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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.
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"
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.
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?
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.