2000: iTools

Apple’s first suite of online services was launched during the Macworld Expo keynote in San Francisco, after which every journalist sprinted to the press room to register their name as an @mac.com email address without the random digits everyone else would soon have to stick on the end. Free of charge, iTools included email, a personal web page, KidSafe (a whitelist of educational sites) and iDisk personal online storage space. Nobody mentioned clouds.

2002: .Mac

Confusingly named for a service based on the domain mac.com, .Mac did the same as iTools but now cost $99.95 a year. A new macOS utility, Backup, allowed users to back up files to their iDisk. Incentivized by its new services income, Apple waited just five more years before adding some small feature upgrades. The default 5GB storage allocation was increased to 10GB, with options up to 30GB at extra cost.

2008: MobileMe

Replacing .Mac on 9 July 2008, MobileMe majored on “push from the cloud”, meaning your email and calendar alerts would arrive without you having to fetch them yourself on a cart. On launch day, MobileMe started as it would go on, by breaking. Storage now started at 20GB, while a Family Pack added four sub–accounts with 5GB apiece. New email addresses were now @me.com. Members using Apple’s iChat app benefited for the first time from message encryption. Fun fact: MobileMe was sold in shops as a boxed product.

2011: iCloud

Promising iCloud would, like, work, Steve Jobs mused: “Why should I believe them? They’re the ones that brought me MobileMe.” He went on to not explain why. iCloud cunningly fixed iDisk by killing it, gradually resuscitating it as iCloud Drive. iCloud Backup handled iOS devices, while the Mac’s online backup was never spoken of again. Sync got smarter: Now purchased apps and iTunes content would download to all the user’s devices, not just the one they were bought on. Documents stored in the cloud by iWork and other apps were pushed to all devices. Email addresses moved to iCloud.com, and you could now use a non–Apple email for your Apple ID. The service was free again, but with only 5GB of storage. The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away…