Something I have noticed with Apple lately, and what their "true" business plan just might be with iCloud - I have concluded it is a classic "shake-down" with typical Apple flare -and if you are lucky enough to own shares of Apple stock; I'm sure you aren't complaining.

For a single iPhone user...this probably won't be much of an issue, but for a household like mine (six devices currently in use on one iCloud account)...it will be.

Apple has said time & time again that they want all of their iProducts (AppleTV, iTouch, iPods, iPhone, iPad, and Macs) all syncing through wifi/ iCloud -and that one day -there will be NO WIRES - right?? But Apple doesn't do anything unless they can make a whole lot of ca$h. I have been trying to figure out why Apple would just completely drop iDisk/ MobileMe, and literally force their current MobileMe customers to migrate to iCloud or lose their data. I was, after all, paying over $100/ year for the MobileMe cloud/ web hosting services provided by Apple, and now iCloud is FREE - right? 

Right...

Here is the catch- only about 5% of apple customers were using the MobileMe service. It was by every account, a complete failure. Apple very rarely fails, and when they do - they quickly adapt and make changes. The web hosting space is incredibly competitive, and there are plenty of free services out there (DropBox, Yahoo Flickr, Microsoft's SkyDrive, etc...) free - if you are willing to be bombarded with advertising and tether these services through your Facebook and Twitter accounts, of course. Essentially you are getting the web hosting services free because you are handing over your entire social network to those hosting services. Well, no one knows their customer base better than Apple!!

But how can Apple get into the cloud/ hosting space, while at the same time, make piles of cash??

Simple really- Apple just makes iTunes and every single app on your iOS device 100% integrated with iCloud. I'm not talking about your photos, videos, documents, email, etc...

So right now, we have an iPad, two iPhones, and my kid's iTouch all running iOS 5 and syncing at 2am each night via iCloud. It updates our apps, photo stream, iTunes purchases, etc.  But did you know that every single app that you have ever downloaded (free or paid) is also syncing & taking back-up space on your iCloud account each night? I noticed this lately because you get 5 GB of free backup storage space with your iCloud account. Originally, our four devices were taking up about 3.5GB. But then it started creeping up closer to 4GB. That's when the automatic emails from Apple started arriving each night.

*Warning* your iCloud storage is approaching your maximum size limit. If you go over, your devices will no longer backup to iCloud (actually, what happens is your apps stop working altogether and your phone pretty much becomes useless right?). Last week our backups began to approach 5GB!!

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So THIS is Apple's ultimate plan. Roll out iCloud to every single one of their customers worldwide, and pretty much force a much larger percentage of their customer base to upgrade to a larger/ PAID iCloud account/ storage limit (available with just a few clicks and billed to your iTunes account).

I had to go into settings ==> iCloud ==> Storage & Backup ==> manage storage ==> click on the device and then manually click the settings to "off" for every single app (of course, the default for every single app is set to "yes"). Once I did that for all four of our devices... Our nightly iCloud backup went from 4.9GB all the way down to  2.8GB!!

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So if I didn't look into this further, I probably would have just clicked on the $20 purchase tab to increase my iCloud max storage size- because I certainly wouldn't want my apple devices to stop working properly, right?? Which I'm guessing is exactly what most people do when confronted with the scary emails from Apple -and this is why Apple is one of the most profitable technology companies on Wall Street and in the history of capitalism. Basically...Apple has invented a brand new way to draw sales revenue from an already deeply loyal and extremely committed world wide customer base. iCloud = $$$.

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Basically the day you install iCloud, that will be the least amount of storage you use & require. From that day forward, every single time iCloud performs a backup, the file size increases.

So what is my point?

There is no turning back from iCloud, and I definitely see the value in this service. However; you need to think about what data you truly need to back-up each night...as opposed to the data that can only be described as "filler" junk that increases every single day that you use your apple device.

This ever-growing data dump will certainly result in millions of Apple customers making the high pressure decision of either upgrading their iCloud storage limit with a simple iTunes purchase OR running the risk of losing the data that is truly valuable to the consumer.

One thing is certain, Apple's net revenue and profits will continue to increase with iCloud.

NC_Hawk (peace)