791: Exploring iCloud.com
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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by my fellow co-host and intrepid Mac explorer, Stephen Hackett. How you doing, Stephen? I like the sound of that. I won't lie. You are. You are a Mac explorer. Go read 512 Pixels, gang. So much good stuff there. I love your historical jaunts. It brings me back. Thanks. Yeah, it's fun. It seems like of the two of us, I should be the one that's writing those because I'm the older guy. Yeah.

But you do a better job of it than I. I just use them. You study them. I love that. Sometimes I get comments from somebody like, you wrote about a thing that you weren't around for. It's like, yeah, you know, but it's fine. It happens. Yeah, it's called the history. Mm-hmm.

inevitably that's true for all of us that's right uh you mentioned 512 south though in here uh i launched a redesign on the blog this week so uh it's actually live right now i pushed the buttons just before we recorded and i showed it to you kind of in process over the last couple weeks and uh yeah here it is new logo new colors new typefaces it's very exciting

It is. It looks really nice, Stephen. And everybody should check it out.

I like that the Mac just advanced a little bit. Yeah. You know, like we went from like 1986 to like 1990. Slowly, yeah. Wait until, you know, 10 years from now and it's all Aqua and like pinstripes. But our friend Daniel, who also goes by Jelly, you may have heard us talk about him. Jelly does all the stuff for the St. Jude fundraiser, like all the design work. And he helped me with the little Mac. So yeah.

It's a nice change. It felt weird. The orange has been present on 512pixels since the beginning, just about. And it's kind of weird to jettison it, but the site turned 17 years old this year.

Felt like a good time. And I know you've had this experience. Maybe other people have as well. When you're working on a redesign or just something new, you turn a corner where the old version of it looks really old. And that's when you know you've landed on something. So yeah, it looks nice. Go check it out. Game 512 pixels net.

Today on More Power Users, then that's the ad for extended version of the show if you want to sign up for it. Mark Gurman is reporting on AI doing, Apple doing some AI stuff with health that I think is kind of interesting and so do you. So we're going to jump into the rumor mill in the More Power Users segment today. So looking forward to that one.

But the topic today is iCloud.com. And this is a funny thing, guys. Steven and I pitch ideas to each other all the time for the show. And Steven's like, I want to do a show on iCloud. And I thought, yeah, that's cool, iCloud. And he put it in the outline as iCloud.com. And I was thinking about talking about the stuff we do with iCloud. But you really focused this outline on iCloud.com, the website that you go to to access your stuff.

And it is going to be a fun show because Apple has really put a lot of effort into this over the years. It happened under the radar for me. I didn't realize it was going on. I saw them making incremental improvements, but I just didn't go there very often. But

This is a thing that we have that a lot of us didn't even realize existed. Yeah, I wanted to talk about it for a few reasons. One, I think it's sort of the most underused part of the iCloud system. I certainly don't use it because I'm on an Apple device all day. But we have a lot of people, and we've heard from listeners, who, you know, they're Mac and iPhone and iPad at home, but maybe they have a PC at work. And if they want to get to their personal calendar or personal contact or something on that work PC, you're going to the website.

But there are also some features on iCloud.com that aren't anywhere else in sort of the iCloud ecosystem and particularly around data recovery and restoring. So we're going to get to that in this outline. But it's it's I'm in the same place you are like it's surprisingly good. And they've really it's really come a long way. Now, I still have some things I'd like Apple to do better. And we'll talk about some of those as well.

But it really is like the bulk of your iCloud stuff on the web, just ready for you. If you're away from your computer or on a PC or something, it's available to you. And it's funny, I didn't really put in the outline, we're not going to really get into it, but iCloud was preceded by MobileMe, preceded by .Mac, preceded by iTools. So we're now like on the fourth consumer cloud service from Apple. Yeah.

I joined in the .Mac days in college. And I remember even back then, like, it was cool, but not really, like, all that useful. And back then it was because, like, what am I going to sync my stuff to? Right? Like, we all just had a Mac. Yeah. And then MobileMe sort of brought that into the present day with, like, I have an iPhone or an iPad. I want all my stuff to sync. Now, MobileMe was bad.

Also said iPad. That wasn't true. MobileMe predates the iPad. But with iCloud, you know, they've gotten it dialed in pretty nicely. So we're going to talk about the website today, iCloud.com. It's not a typo, the actual website. Yeah, I remember when .Mac was new, and I understood it immediately because I did have two Macs at the time, and I wanted to do it. So first thing I put it like a PDF file, you know, lawyer, that's what you do.

And like, it just never would sync over. And then I started, then I made like a Word document and it just would never. And then I started getting progressively small. Then I made like one sentence text files and they would sync, you know? And I had this theory that like somebody in Cupertino had like

the .Mac server under their desk, like it was one computer. Yeah, iDisk. I mean, what a time to be alive. Yeah. But I want to talk about this concept of who's using it. I spent too much time trying to get an answer to that because I thought about that for this show. It's like, well, how many MPU listeners are actually using it or even aware of it?

And there is surprisingly little data on the internets about it. You know, Apple keeps all of this very private and they've not really shared anything about user statistics on iCloud.com. So I'd like to do something. I'm going to put together a quick Google survey. We'll put it in the link of the show. If people listening to the show could take a minute and click that and just click the survey, it'll be three questions. Never, sometimes or often.

you know, how often you use it. I I'm just curious and we'll report back on a future feedback show, but there's really no information anywhere as to how many people are using this stuff. That'll be very interesting. Interesting to see. Let's talk a little bit about, about signing in. I think when we start talking about iCloud.com you know, people have questions about, well, how do I, how do I get to it? How do I know it's secure? Well,

If you're using Safari on the Mac, you can sign in with Touch ID, assuming that the account you're logging into on the web is the same account that you're logged into, like in your user account on the Mac itself, which is great. It means if I'm sitting at my Mac, I need iCloud.com. Just like logging in to the Apple Store online, I can just do Touch ID and Safari and I'm in. Yeah, nice. I mean...

How do you get there? iCloud.com. iCloud.com. Very easy. It's in the name. Yeah. If you're on a Mac, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are both supported. And you can use a passkey in those browsers. We talked about passkeys a little bit in the past. And, of course, you can just use a password and two-factor authentication as well.

The roadblock is for some users, I think particularly nerdier users, is advanced data protection, which we talked about at length when it came out a few years ago. Advanced data protection is an optional setting you can set on your Apple account that does a lot of stuff, but sort of the high level is it end-to-end encrypts way more in iCloud than is encrypted normally.

The tradeoff is if you're locked out of your account, Apple has really limited options on how they can help you with that password issue. So you need to know if it's right for you. I have advanced data protection turned on on my account. And a side effect of that is access to your iCloud data at iCloud.com is disabled when you have advanced data protection turned

turned on. And it's actually very clever. When you go to sign in, you get a little pop-up and says, Hey, you have advanced air protection turned on. If you want to continue, you need to turn it off and here's how you do it. So I went through that process. It was very easy to do because I'm

Again, using all Apple devices all signed into my account, it's re-enabled as soon as we're done with this episode. But that is something to be mindful of, that advanced data protection is a bit of a wrinkle when we're talking about the website. Yeah, we were joking before we recorded. We'll both be doing that. We both turned it off for the purposes of prepping for the show, and we'll both be turning it back on. An interesting note with that, though, is when you turn ADP off,

There's still a checkbox in the iCloud settings that allows you to turn off iCloud.com. So you don't have to go to advanced data protection to turn off iCloud.com.

So if, if you go through the show and you're like, Oh guys, this was great stuff, but I don't ever want to use it. Then just go and turn it off. So nobody can ever use it. Nobody can go on the web and access your stuff. So I do like that. They have like multiple tiers of this protection, but if you're doing ADP, this isn't for you. I wonder sometimes like, you know, how many, that's another one. I don't know how many people use ADP. Maybe we'll do that as a future poll, but the, um,

But it is a risk, right? Because if you don't get your password right and you don't have your act together, you could lose all of your data. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I don't want people to think about that lightly. And like I, there are people in my life who, if they came to me and said, I want to use advanced data protection, I'd be like, no, you're not allowed. You would, you would lose it in six months. But you know, if that's your thing, this is not a feature that you can use this iCloud.com. Yeah.

A nice sort of secondary safety feature to this is you get an email when your account is logged into online. So I signed in, I get a notification from MimeStream. There's the email saying, hey, you know, you've signed in iCloud.com. If it's not you, go to this URL account.apple.com to set your password, reset your password.

Something funny about this. We are in the transition of Apple referring to Apple IDs and then moving to Apple account, which is a better term, but this email still says Apple ID all over it. So if you're out there listening, iCloud team update your email template, but it is, uh, it's, it's a nice like sanity check that yes, you are the person who signed in. And if you get one of those and it's a legitimate email, you know, we've talked about phishing and other things before, uh,

Might be time to look at that password. But yeah, here we are. We're all signed in now. And what is available on the iCloud website is actually very broad. I'm just going to rattle off this list and we can dive into specific ones. But this is what you have access to on the iCloud website. Apple invites, iCloud account settings, calendar, contacts, custom email domain for iCloud Plus,

Find devices, hide my email, iCloud Drive, iCloud Mail, keynote notes, numbers, pages, photos, reminders, and with those iWork apps, collaboration. It is very broad. I mean, almost all the major features with Apple's software and where it meets iCloud are available to you in the browser.

With qualification, right? Some of them give you more data than others do. Yeah. And you know what? We should say it's pretty. I mean, it used to be ugly, and now it looks really nice. They've done a good job of making it accessible. Because it's Apple, they want it to look like a Mac app. They don't want it to look like a browser window. And sometimes I wonder if that's like... I don't know why they do that. It's the web. We all know it's the browser. Maybe you should just lean into it. But...

you know, that's a hill they're going to die on. And, and, you know, they're, they're doing it. They're doing the extra work to make it feel kind of like a Mac app. And they've been on that hill for a long time, even in the dot Mac days, it kind of looked like mail, but especially if you go back and watch the mobile me announcement, like Phil Schiller spends a lot of time on like, look, it looks just like mail or it looks just like this. And yeah, like it compared to Gmail, right. It's beautiful. I don't know if it's necessary, but,

But there's also some customization. When you log into the iCloud website, you kind of land on this dashboard and you have like your profile picture and like a view into some of your things. And that is customizable to a degree. And so if you're using iCloud a lot and you're really just using it for like calendar and photos, say, well, you can kind of bump those up the page and downplay the others. So it's not only beautiful, but it's also customizable, which is pretty cool.

Now, switching over to the phone and the tablet, right? Historically, it didn't work at all. Like, if you went to iCloud.com, it'd say, hey, you're on an iPhone. What are you doing here? I know, yeah. Which, honestly, was the honest truth. But now you can get some features on an iPhone, too, or a tablet. Yeah, this has really come a long way. I remember those days. Like, this is, like, I get it, but I don't get it. So...

If you're signed in on a phone, you have access to Apple invites. Thank goodness you can send your kid's birthday invitation from someone else's phone. But you have mail, notes, photos, and reminders. But the big one is find devices. So say that you and I are together at Disney and I leave my phone behind somewhere.

I can log in on Safari on your phone to my iCloud account and access fine devices. So I could put my phone in loss mode or make it play a sound or view it on a map.

And that's really good. Like that's a really good addition. I think it was actually the first thing you could do with iCloud on the web and they've added these other things over time, but find devices in particular, like that's the one that I want available to me. Something happens. I can log in on my spouse's phone. She could log in on mine and, and we go from there. Yeah. Maybe should we talk about that now? Like what are the use cases for iCloud.com? I mean, clearly you can, you can access almost any of your iCloud data from it.

But who are the people that would naturally want to use this feature? I mean, the poster child is the person who works on a PC, right? I think so. You go to work, you got a PC at work, and you want the ability to add something to your Apple Notes or get a contact or just check your personal mail or whatever. Assuming the IT hasn't put the kibosh on it. Yeah. You can go to iCloud.com and get access to that stuff.

Yeah, I think that's the primary use. But I think the secondary one is like something happens and I need to access my stuff from someone else's phone. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's fine too, right? And that's something that I think everybody should be aware of. I think another use is, frankly, when you're just like at, when you're with a friend or somebody and you want to share something or show them something and you don't have your device with you. Yeah.

Although I don't know how often that happens. I was going to say, I always have my device with me. But yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, it is limited, but they did a pretty good job of implementation. A couple of things I felt like were missed opportunities spending the week goofing off with iCloud.com. They still have not done a good job with cloud-based mail rules. Like you've got iCloud mail, right?

available to you so if you've got your you know iCloud account or old dot mac account or whatever you can access it at the iCloud.com through the mail tool and they actually have a mechanism for mail-based rules but there's like three different criteria it's very basic you know and you look at like Apple mail and it's got really remarkable customization and mail rule the support

And just none of it has ever made it to iCloud. Compared to people like FastMail and Google, who have very robust cloud-based rules, I mean, this is an opportunity for Apple. If they put good cloud-based mail rules, then you could have iCloud.com sorting your mail for you before it even got to your inbox. That, I think, is a very...

very limited thing when it comes to iCloud versus FastMail or Gmail. I mean, it's one of the reasons out of me that I use Gmail. I really depend on a complicated, sometimes overlapping set of rules to help me manage my email in addition to SaneBox and other things. I do wish that was better. And honestly, that's been bad for so long. That was true in MobileMe. It just...

They don't seem that interested in it. And you may be thinking, well, you can do these things in the mail and the Mac. Well, then you have to have mail on your Mac running all the time. And maybe you have a Mac mini in the closet where you can do that. We have listeners who do that, but most of us don't. And that means that I want my servers to be, or I want my rules to be server side to be running all the time. And that's just pretty limited in terms of, in terms of Apple stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, and it seems like a blind spot to me. Like, you know, I would see someone at Apple arguing with me, well, that's too complex. We like to keep things simple for our customers. But look, this is a mail-based rule system on iCloud.com. Simple customers are not going to even find that button. So you can make it, once you get in there, you can make it as complex as you want because only the power users are going to land there.

And the thing that gets me is that they did make a cloud-based mail rule system that

And this is like, it has the same rules available that it did 10 years ago. It's just like, nobody's ever touched it. Nobody's interested in it. And clearly they're spending money and time on this website. You know, iCloud.com has improved a lot, but I feel like that is just something that it's like a blind spot for Apple. Like, no, we're just not going to do that. And that's that, you know? So that's weird. Another thing that was odd to me, but makes sense is iCloud key chain is

doesn't show up. Like they have this new passwords app. And if you could log in at iCloud, would you or should you have access to your passwords? Because they're trying to become like a more legitimate password app and third party password apps out there.

do have mechanisms for cloud access, which could be really great. Your house burns down, you want to get to your things. That's just not there. Maybe that's in the future, but that's another thing I thought was odd that that wasn't there at all. I totally agree. And exploring iCloud.com, that definitely crossed my mind. I was like, why isn't this here? Maybe it is a security thing that they're not comfortable with. I don't know. I think it would be a good addition, though.

Let's talk about some of the

the other apps here. We mentioned the, the find my support. So you can go on and find where your devices are. I was a little surprised that this is not find my, like it is on the Mac and iPad. Like people aren't there. It's just for devices. And I mean, I guess that makes sense. Like that's the core thing I would want on the website is,

But I couldn't come up with a good reason why like my friends weren't there as well. Yeah. I mean, if they're in, they're already in your fine money. Yeah. Why not? Right. Expose them to the, to the web. Yeah, I guess. No, you know what? That's probably it. There is a certain level of insecurity with this. If someone can log in, they get a lot of information about you. Yep. We mentioned those other apps, notes and reminders. And, um,

I think these are in line with the mail rules. The basics are here, but a lot of the advanced features of like the full blown apps are not. So in reminders, you can't sort items on a reminders list, nor does it respect the sort order you use on your devices. So like for me, all of my lists are ordered by due date.

Well, on the web, they're listed by best I could tell the order in which I'd entered them into reminders and that sorting should be there on the web. The same thing with notes, right? I use folders and subfolders and Apple notes and there's no sort order stuff on the web and some of the organization stuff is not on the web anymore.

And those are things that I would like to see them add. Like if you are going to offer these things, it's great for quick access. But again, thinking about the user we've been talking about where I'm on my PC at work and maybe I use reminders, they should have the same experience on the web as they can on their iPhone or iPad. And Apple is just not there yet. Yeah. And again, I just feel like there's a lot of third-party apps that

that do a really good job of a web interface of this. Even native, I mean, OmniFocus is an example. They have a web app if you want, and you basically have the same tool set you do on the iPhone app. And Apple is just not going to go that far with this stuff. Yeah. I just don't think...

for whatever reason, they just don't feel like they want to. Yeah, it's a lot of work. But I also don't think it's a philosophy thing. I think maybe it used to be like, no, we want you in the desktop apps. And like, that's why the web looks like desktop apps. I think it may be just a matter of priority more than anything else at this point. I don't think they're, I don't think they are like, no, don't use the web because they have made so many improvements to it, right? Like,

It is really good in a lot of areas, but it's sort of like the last 10% or last 20% of some of these things just aren't quite there. Yeah. I mean, I think the mere existence of this is remarkable because...

I could see Apple just not bothering. It's like, oh, your work has PCs? Well, then you should tell them to buy Macs or buy an iPad and bring it to work with you. I can see them saying that, well, there's no reason for us to even make this. So, I mean, it's remarkable, but it's also...

Not as powerful as I would like it to be in some regards. Yeah. One page I do want to mention as part of all this is the iCloud status page. I think people should just be generally aware of that, whether you're using iCloud.com or not. If you ever have weird things going on with your data, I keep that one bookmarked.

And because sometimes iCloud does have outages and you just push the button. Yeah. As we're recording, actually, it shows that they're recovering from a couple of things like, oh, well, there you go. Okay. So let's go. You know, something else that kind of stood out to me using this that I'd forgot about is how good they've got at collaboration. You know, Daisy and I open a note together and.

It's solid. I mean, it used to be, you know, it used to be Google Docs was good and everything else sucked at this. And now, you know, keynote numbers, pages, notes, all of them you can do real time collaboration with and it's useful.

Because I do keynotes in the labs all the time and in the webinars. And I'm working on them to the last minute. And he'll go in and catch a typo or something. And I can see him fixing it in real time. I mean, it's just a tool we use. And it's not a thing anymore that you talk about how bad it is. They've got that licked. I did run into a little bit of a hiccup that I had some really old keynote files. I mean, the creation date was like 10 years ago.

That weren't, they didn't show up on iCloud.com until I opened them on the Mac. Maybe some like weird old file format thing. But once I re-saved them, they were on the web basically instantly. So if you have active, you know, active projects saved in iCloud Drive, like it won't be a problem. I think if you just have something really old, maybe open it on the Mac first and you'll be set.

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It's really nice having a vault of information on my mobile devices that goes beyond the mere iPhone security. So if someone unlocks my phone, they still can't get to my most secure data because I've got it all locked up in 1Password. But don't take my word for it. Go check it out at 1Password.com slash MPU. You can go there today and download it for 20% off. It's an excellent internet security tool. Both Steven and I rely on it every day. Go check it out for yourself.

And thanks 1Password for all of your support of the Mac Power users. We have talked about accessing your iCloud data and what you can do with it on the web. But now let's talk about some of the more advanced features of the iCloud website. One of them is dealing with your iCloud account settings. A lot of this you can manage in system settings on your Mac or iPhone or iPad, but they are all kind of in one place.

on the iCloud website, including your Apple account photo, some iCloud.com specific settings, but then also like your iCloud plan and your storage and outline of the features you have access to, and even changing the language of your iCloud stuff you can do on the web. Yeah, it's nice. And we have to mention, we talked about customizing the homepage. The default background is, as far as I can tell,

uh mac os tiger wallpaper right doesn't it look like tiger yeah it's i think it's inspired by but it definitely has that vibe yeah nice which is cool i'm all i'm all for it but if you're confused about what devices are hooked in like if you're doing family sharing one i felt like icloud.com almost did a better job of giving me a snapshot of who's using what than my phone did

Yeah, I think so too. And I looked through my account and there were some devices signed in that I honestly had forgotten about. So I used this as an opportunity to sort of clean up my signed in accounts or signed in devices too. Yeah. Which is good. So we'll talk about data recovery. This is a feature in iCloud that is only available on the web. And so you have...

quite a few kind of different tools in here. So I want to walk through them. If you have deleted a file from iCloud Drive or from within an iWork apps, like you accidentally deleted that pages document you're working on, you go into the iCloud Drive section of the website. And then there's a recently deleted section in the sidebar. And you can recover everything or select the files that you want

and recover them and they'll show back up and then your Mac and your other devices will see them after a second or two. This is really nice because it may be that you accidentally or even on purpose deleted something

And so it's on the trash of your Mac, but you don't realize it until you're on your iPad, right? Yeah. Or your other Mac, or you've emptied the trash on your Mac and it's gone. And so this gives you a buffer of time. It's within, it's within 30 days. And so it's not forever, but you kind of have a rolling 30 day window where you can grab your stuff.

I do wish this was built natively into Mac and iOS and iPadOS. Me too. I'm not sure why it's not. I don't think people know about this stuff. Yeah. While we're doing it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really nice feature, and it should be also in the internal operating system, in my opinion. Mm-hmm. So iCloud information, so things like calendars, contacts, iCloud photos, mail, notes, reminders, and even bookmarks –

can also be recovered from iCloud.com. Now, the way these work are a little bit different from each other. So photos is basically like files, right? There's a recently deleted section and you can pull something back. Some of these things, so calendars and contacts, for example, and even reminders, right?

they're not like in you can't go into like individually like oh i deleted david's contact i need to go get it what you do is you go back in time and you restore your entire data set data set your entire database which i think is fine but i could see a world where this could be more fine-grained what do you think about this

I think this is as far as they're going to go with it. Like something catastrophic happens to your contacts and you can say, well, just go back to last Friday and restore it. And I think that's their kind of use case for this. Whereas like you can't say, well, I want to bring back them, you know, Steven, who I lost, but I want to keep David, who I added. They're just not going to write a UI. They do that for you. Yeah.

And I think that's kind of what we're talking about, like sort of like a catastrophic issue. And I think in reality, especially like in contacts, like, I don't know, I'm not in there all the time, right? I think it would be fine to roll back. If you do roll back calendars or reminders regularly,

And I think notes as well, you have to reshare any content that was shared. So say that I, you know, accidentally like really messed up my, my work calendar and I restored it from the iCloud website. Well, I share that with my wife so she can see, you know, Oh, is he in an important meeting and he, you know, or whatever, see my work calendar, um,

I would need to restore the calendar and then reshare it with her. The restoration process breaks the sharing. That's also true when reminders. So if you have a shared reminders list and it gets restored from iCloud.com, you'll need to reset the sharing. So just something to be aware of if you walk through this process at some point.

But that's no different than the way it works with Time Machine. Like you go back and you restore a database. The get out of jail free card they give you on some of those apps like photos and reminders is they have a recently deleted item folder in the app. So you've kind of got a second tier recovery where you can go in and recover individual tasks or items that way.

But yeah, I don't think they're making this as, they're ever going to make it any more granular than it is. Yeah, I think that's true. You got a couple other sort of things kind of under this advanced features umbrella. You can set iCloud to send you notifications on your PC. So if you want to receive notifications from mail or calendar,

you can have those show up as a browser notification on your PC, which is pretty sweet. I think especially for email, if you're on your work computer and you just want to be notified about personal emails that comes in, this is a great way to do it. I generally am not a huge fan of browser notifications because I feel like a lot of websites kind of overdo them. But if you're this sort of user, this is...

This is, I think, really pretty useful. Now, there are a couple of caveats here. One, you have to choose the keep me signed in option on the login page, or you will stop receiving notifications after 30 minutes of inactivity. So it's a short window.

But even if you do choose that option, then notifications are available only for 30 days unless you log back into iCloud. So say that you rely on this, you're going to be logging into the iCloud website every so often.

But in reality, I don't think that's that big of a deal because if you've set up mail notifications on your PC for iCloud, you're probably going to want to do something with that mail. So you're probably logging into iCloud.com to deal with that stuff anyways. But it's just a little fine print that if you set this up and rely on it and it stops working, sign back in and it should kind of get things moving again.

And then, you know, the one you added a point to the outline here that I have always looked at as SKU and that's custom domains through iCloud. Yeah. That seems just so odd to me that you would run your custom domain through iCloud. People do it. You know, I said that when this rolled out and I heard from people like, no, it's great. I want to use my iCloud email and, but have it at my company domain. I mean, I'm a firm believer that especially for work, you should have a custom domain. Like I,

I'm sure you, I'm sure everyone sees this. Like you're behind like a, an HVAC guy in traffic and it's like, you know, Memphis HVAC at gmail.com or whatever. It's like, dude, just buy the domain. Like just do it. And you know, I don't know how widely used this is, but you can also manage this on the web where you set up a, you add a domain and,

And then you can share it with friends and family members, which is cool. So you could have like hackitfamily.org or whatever. And I could do that all through iCloud if I wanted to. And then your email is basically using that domain, just like Google Workspace, right? So like I have relay.fm. It's actually just a Gmail address with a fancy domain on it. So iCloud really was...

kind of the, they were behind Google on this and like Fastmail, of course, is, you know, you can do your own domains there as well. Hover even like lots of places have, you can do your own domain for your email. And so Apple added this a few years ago and it's all managed on the web. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not using it, but I don't, I don't use my iCloud email. Like I should say my iCloud email is,

And you can do this as something else you do on the website. It automatically forwards to my Gmail account. I want everything in Gmail for all the reasons I said earlier, including that I use MimeStream and want all my email in one application. And so I'm not using the iCloud email for anything. Yeah, I use it as my personal email and I don't forward it. I just treat it through iCloud. And I don't know, I just feel like I should.

Yeah. But the, but yeah, there's a lot of email options, but adding your own home domain to it, that, that works too. All right. So in addition to iCloud.com, there's iCloud plus, and that is a whole different monkey, right? That's not how I expect you to end that sentence. I'm just going to say, yeah. Yeah. So you have iCloud, which is the syncing and the five gigabytes, which is still ridiculous. Yeah. iCloud plus this got,

kind of rebranded and redone a few years ago. So if you pay for iCloud, you are in iCloud Plus. That's additional storage. That's iCloud Private Relay, which is like a VPN, but not a VPN for your Safari traffic.

You'd be surprised how many customer support requests I get for like things, like Relay World stuff. And it's like, oh, iCloud Private Relay, like broke your thing. Restart your Mac. There's Hide My Email, which is the feature that if you sign in with Apple, like, oh, I'm going to sign into this new task manager and I don't want them to have my actual email address, you know, some garbage email. That is paywalled behind iCloud Plus.

custom email domains we just talked about um home home kit secure video i love this feature but it's limited like i don't know why they'll only do 1080 cameras or if you have a 2k camera it'll only do 1080 but depending on which plan you buy you can have it securely store your video uh like that and um

Family sharing, you know, as you get above, I think it's a 200 gigabyte plan. You can start sharing space with family members. And of course, don't forget the brand new Apple invites application. Apple invites. Yeah. You can see invitations, but to create them, you have to be an iCloud plus member, which is maybe the weirdest of all of these. I'm not really sure why they did that. I mean, I know why they did it. Apple like services revenue, but it's like really invites. Yeah.

Yeah, so this is all the iCloud Plus stuff. Pricing and plans vary around the world, but in the U.S., currently, it's 50 gigabytes for a dollar a month. We talk about this every time we do one of those family tech support episodes. I always feel like our headline is, give your uncle or your dad 12 bucks so they have all their photos in iCloud. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a dollar a month. 50 gigs covers a lot of stuff for a lot of people. And then it goes up from there, 200 gigabytes all the way up to 12 terabytes. If you need 12 terabytes, you're paying $60 a month. I don't know who the 12 terabyte iCloud Plus plan is. If that's you, please, please let us know in the feedback form. What are you doing? What are you doing with 12 terabytes of stuff in iCloud? Even with family sharing, I don't know how you could ever use that much space.

Well, I am at six, so just to let you know. Wow. Well, I have adult children with iPhones. Yeah, I mean, I got two teenagers. And the iCloud storage really ramps up when you give your kid their first iPhone. It really goes up. I'm sitting on the two-terabyte plane right now, so I'm paying $10 a month. Or we share that space and all that stuff.

But I do love how they don't give you any discount. Like, if you go from 2 to 6, it's still $10 for 2 terabytes at each layer, up to 30. Well, that's how they do it. Like, if you upgrade a MacBook Air from 256 to 512, like, the 256 just disappears, basically. It's like, come on, guys, like...

Yeah. Yeah. Apple is stingy on their pricing with this. I'm glad the base one is just a dollar a month, but once you get above that, it starts getting a little silly. I think the base one, probably the $3 one should be free. I mean, yeah, I mean, I agree. I totally agree. I would imagine a huge, huge percentage of iCloud users fit in 200 gigabytes. I mean, it's gotta be the vast majority of them, I think.

I wonder if you took cuts from former Mac Power Users episodes of you or me or Katie complaining about that price because it goes back, that five gigabyte free tier. If you could put together an entire episode, like an hour and a half of us doing nothing but complaining about that. I bet you could.

Chat GBT cut me a super cut of us complaining about iCloud space. I mean, the five gigabytes are free has been free since 2011 when Steve Jobs introduced all this stuff. It has been that long. Maddening. So yeah, that is iCloud plus. You can just pay for iCloud plus and get all those features. But what Apple wants you to do is pay for Apple one, which is Apple's sort of top line bundle of,

And it includes iCloud Plus in addition to Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple Fitness, and Apple Arcade. Yeah. And for me, and I think probably for you and I think for a lot of people, I want enough of these other features. Like I want iCloud Plus. I need the space. I like Apple TV. We are an Apple Music family.

It is cheaper for me. And you can go into system settings or on the website and do this, like check the things you want. And it will tell you if you buy these separately or if you get these in Apple one,

This is the price difference. And so my family, we are on the premiere, the $38 a month. It's two terabytes of iCloud space, Apple TV, Apple music, arcade, fitness and news separately. Those that would be $67 and I'm paying 38 because of the bundle. So if you are using iCloud and you're paying for space and really, if you use one or two of any other Apple services, you,

And Apple one's available in your country. It's not available everywhere. Probably makes sense for you to, to look at Apple one, even if like for me, like we're not using, I don't use Apple arcade. Occasionally I download a game, but you know, if it went away, I wouldn't be sad. Technically I'm paying for Apple arcade, but it's cheaper for everything else. I do use to, uh,

Go with the premier. So that math will work out differently for different people. But in general, I think for most people, especially if you're getting into family storage and stuff, the Apple one is the way to go. And the family and premier plans come with sharing built in. So it's not just Apple music for me. It's Apple music for everyone in my cloud family. So my wife,

Two of our three children have Apple accounts. Well, the third one does. He just doesn't know it. How his iPad is signed to him. He doesn't have access to it. We all get music. We all get TV+. We all get Arcade and Fitness+. So that's kind of where we are with it. Yeah. And it is kind of remarkable to note how much Apple has turned into a services company.

Like this is where it stands. You look at that premier tier, iCloud plus $10 a month, TV plus $10 a month, music $17 a month, arcade $7 a month, fitness $10. I mean, news plus $13. They have a lot of services for sale these days. They do. And like old school people like us still think of Apple as a hardware and a software company, but they very much are a services company at this point.

It's where the market has gone for them, and it is where their growth is. If you look at those charts every quarter, that's where it's growing. Yeah. Every 90 days, they've got to go to Wall Street and explain why they're valuable. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash MPU to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain name using the code MPU.

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Somewhat related to this discussion while we're talking about iCloud storage is just that always comes up. What's the current status of the iCloud versus Dropbox story? And this is an evolving thing.

There is one thing that has changed with the Sequoia release. You can now push a button on a file in iCloud and have it keep it downloaded. They give you that one control where we didn't have that before. And that was, it was tough because like you need to rely on files being there sometimes. Yeah. Way, way overdue that this was here because the,

iCloud will do the thing. It will download everything or it will like manage it for you and offload things and download things kind of on demand as it sees fit. And there are some things like I just, I want to know I have on my local drive all the time. And that's how I have my Dropbox set up on my MacBook pro, right? Download everything. I got the space. It's fine. And this really was honestly a real limitation of iCloud drive. I'm glad they finally got that resolved because,

Another, I think, big feature that a lot of people use on Dropbox, I know I certainly do, my whole workflow is based around it basically, is shared folders. That works pretty well on iCloud Drive. I got a few shared folders with a few different people, including a massive one with me and my wife.

And it works as you expect, right? Full things show up. My only complaint about it is in the Finder on the Mac, it has a label of like shared by you, shared by Mary, next to every file name. Like I do not need to see that in Finder. Like I do not care who added this, who shared this with who. Like I don't need to see it. Put it in the inspector window. Put it in the sidebar somewhere. But that's a...

It's a silly small thing, but if I used iCloud Drive every day instead of Dropbox, I think it would make me lose my mind. I think it really would. Yeah, it's funny to me, though, that you're complaining that they gave you too much information. They just put it in the wrong place, is what they did. Like, I don't need to see it. Like, I'm looking at my iCloud Drive right now, and I'm looking in here, like, I don't need it next to every folder in this list. I just don't need it. Yeah, it is kind of maddening. I feel like it's like,

They keep inching toward a situation where I might be tempted to just use iCloud. And there are certain advantages of it, especially if you're just using Apple hardware, because iCloud just kind of wires into the file system really nicely, like if you're using an iPad a lot. But there is like a sandpaper friction that comes with it when you're used to Dropbox that you don't get. Like the way you mark a file...

as something you want to keep downloaded on the Mac, and you have to go into Finder, find it, right-click it, blah, blah, blah. Whereas the Dropbox app just has a menu where you select very surgically those files that you want to always have downloaded. It just feels to me like a more mature solution. Sharing is easier on Dropbox, and I feel like underlying it all, Dropbox just seems to be a more stable version of it.

But wouldn't it be nice? Because you're already paying for iCloud. Why don't you just get it all there and not have to pay for another service and just have, is this the stuff I put on Dropbox or is this the stuff I put on iCloud? I mean, if you could remove that friction. Plus, with advanced data protection, you're getting real protection to cloud storage that you don't get with Dropbox.

And I think there's a security argument for iCloud. So like, where is it right now? I think it's an option. I just don't think it's probably the best option, but it's definitely an option. And there are people listening to me right now who are doing it. And we're going to talk in a minute about what we're doing with iCloud. And I'm again, going through that phase where I'm putting more stuff in iCloud and partly because of this episode and just as an experiment, but yeah,

It's manageable. I just feel like it's not quite there as well. Are they even interested in matching parity feature for feature with Dropbox? Probably not. But are they interested in making it useful enough that I wouldn't miss Dropbox? I'm not sure. And there's an element, too. Dropbox has a lot of features I don't care about. How many emails do I get a year of Dropbox? Like, hey, we added signatures and stuff. I know some people want that.

The ideal version of Dropbox for me is the Dropbox of like 15 years ago. It's like, yeah, it just runs in the menu bar. It syncs the folders. And you know, the Mac app was pretty bad for a while. It's much better now. Again, like my whole world of podcasting and work is, is on Dropbox. Um, but the simplification is tempting. Um,

I mentioned, you know, we mentioned the pinning that they always downloaded folders. But another huge feature for me for Dropbox is I have this in my Dropbox. I want a URL to it that I can send to somebody else. So like, yeah, maybe it's a big PDF. I need to send it to you or it's a zip folder of MP3s and I'm sending it, you know, to someone who I don't normally share with like.

right click, copy link, put it in an email, put it in an iMessage and send it. And then you get the link, you open it on the web and you can download it or add it to your Dropbox. And what's frustrating is iCloud has a feature that's so close to this, a feature called MailDrop. So if you use Apple Mail,

And say you want to send, you know, 150 megabyte Photoshop file. That's too big for an email. But what it does is it actually uploads it to iCloud. And on the other end, they get a link where they can download it. Like they have the technology. It's right there. But add, call it WebDrop, add it to Finder, add it to iCloud Drive. So if I have something I need to share with somebody, I use that all the time. And that would be awesome.

I mean, my finder label thing, which I put a link in the show notes, you can see it and make fun of my complaints about this. That's one thing. But the, the lack of like public open ended sharing really like kind of comes back to, to, to burn me sometimes. That would be a, that would be pretty close to a showstopper for me. Yeah.

But it's in the ballpark and not everybody needs that feature. And this may be enough. I don't think I'm not afraid of it being unstable and like deleting your files. Yeah. You know, in the early days of iCloud, we weren't sure if that was going to be a thing or not. Right. So, I mean, they've made progress on it, but it is I still think it's probably not Dropbox.

With that famous meeting, Steve Jobs met the Dropbox guys and tried to buy him, and they said no, and he says, you've got a feature. Yeah. You don't have a product. Yeah.

Well, Apple still doesn't have that feature. I mean, at least not to the level Dropbox is. But I also agree with you. Dropbox is trying to turn itself into more than Dropbox. And I'm like the latest one is they have an AI calendar. And every time I open my email, they're telling me about their AI calendar. And I have no interest in artificial intelligence running my calendar. And I have no interest in switching my calendar to Dropbox. But boy, do they want me to.

One feature I use in Dropbox all the time is the ability to right click and finder and say get get link and then send that link to somebody. So if I want to share a PDF with you or like a zip file full of audio files, you know, to somebody who I don't I don't collaborate with regularly, they can open the link and they can then like download the files or add to their Dropbox or whatever.

That doesn't seem to be a thing in Finder. I can't right click on something and get a link. But if you're on iCloud.com, it's something that I learned in preparation for this episode. It kind of exists, sort of. So if you open a file on the iCloud Drive website, that URL that it gives you, which is like long and random, you can send that URL to other people and they can see that file.

that's not really intuitive. That's how that works, but it's not like a share URL and it's not, you can't make a URL in the finder. What you can do in the finder is share, but then it sends the actual like file itself. So I have a PDF. I want to share it with David, right? Click on finder, hit share. But at that point it's just like sending the actual file, not a link to the file.

So it's kind of here. I'm not even sure like if Apple really means for us to use it this way. But I think that this could be much more useful if it acted more like Dropbox, where I just create a URL right from Finder and someone can open it and download and add it to their iCloud drive. Like it's a feature Apple should just copy from Dropbox because Dropbox's version of it is really thought through.

Yeah. Just every time this comes up, Apple is a little closer, but not quite there. Yeah. A little bit, a little bit closer every time. I just, this is a really topic for another day, but one of my chief complaints about Apple's entire software game is that everything is so locked into point releases, whether a big really a 0.0 in the fall or, you know, 0.3 or 0.4 in the spring, as we're recording this, you know, iOS 18.4, et cetera, just came out last week. Um,

iCloud should just be updated as we go. We shouldn't have to wait for the next version of macOS to have sharing with a URL. They could just add it at any point, but they seem unwilling or unable to do so. All right. I thought it'd be interesting to talk about, now that we've gone through all this stuff, generally, what are we doing with iCloud? How are we investing in it and where are we using it? It's time for a check-in.

I do have the Premier account plus some expanded storage. And that's just because my kids are, somebody told me grown children are little poor people that think you're rich. And that's what they are. So I got to cover them. If it was just me and Daisy, I think we could get by on two terabytes. But I've got expanded storage. Apple is getting that services revenue from me.

I do not use iCloud.com. As we talked about at the top of the show, when we finish the show, I will be turning advanced data protection back on. Yep. I like that. I'm willing to take the risk. I've got good password software.

1Password is, as everybody knows who listens to MacPower users and our sponsor reads, but I use 1Password. I've got everything covered. I'm not going to lose anything important, and I like the protection of it. So I don't really use iCloud.com, but I am pretty invested in...

iCloud as a data source. Like I use Apple mail just as is. I don't go anywhere else for my personal email. I use the home kit secure video for several cameras in the house. Those are the only cameras I trust in the house. Like I have these Yuffie cameras outside that feed into the Yuffie software and

And I just leave them doing that for the, I have a couple cameras in the house. They only turn on when nobody's home and they only saved a home kit, secure video. And like, that's my comfort level with it. I think Apple's good at privacy and I think they're, they think about protecting me. And I really wish that my Yuffie cameras that have a higher resolution than Apple will accept. You know, I wish that they would fix some of this stuff, but they don't, but it's good enough.

The private relay thing, I've had very inconsistent results with it. And it seems like it often causes me trouble. Like when it's on, I can't get data I want and things don't work right. That is a misfire in my opinion. Whatever they did, they didn't do it good enough that it works seamlessly.

which is the Apple way, right? Additional storage, I have definitely been taking advantage of my six terabytes. I've moved recently a lot of stuff into my documents folder, even some of my media assets and things.

And the point is, you know, I've been rethinking my computers lately. Like I thought about selling and buying a laptop like you did, but I didn't ultimately do it. It's just, I don't need an update. An M2 to M4 doesn't make enough sense for me personally. So I've got a laptop that's a MacBook Air and I've got my big Mac studio. And the question to me is like, what if I go on vacation or leave town and

And there's a file that you or JF needs that I just can't forgot to send or whatever didn't do with. So I've been trying to put stuff into a very organized curated folders in the documents folder and I turned on document sharing.

So then when I open my little tiny MacBook Air, all that stuff is visible to me, even though it's not downloaded. And in theory, I'd be able to get access to it and send it to you or do whatever I need. So I'm going deeper down the iCloud rabbit hole. I do have my paid Dropbox account still, though. And it costs me because I pay for mine and I pay for JF's because he has it because I'm sending him videos. We're making...

The Max Markey Labs and Field Guides are a video business that makes hundreds of videos a year. So there's a lot of data going back and forth between me and the editor. And we need a reliable, fast system for that. And I've just never been able to make iCloud quite do it. Dropbox is just not a problem. You pay the money, but it works 100% of the time. And I would love for iCloud to save me some money and stop and be good enough, but it's just not.

Uh, what else am I doing with iCloud? Uh, in terms of the Apple one services, um, Apple TV plus I watch it. I watch shows that they make Apple. We're an Apple music family. Uh, I don't use Apple news that much, but there are some good publications in there that I wanted to, I would read, but I, I've, I've been trying to curate my news watching even more. Um, so I don't do Apple fitness plus I'm using all the time.

I mean, I still do the videos. I think they're great. Yeah, me too. Just recently, I realized, because Daisy and I are in a bit of a health kick, and I've been doing a lot of Pilates. But I noticed, because I'm usually the only guy there,

All these women in Pilates with me from age 20 to 60, they all stretch better than I do. I think men, it's harder for men to stretch. So I've been doing Apple TV Fitness Plus stretching stuff. I don't know. I think it's good. And occasionally an Apple Arcade game finds its way into my life. I try not to get hooked on those too often. So I get those. My kids use the Arcade stuff all the time. And you multiply this with the family, right? Because everybody is using some of these services. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm all in, I'm the perfect customer. I give them a lot of money and I use the services and I do wish that some of this stuff was better. I'm I'm pretty in line with you. Like I'm using it for, you know, all my calendars, all my contacts using it for some iCloud drive stuff. The biggest use is that shared folder with Mary because all she was using on Dropbox was one folder shared with me. I was like, well,

We can move that to iCloud drive. Like she's not in that folder very much. It's mostly just a reference. Like, Oh, like here's the contract from when we bought the house. Like sometimes you need that sort of thing. So it's not like an active thing all that much. Definitely using iCloud photos and the family sharing in photos. We have the family album, family library set up. We got, I mean, so, so many photos and videos. It's, it's unbelievable. And like I said earlier, paying for Apple one, because you know, we use Apple music. I love Apple TV plus and,

Man, severance. So I could do a whole podcast about it, but I won't. All sorts of great stuff on Apple TV+. And I'm using news more. I've talked about this a little bit. Took social media stuff off my phone this year, and that's been great. But in addition to friends on social media, I was subscribed to several news organizations and just see their headlines fly by because I didn't want all that stuff in RSS. And so using news plus a little bit more, it's not great, but it's not the...

The pit of despair that maybe I thought it was. Yeah. Or maybe that it was when it launched. I think it has gotten better. So yeah, I'm using a fair bit of it. I don't do the document and desktop sync. I don't do...

I don't do iCloud private relay. My experience has been exactly what yours is. We're like, it's really buggy and like things just won't load. And I just, I tried it about six months ago because I think maybe on connected, we talked about it and it was really bad when it first came out. I was like, Oh, we should try it again. Like in my experience, it's not great. And it's a, it's just Safari traffic. So if you're using other stuff, like that's not, that's not getting routed through there.

And yeah, not using iCloud email, but using a fair bit of it. And what's really great, you know, Apple to a degree can be fair, can be criticized fairly about tying its hardware and software and services too close together. Like, oh, look, maybe that's anti-competitive in areas, but I will give Apple full credit here. If you want to use Gmail or Google workspace or Yahoo or a thousand different things to

to have your contacts and calendars, to have your email, either in the first party apps or third party apps. Apple software lets you do that. Like my Google calendars, I use iCloud for all my personal calendars, but I use Google calendars for work, my various work accounts, right?

And they just live side by side in calendar. And like, I never have to think about, oh, I need a mode switch from my iCloud calendars over to my Google calendars. And they have features the other ones don't. Like, no, it all just works. And so you can mix and match these things with other services from other companies, right?

And sometimes that's been rougher than others. Occasionally there's like a, you know, I think in Mavericks kind of famously, there was a version of mail that just like totally choked on Gmail tags. Like, what are we doing? Like you have to fix this and they got it fixed. The move to document providers for syncing on the Mac, it was a little rocky with Dropbox and OneDrive and other things for a while. But generally speaking, you can mix and match these things. Not for everything, right? I can't choose to sync my Safari bookmarks online.

to a Google Drive account, right? That's just on iCloud. And I understand that. But in terms of the data, like the actual information I have, the files I have, Apple's platforms are fairly agnostic to what I sync them with. And I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that Apple does the work. So Dropbox works as well as it does on the Mac, or that I could have all my contacts on my phone be synced to a Gmail account and not iCloud if I want them to be.

But it still makes me wonder. It's like, okay, so you guys did the support. So I can right click in the finder and get a Dropbox sharing link.

And did anybody think to call over to the iCloud Drive team and say, hey, guys, you want us to take care of you at the same time? Yeah. I mean, there are links to those files. We've proven it on this episode. You can go dig one out of iCloud.com. Just surface it for me and let me as a user take it. I don't get it. I don't either. Yeah.

But yeah, it's all good. And I remember when everybody, the story of Apple was they can't do the cloud. And now they're fine. They're fine. And I feel like ultimately that's going to be the story with AI too. But it's just going to take a while.

All right. We're the Mac Power Users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash MPU. Thanks to our sponsors today, 1Password and Squarespace. For more power users, stick around. We're going to be talking about AI, Apple's AI doctor in particular. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.