Apple has been on such a roll with me product-wise, it's difficult to remember there was a time I did not merely follow every new release with a purchase. That roll, however, ended today.
I run on a Mac Book Pro at work, and, while it's not my favorite laptop or OS of all time, it's doing a fairly decent job at getting the codez out. Whenever Apple has some new release, and, occasional ridiculous new features aside, I install in and my computing experience is better. I was looking forward to iCloud, as a universal solution to basic cloud requirements (backup, sync) and installed it today.
To start, it turns out it does not provide Time Machine backup. Strike one. How, Apple, did you let this release go out the door without supporting this killer technology you have for backing and versioning things?
Second, it also has an steep cost curve. Strike two. I can get free Skydrive from MS (25GB). I can use DropBox for 50 GB for $120 (vs. iCloud 50 GB for $100) - so good, deal, right? No.. iCloud only stores my most recent 1000 photos, and (oddly) does not store ANYTHING from apps that haven't been updated to support iCloud. What? Further, with Live Mesh I can get unlimited space syncing to all my machines - a feature I love.
Normally this is where I point out that specific features are actually pretty irrelevant and the fact that Apple has a great end-to-end solution trumps all, and they're going to win. And, for all I know, they probably will win because this will be the default solution for the average user.
However, and finally, iCloud does not let me sync with Google Contacts. WHAT? 100% fail. I use Gmail on the Web, not having sync to my contacts means that I essentially am address-book-less. Yeah, that ain't happening.
And so, the elephants are dancing and we have to get out of the way. Soon enough, Google (or someone else) will create a syncing solution, and we'll get what we want, but this was a real annoyance. If you're forcing me to choose between using your service cause it's well integrated and has some nice features, and getting stuff done, it's not much of a contest. Sorry, Apple, you lose this round.