Steve Jobs' Brainchild Has Realized Its Potential

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”.

- Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan

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 to us on that stage wasn’t quite borne out by the reality. Photos, for example, weren’t entirely accounted for until the arrival of iCloud Photos in iOS 8, three years later. We also had to wait for iMessage to be covered, and files couldn’t be seamlessly synced until Apple added Desktop and Document folder syncing.