At the developer conference, Apple announced and demoed changes to iCloud that, according to developers I’ve spoken with, have improved the service, but not dramatically so. With Mountain Lion, iOS 6, and WWDC ’12, Apple tried to improve the overall experience for both users and developers. Months later, developers were still deeply concerned with the state of iCloud sync for third-party apps, as the APIs Apple provided turned out to be difficult to implement and unreliable at best. For one, iCloud wasn’t even natively enabled on OS X at first: Apple had to ship a software update to Lion – 10.7 was released in July 2011 – to bring official iCloud support to the desktop. Launched to much acclaim with iOS 5 in October 2011, iCloud immediately appeared as a fantastic solution to keep personal data in sync between iOS devices, but a more complex technology for third-party integration. While that has been (partially) the case, 409 days later the results are more nuanced.įor developers, iCloud integration didn’t quite go as planned. I no longer have to worry about space since I can plan well ahead for that.I concluded last year’s edition of My Must-Have Mac Apps suggesting that, with iCloud approaching its public debut and developers starting to integrate native sync in their iOS and OS X apps, “a new class of Mac software” would take us in new directions. Still, I have over 2TB of media reasonably secure and all Macs are backed up via TM. Cons are that the initial investment was high and that having my iTunes library on the Drobo means I can't do a time machine backup on that. Pros were that I could grow the storage space as drives got cheaper, recycle old drives, have a safety net if drives fail and also use as a Time Machine backup. Then as the library got bigger, it was getting hard to store the media on an external drive and also back up. The rMBP should last a good few years and is definitely an improvement over the mini.įor storage space, I moved away from internal drives with the mini. Now I use a first gen rMBP (2012) that was retired when I got my touch bar MBP.

The host mac has evolved from a G4 tower bought in the late 90s to a 2009 Mac mini. Initially just music, ripping all my CDs plus some vinyl.

I have had a media server in several forms since iTunes first came into being.

Must have apps for macbook pro 2012