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Want iCloud With Windows? Ditch the XP
halfEvilTech writes "Microsoft isn't the only company denying equal online footing to Windows XP users. Apple will not give PC users access to iCloud – its great digital locker in the sky – if their machines are running Microsoft's aging but still popular Windows XP. Tucked at the bottom of the iCloud announcement, Apple says you'll need a PC running Windows Vista or Windows 7 to jump into Steve Jobs' version of the interwebs."
It's a 10-year old operating system. It was all Windows users had for a long time, and Vista was a flop, but Windows 7 is really good and has a strong adoption rate.
We need to start getting away from XP anyway. It's ancient and insecure compared to other, not-ten-years-old OSs. It annoys me every time I have to work on an XP machine for someone, since I haven't used XP myself in four years, and it's damn near impossible to walk someone through OS related tasks over the phone at this point.
So your argument is that you don't care if it meets your needs, or is the best tool for the job, the fact it's made by Apple means you refuse to use it? You sound every bit as bad as those kids that type Micro$oft.
Not rewarding companies that do things that people don't like is more important to some than having the latest toys.
This is a bad decision on their part.
Granted XP is ancient and not very supported, but its still heavily used. If we're talking about end-users, its more likely to go:
"Aww, not supported. I guess I'll use something else"
instead of
"Aww, not supported. Let me pay a few hundred euros to upgrade my OS (and maybe need to improve my hardware) to use this product/service."
Is this "Windows 7 or above"? Because I'm 91 versions ahead.
Not only do they not support 98, or 2000, or XP, they also don't support any OS X older than 10.5 (example: Safari and iTunes).
It is simply part of Apple culture not to supply software to older OSes. It forces the user to upgrade (i.e. spend money), and I'm not surprised Apple applies the same tactic to PCs that has worked so well for Macs.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
But one still needs a $200 copy of Windows to run inside KVM or VirtualBox.
If you don't use anything else from Apple, then you wouldn't want to use iCloud. It's a supplement to their other products and services, and doesn't really have any value if you don't otherwise use any of those products or services.
That help?
Now, if you use their other products or services... let's say you have an iPhone. If you set up iCloud on your Windows box, the photos you snap on the iPhone will automatically appear in a folder on your computer without an explicit sync step or USB connection, and you can sync the bookmarks in Safari on the iPhone to IE on the Windows machine. Similarly, there are benefits for iPad users, iTunes users, people who switch between Windows and MacOS sometimes...
Heck, there are even benefits for people who want to use an iPhone but don't want to load iTunes or any other Apple software on their PC. You can set up the iPhone so that iCloud is the thing it backs up to and syncs with, instead of any PC. So you'd be able to use an iPhone without buying into iTunes or QuickTime and without installing anything on your PC at all. (This is true even if you're an XP user. Or a Linux user, for that matter.)
But the service has no value on its own in isolation. If you don't touch anything else in the Apple ecosystem, best just ignore it completely.
I lost a cousin in the Cola wars
I love how little credit The Register gives Apple when they say "According to the latest stats, this means that almost half of all PC users will not be able to access iCloud." Given that Apple has usage statistics of the people who use iTunes, I am willing to bet they know exactly how many of their customers with iCloud compatible devices are running on XP and made a very educated decision that dropping XP support wouldn't alienate that many users.
As others have already pointed out, XP is a decade old OS now, and two versions back. It is OK to start phasing our support. First for apps that run primarily in peoples homes, and then eventually to what runs in business environments.
What do you know I wrote a novel
http://www.apple.com/apple-events/wwdc-2011/
It's not "cloud computing", it's automatic online synching done right. It's called iCloud simply because "cloud" is today's buzzword.
If you're still on Windows XP (and you're a home user) than you are an idiot. Update and move on for the love of god. The majority of Windows XP users will be corporate sheep anyway -- and they don't need to be using iTunes/iCloud anyway.
Times like these I wish I was more active here and had the points to spend to send your post into troll/flamebait oblivion.
People like you are the embodiment of that "your laptop/phone/tv is already outdated" tv commercial.
We don't need to ditch perfectly working computers simply to be on the latest-and-greatest side of things. I have XP at home, I play some older games on it, some stuff from Steam, and stream Netflix. It does what I want it to do, and I'm quite certain many others would say the same. Why should people spend money that they don't need to, just to appease some twitchy teenager on the internet who does the "OMG OLD" shtick?
Doesn't it only sync once a day? (... or that's what I remember from reading the original release) If so, that doesn't really sound like 'done right', although I'm sure the OS integration will be fairly smooth.
Some reason this story also makes me think of this:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-05-04/
See, that's exactly the problem.
When you switch off an OS you have to examine the entire ecosystem effect. Because XP was the only sane choice for EIGHT YEARS that's what Windows computing grew up with.
Suddenly Win7 hasn't really been out that long, and the early reports of Windows 8 are dubious, so it does suddenly seem like they're trying to make continued use of XP painful like a Pavlov experiment.
I won't switch off XP until the upgrade path through *Windows 9* has shaken out. MS is thrashing pretty badly lately, so I don't want to get caught in the Zune of OS decisions until MS figures themselves out again.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
From the demos done on stage, it syncs everything in real time. Photos taken on an iPhone were sent immediately to the iPad and the Mac, documents edited on one device were pushed to the other devices, etc.
"It just works" comes to mind.
Apple is a vertically integrated company. Its products work with each other pretty well as long as you follow the Apple way of things. Apple has a vested interest in making sure that has equivalents to compelling new products, like Amazon's music and books service. By controlling it themselves, they can focus on making sure that it works together with other Apple products.
Compare that with the Microsoft way, where they write a big part of it, but rely on partners to fill in the blanks. You have all these independent companies running around doing their own thing without a cohesive vision of what the whole system should be doing.
For people who don't want to mess with their computers and music players and websites etc., Mac is a natural choice. Windows offers a fractured broken system, and Linux is great for those who do like to mess with their computers and music players and websites, etc.
I use all three systems, and the Mac seems to have the fewest problems with Mac stuff working together, as long as you are adhering to the "Mac Way of Doing Things".
Easy to use, consumer stuff - Mac
Can do what you want - Linux
Corporate or Engineering software - Windows
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Even an OEM copy of Windows 7 Ultimate doesn't cost that much.
According to this page, an OEM copy of Windows isn't intended to be sold to people who build their own PC for themselves to use. OEM copies are only for people who build PCs to sell.
You can buy an entire nettop for not that much more than that
I mentioned this once to a Mac salesman at Best Buy, and he told me that running Windows in a virtual machine on any current Mac would be far faster than running it on the bare hardware of a nettop.
The best tool for the job? What is iClouds job? Media access or consumer control?
Bullshit Sales Pitch
Q: What does iCloud do?
A: It gives me easy access to my media.
Wait! If you think that Apple cares about easy of access to your media more than promoting their DRM scheme and locking you into their ecosystem where they take 30% off the top, you need to take those blinders off.
No Bullshit Reality
Q: What does iCloud really do?
A: It gives Apple more control over your media than they do already. You give up more freedom and thank Apple for taking it from you because they make life easier once you agree to their control. In short, iCloud takes your freedom and makes you like it.
Closed, walled-gardens are the wave of the future. DRM is trendy and cool. Freedom and openess are for losers. You want to be cool don't you?
Dear lord, because the vast majority of people are not nerds, man.
I mean, I'm a nerd. I got me my NAS with many many terabytes of storage and nice control and features.
Most people would like to just buy something and just use it and not bother thinking about it.
Also, iCloud is FREE -- for up to 5gb, which when you consider does NOT include apps, music, photos, etc, but only your personal data you and your apps upload, is actually quite a bit more then most people will need (Yes, I know, not all)
Are you really asking why people use a built-in, fully integrated, automatic, free service -- verses something that you have to set up, maintain, keep plugged in, and pay hundreds of dollars for?
... he typed, just as his Gnash plugin crashed and Gnome put up a warning. So he launched The Gimp and balanced his checkbook with Gnucash, because he'd just gotten a check back from some GnuStep implementation work he did -- he'd be sure to thank the client with a gnupg-encrypted email. He didn't have the client's address handly so he launched GNOME-find to find the invoice.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Because it's fairly clear that you don't understand what it is. Among other things, it syncs mail, contacts, calendars (Outlook/Exchange or Apple apps), music (if it's in iTunes), and photographs (probably only from iPhoto) with "the Cloud", and from there to your mobile devices. How is it even conceptually possible for a browser to do all that? Open API? Seems doubtful. Only work with proprietary Apple software? Mostly, but again, understand what the thing is before asking these questions. Clearly, if you use a Linux box at home, a Window box at work, and your phone is an Android, iCloud is not for you. If you use mostly Apple products, but you need to pull an odd Windows machine into the mix, iCloud is most definitely for you. The entire point is to sell more Apple products by producing an ecosystem where once you have iCloud set up, you never again have to think about where some piece of media is resident, because it's everywhere. That's going to be pretty attractive to a lot of people, although obviously not all of them. Independence from specific desktop software is not at all the point.