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With Mountain Lion's iCloud Integration, Apple Strengthens the Garden Wall
snydeq writes "With WWDC around the corner, iOS 6 rumors are taking center stage, but the real action for developers may be around iCloud. Forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion will integrate iCloud into the formal file system, making iCloud usage much easier and thus more common, and thanks to iCloud Documents, which lets apps open and save documents directly in iCloud, developers will be able to better tap iOS-to-OSX document syncing in their apps, a la iWork. But there is a downside to this opportunity: 'For developers, it further enmeshes you in the Apple ecosystem, almost in the way that America Online did in its heyday. Case in point: OS X apps can use the iCloud Documents APIs only if they are sold through the Mac App Store.'"
the your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 (aside from the apps residing on the host CPU instead of a web app).
But not this. They are providing a free network support service to vendors that sell through their store. Seems obvious, ethical, and fair. Dropbox is better and simpler anyway because all apps can use it with no API; however Dropbox SELLS its service and gives it away for free as a loss leader.
Isn't this pretty much exactly how Skydrive works, and isn't that being integrated into Windows 8? Nobody has been complaining about that...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Apple doesn't want you to have a computer, they want you to have Apple devices where you buy stuff from Apple. They want you to sit around and consume the content they sell. They've been heading that direction for awhile now, this is just a continuation of it. It isn't likely to be too many more years before they lock it down entirely, and Macs are just large stations for accessing the Apple Store/iTunes.
Apple is all about the locked-in ecosystem where everything is their way, everything runs through them, and they get a cut of everything. This is just another step down that road.
Apple wants you to buy hardware. All the content, apps, and the walled garden are a means to this end.
Apple's financial reports illustrate this point. They generate little (as a percentage) in non-hardware sales.
It would be really difficult to reliably block terminal access
Why would it be difficult? They can do it in exact same way they did it on iOS, which, after all, is also Darwin-based.
I meant difficult not as in "difficult to implement" but difficult to fit into their whole OS ecosystem. Apple would have to shut down their server flavor, they would have to ditch terminal completely, they'd disable PHP, Apache, X11. They would have to make their OS incompatible with any programming environments as Python, Perl, revision control systems... Finder probably would have to go away (or just be re-implemented so that it can't go into unprotected territories). Their root handling would have to be reimplemented (too easy to hack), etc. It CAN be done but it I doubt they would just ditch it all just in one second (that's why I wrote about 5-6 years which gives about 2 OS X versions; still too small but I'm being cautious). But I may be biased, I have personal interest to believe what I say. ;) Linux GUIs are buggy and I wouldn't like to have to go back.