When the then-CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs,
prepared to unveil the cloud storage service
iCloud back in 2011, he described a world that
you might barely recognize now: a world where
any photos you take, videos you shoot, music
you buy and other digital files are stored simply
on your PC, “the digital hub of your digital life”.
However, as you might recall if you are old
enough, this arrangement faltered as many
devices other than the PC began taking on
further PC-like responsibilities.
The days when a photo would scarcely last long
on your phone before you quickly uploaded it to
your PC are long gone. As Jobs acknowledged
at the 2011 keynote of Apple’s Worldwide
Developers Conference (WWDC) where iCloud
would ultimately be announced, our PCs,
phones and tablets all had photos, videos and
music – and having to remember to manually
synchronize all of it between those devices had
become a convoluted nightmare giving rise to
understandable frustration.
Basically, our digital lives needed a new digital
hub that was a better fit for 2010s tech habits
- and the solution that Apple proposed was
iCloud. With your files now stored in the cloud
rather than on physical hard drives, you could
save, straight to the cloud, data that was then
automatically pushed to all of your other devices
connected with iCloud. It’s no wonder Jobs that
chose this occasion to air one of his now iconic
catchphrases, “it just works”.
Nonetheless, it would have been more
accurate to say that the 2011 version of iCloud
“just works” in specific areas. The concept of
seamless, virtually universal connectivity sold