iCloud Drive = Dropbox killer?

[STL]

"Google does all of this exact same thing right this second for free."
.
Google's is way overpriced for me.
It's not free.
It cost you your private information.
Google is evil.
.

[vision63]

STL wrote:
"Google does all of this exact same thing right this second for free."
.
Google's is way overpriced for me.
It's not free.
It cost you your private information.
Google is evil.
.

This makes zero sense. They're all the same.

[onthedownlow]

vision63 wrote:
Google does all of this exact same thing right this second for free. It's not going to kill Dropbox. What's going to hurt Dropbox is them charging for it when Google is giving it all away for little or nothing. There's even a "Photos" app that does everything most people will want to do with their photos. In fact, the unlimited uploading of photos doesn't even count against your "Drive" space.

...and if you have Google Fiber, or will eventually, you get 1TB of Drive storage free on it; likely more in the future.

[silvarios]

vision63 wrote:
[quote=STL]
"Google does all of this exact same thing right this second for free."
.
Google's is way overpriced for me.
It's not free.
It cost you your private information.
Google is evil.
.

This makes zero sense. They're all the same.
I agree with vision63. Apple also runs an ad network and freemium supported by ads is big business on Apple's app store. How many apps used to suck up your contact book just because?

Lot of room for improvement in any of these services when it comes to privacy. Google is trying to make self driving cars, robots, and better Internet access for people, Apple just gobbled up an overpriced headset manufacturer. Even still, both companies do things that bug me, both have provided some awesome products, why not pro and con things at a technical level?

[N-OS X-tasy!]

Zoidberg wrote:
I dunno; Apple really screwed a lot of people over when they said, "Hey, you know iWeb/mac.com/MobileMe? Yeah, we're not doing that anymore." I don't think I'd trust them for this either. Not on a large scale.

Minor adjustment to make a point.

I've said it before and it's still true: iCloud's reliability record is not sufficiently high enough yet for me to consider using it as my primary cloud storage solution... at least not for items I will need to always be able to access at a moment's notice. Archival storage of photos is another story.

[DRR]

I've been a longtime advocate of Dropbox and have been on their 100GB tier, happily, for about 4 or 5 years. I have few, if any complaints.

Having said that, I'm going to give iCloud Drive serious consideration.

First - pricing. I need at minimum about 80GB. I keep 2 years of client files on Dropbox so everything is fully accessible, any time. With Dropbox I pay $100/year for 100GB (give or take on both numbers, I have some additional free space as well with them). iCloud Drive is offering 200GB for under $50 a year. Twice as much, for half as much. Now my understanding is that some of that space is going to be used for apps that you enable for iCloud Drive also but not enough to tip the scale the other way.

Integration - when cloud integration across platforms works, it's a thing of beauty. Dropbox is a great place for my "stuff" but I already use iCloud for cross platform integration of Pages and Numbers documents. If this can become more robust, across more apps, sign me up.

I will almost definitely try out the $12/year tier (20GB) and see how well it works, see how reliable it is, how the features work (I use the "share this document" feature on DB a lot, where it just copies a link and I can email it - i wonder if iCloud Drive can do this through the finder) and I'll definitely consider switching.

[Robert M]

DRR,

The difference between icloud and dropbox is reliability. iCloud doesn't work particularly well. Syncing is still somewhat unreliable. It gets files confused. All under normal day to day usage. Syncing with Dropbox is rock solid reliable, vastly more reliable than iCloud. The only time I get see conflicting files is when I'm restoring a machine from a backup and even then the number of them is very small. Easily found and resolved.

What really bugs the crap out of me is that iCloud Drive is being touted as a new feature. iCloud Drive restores and builds on a feature that was provided to users of MobileMe. I had a cloud drive and desktop access to it under MobileMe. It only worked on the Mac and didn't sync across machines but it was a cloud drive and readily available to me via the desktop or the web.

What is iCloud drive? MobileMe storage with syncing features and apps like Dropbox. Too little, too late. The value it provides remains to be seen but I'm not going to get my hopes up since when it comes to this stuff, Apple has definitely missed the mark one time to many.

Robert

[silvarios]

Doesn't it technically build on iDisk from all the way back in the days of iTools?

[Robert M]

Silvarios,

Yups. That it does, which makes this "new" feature of a cloud-based disk accessible from the desktop all the more annoying.

Robert

[silvarios]

Apple also announced a big new feature where you can interact with your iPhone from your Mac. Messages, calls, etc. Apple had this feature for non iPhones and killed it seven years ago! Seven years to reimplement this "new" feature? Cheers to progress.