Dorchester — Mar 12th 2019

In defence of the criticism of Apple over pricing of its new iPhone XS at the end of 2018, Tony decided to look at all the presents that Santa Tim Cook gives us starting with the fact that all new Macs come with a collection of included apps we used to know as iLife i.e. iMovie, Photos and GarageBand and iWork i.e. Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but now steadily being incorporated into an enhanced set of services in the Cloud, iCloud, which includes 5Gb of free storage.

Apple’s Internet and Cloud services include iCloud Drive, eMail, iCloud Photo Library, Shared Photo Albums, Photo Stream, iCloud Keychain, the syncing of Messages, Notes, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders and Safari tabs. Additional Cloud services include, Mail Drop, Find My Friends, Find my iPhone etc., iWork for iCloud, iCloud Backup and Restore, Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive. Tony briefly mentioned iTunes Match, Apple Music and the due to be phased out Back to My Mac. So fair point, that’s a lot free gift that come as part of the Apple package

Apple’s 5Gb of free storage in iCloud can be upgraded for monthly payments, 79p for 50GB, £2.49 for 200 GB and £6.99 for 1TB. Whilst describing the various services offered in the Cloud, Tony highlighted those which can eat into the 5Gb.

Starting with *iCloud Drive, Tony described it as a pretend drive, available on all devices that simply stores files like Dropbox et al. He warned that using MacOS Finder to move files in and out of iCloud Drive moves them and does not copy them as with all other ‘external’ drives.

Space Hogs include *iCloud Photo Library, *Shared Photo Albums, *Back up and Restore (use iTunes as space saving alternative) and *Desktop & Documents folder in iCloud Drive.

Apple *email, Messages, Calendar, Messages, *Notes use iCloud storage. In the case of email make sure that deleted message are also deleted from the server. Tony showed how you can check iCloud storage in some detail; on the Mac, Preferences>iCloud and on IOS 12 Settings, Your name (& Picture)>iCloud.

Photo Stream does not use iCloud storage but holds 30 days of photos with a 1,000 photo limit available to all connected devices, full quality on the Mac, reduced on IOS. Photos App on the Mac can be set that all photos are automatically copied from Photo Stream to the photo library. Another useful feature which does not use the storage allowance is Mail Drop which bypasses mail-servers attachment size limits, keeping attachments up to 5GB in size for up to 30 days for recipient to download, 1TB in all; not limited to Apple Mail.

Whilst most of us are aware and may have used Find iPhone (actually Find iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple watch), fewer of us are aware that Find my friends is similar way of being able to see where friends, who have given their permission. are. located Tony demonstrated both. The Mac positioning relies on WiFi location and is not as accurate as the devices with GPS.

Finally Tony showed how, by logging in to iCloud on any computer browser, not only can you access and use Apple Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Reminders, Find my Friends and Find iPhone but also web browser useable version of Pages, Numbers and Keynotes quite a breakthrough and free! So all in all Apple does include a lot under the bonnet or should that be in the Cloud with its expensive hardware. A belated Happy Christmas Santa Tim.

* indicates possible heavy storage usage.

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