iWish iCould iCloud

Releasing a cross platform update in one go was asking for trouble. Photo / Supplied

I'm one of those suckers - if you're to believe the antihype - who has been subscribing to, and using, MobileMe on my Mac for many years.

I always considered it a bit expensive to recommend to people if they were only going to use a couple of facets of it, at a subscription at NZ$140-odd a year, but since I used many elements of what MobileMe offered, I never regretted it for myself.

I got 20GB online backup, email address and aliases, a website and web publishing via iWeb, the ability to boost entire albums of images from iPhoto online for people to see, that I could then let other people upload to if I wished, plus backups of bookmarks, Dock items, widgets, keychain settings, addresses and schedules and more.

Getting a new Mac and logging into MobileMe with my email and passwords meant all my contacts appeared in the new Mac's Address Book, schedules in iCal and settings across the system for networks, Wi-Fi, and even what was in my Dock and the bookmarks in Safari, all as if I'd never left the old Mac. Even the desktop picture reappeared as if by magic.

When I got an iPhone, MobileMe became even more of a boon, handling seamless sync between that and my Mac.

But people criticised MobileMe as slow (and these were mostly US users with their fast broadband speeds). It was labelled clunky and for being unwieldy, particularly in the online versions of Mail and iCal that you could, as an added bonus, get into from anywhere, including from PCs.

iDisk, which mounted a virtual 20GB disk on your desktop that was hosted wherever Apple's server was, could be particularly grindingly slow, at least from here in New Zild, but still, it had its uses if you had to back something up. You could share files via a folder there à la DropBox, and long before DropBox appeared.

Apple listened to the criticisms. It was exclusive to those who would/could afford it. MobileMe didn't address some needs, addressed others badly, but overall it was clearly a good idea. Then iCloud was announced.

iCloud would replace MobileMe, giving every Mac user (not just subscribers) a free email address, 5GB online space (DropBox is 2GB; you can pay for more), and it would handle synching and scheduling across all your devices.

What's more, buy one app on an iPad and it will appear on your iPhone. Buy a song on your Mac and it will appear on your iPad, iPod touch and iPhone.

Existing MobileMe members would morph their data over to iCloud, and as compensation for paying for MobileMe, would get to keep their email aliases they had set up and have a grace period of an extra 20GB online storage until the middle of next year.

Cool. iOS5 - a free update for iDevice users - would tie all this together, along with simultaneous updates to iTunes, Mac OS Lion (to 10.7.2) and other odds and ends of free updates across affected applications.

And all announced to come out together. On one day.

Can you see where I am going with this? Millions of people own iPhones, iPads, iPod touches. Millions own Macs. Millions of people with PCs also have iDevices. Many, many of them wanted all this new, free software booty.

All at the same time.

Can you see where I'm going with this? Problematic, you might think. Indeed, for me at least, it so proved. I did the migration of MobileMe to iCloud, all handled via the MobileMe pane in System Preferences, but then I was supposed to log in, using my Apple ID, to iCloud in the new panel that appeared in System Preferences in Mac OS 10.7.2.

No way. It wouldn't let me. I read about it online. Everyone said Apple's servers were getting a hammering (surprise!) and to keep trying. I must have tried 50 times since Thursday morning, when it was all supposed to happen.

Updating my iPhone and iPad to iOS5 was a little challenging, as it kept failing. Online advice said to keep trying till it worked - that was about five or six times each, but then they both took.

But the worse thing is, my email account (the mac.nz one) stopped working on my Mac. It worked fine on my iPhone, so at least I could see people were emailing me, but many emails are much better and easier to answer on a Mac than on a little phone.

But on the Mac, I went into an agonising spin of examining keychains, fixing permissions with Disk Utility, Unix routines to 'fix disk', setting and deleting and resetting the MobileMe account, resetting the passwords, visiting online forums ... I even tried Apple's support service, but it asks for your hardware serial number and my year of free service was up in September.

I didn't see why I should pay for help with a service Apple delivered online that I hadn't exactly asked for, but I resolved to go there at the end of Friday and call to argue my case if I still got nowhere.

Finally, at 12:08pm on Friday 14th October, the new iCloud panel in System Preferences let me sign in. My goodness. I almost jumped for joy. I could hardly believe it.

I deleted my misbehaving and recalcitrant MobileMe address and let the new 'iCloud' email account bring over 8012 messages. Phew.

Now, I'm not angry at Apple. I did get frustrated at having one of my major information avenues (my mac.nz email) cut off for a time. It would be churlish and unreasonable to expect that millions of users trying to install many new services all at the same time, across the world, would not create bottlenecks. Despite massive new Apple server farms like the one in Maiden, North Carolina that cost over US$1 billion. It covers 46,451 square metres and it's bulging with hard drives and computers running Microsoft networking protocols.

Another server farm was leased in Santa Clara, and who knows what else Apple may have built or leased in Europe, Asia, and even Australia?

I mean, we have these great devices, and we get amazing service from them, so it would be churlish, would it not, to allow our frustrations cloud our judgement on the rare occasion when things go wrong? As I'm sure all those thousands of BlackBerry users will agree, after email and messaging glitches plagued BlackBerry users around the world for days, caused by a core switch failure somewhere.

And perhaps I am the only New Zealander struggling to make all the new stuff work. If so, I can fondly (and probably wrongly) imagine someone at Apple going 'Jeez, it had to be that guy who it didn't work for!'

But at the end of the day, did Apple not realise what a huge undertaking this was going to be, rolling multiple cross-device updates out, plus data services, all over the world, all on one day?

For us New Zealanders, tethered to the magnificent and multifarious internet by that one lonely cable under the Tasman, it can feel like we are a long way from the world again, even if it's only for a day or two.

But now, I am happily pondering my new 'iCloud' email address in Mail. And I thank the stars it's working.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com