Brief Info About iCloud

Hey guys, this is Magic Hands on one, and today I want to talk about Apple's new product that they're going to be releasing sometime in the future called iCloud.

Now, if you're not familiar with the term cloud, it's basically a word for less technical savvy people that means the Internet. So what you store in the cloud is really what you store on an external server that's somewhere else.

When you do stuff on Google Docs, that's on the cloud because it's not on your computer; it's on the Internet. When you do Gmail or any kind of email that's not hosted locally, like on your network—which is pretty much everyone's email—that's on the cloud. So we actually have been using the cloud for quite some time.

But what Apple wants to do is standardize it and make it so it all works together. There can be good things and bad things, and there's a lot of controversy about this particular release, especially with the more Linux-like community.

So the way the iCloud works is on your Mac. I guess iTunes will support it, and there will be some OS updates for it. On iOS 5, which is the next version of the iPhone software coming out sometime in the future, it's going to be integrated.

So whenever you—if you have an iPod account, by the way—you can get a free iCloud account with 5 gigabytes of storage. But if you want more, you have to pay.

Anyway, if you have an iCloud account, you set it up on your iPhone, on your Mac, and on your iPod and your iPad, or whatever other devices. They also have some kind of PC support, but that's probably through a web interface of some kind.

But anyway, if you set that up, then when on your Mac you buy a song or an app for your iPod or something like that, it'll transfer over the air, basically. It also does that for email, contacts, blah blah blah—a lot like MobileMe, actually.

I think they could have integrated this with MobileMe because they already have iDisk. I mean, MobileMe syncs your contacts and calendars. Well, why can't they make it through that? You know, why they don't just use MobileMe? I don't know; maybe the new name “iCloud” does sound kind of cool.

But anyway, the controversy with this is that when stuff is stored on the cloud, it's not locally on your computer, so you don't even own the content, really.

I think one of the things that Apple was trying to do is make it so when you buy a song, it throws it up on the cloud, and you don't even download it onto your computer. Your computer doesn't even have the file now. That doesn't make sense.

I think they have you download it, just the way iTunes already works. It may be easier for them to do that as well, but the argument is once everything's on the cloud and not local, you don't own it anymore.

So you can pay money to be able to stream a song over the Internet. That doesn't seem to be how this works, anyway.

One of the other cool things—I’m just going to tell you a couple new features that they added to iOS 5, and right now developers have it, but normal people—like your average user—can't get iOS 5 yet.

The way it works is there are fancier notifications, there's like a preference screen. I'll show the screenshot from MacRumors up there. But what it is is you can set it up to sync different things with your iCloud, similar to MobileMe, and it'll do that.

Now, you can also sync wirelessly with iTunes; that can be cool. They really beefed up notifications and made them fancy. You can set settings, and so they've done a lot with notifications in the cloud.

So that's just my little talk about the iCloud and some of the features. In the description, I'll link to the MacRumors article about it, and I'll have a link to Apple's official iCloud page with more info.

So thanks for watching! My kids, 11 subscribed, and goodbye!