Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Cloud, wireless, and unreliability

I wonder why everybody is pushing The Cloud so hard? I see advantages, but no dramatic ones, none which really make up for the fact that the Net and the Cloud are still simply too unreliable, and often too slow.
For example, for two days I've been trying to get on with watching Community, which I bought on iTunes over my Apple TV box. But all I'm getting is "iTunes is currently not available, try later". This is simply not good enough.

Is it just another method of locking us in? I guess it that much harder to change to a Windows machine (imagining anybody would want to), if all your files are sitting in Apple's iCloud.

I have similar feelings with wireless communications, bluetooth and wifi. In all my experiences, they are simply not reliable, not by a long shot. A couple of years ago, I finally gave up and put in an Ethernet cable for my main Mac. I've not had a connection problem since on that machine!
I use bluetooth as little as I can, but I have to use wifi with my iPads. And I have connection problems so often, you dunno. Recently I bought five TV episodes, and it took a full 24 hours to download them!! That's ridiculous.

In case you think it's because of a bad ISP, I don't think so, because I have two for redundancy, two different companies, two different technologies, cable and ADSL. And still I get so many dropouts.

Sure, I see an equally ridiculous ten wifi networks in this apartment building!! But the technology is still not mature, after all these years, if this should cause so many problems. I mean, it's not like it wasn't predictable that it would become popular, since wifi has been pushed even more than the Cloud, and even longer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"iTunes is currently not available, try later"

Hmm, was this because Apple was making changes to support the new hardware and software announced on Tuesday morning (Calif time)?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Doubt it, it's still the same now, Thursday.

Oddly, my iPad *can* access iTunes.
(But some shows/films bought on Apple TV can't be watched on other devices, lord knows why. Maybe only licenced for streaming. Though I'd guess that could be done.)