★ What I want from Apple’s iCloud Service

Apple has pre-announced that iCloud will be unveiled during Steve Jobs’ Keynote at WWDC next week. Everyone has already said what they think iCloud will be and many more weighed in today on what they think it won’t be. I’d like to state what I want, as a technologist and Mac user. I travel a week out of the month, I have a Core i7 Dell notebook attached to a high speed work Internet connection and a 30″ LCD display. I also have an 11″ MacBook Air and 27″ iMac along side my iPad 2 and iPhone 4. I have a 50 megabit home Internet connection and a combined 4 terabytes of hard drives. My iTunes library is over 2 terabytes in size when you add up music, video and app content. Finally, I own a Boxee Box, AppleTV, XBox, Roku, Sony Blu-Ray Player and share my content with Flickr, YouTube and other services. To finalize the picture, I do use Google Apps Premiere but rely on Apple’s $99 a year subscription of MobileMe that I’ve been using since it was iTools in 2001.

With that said, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into my hopes for iCloud with the “chip on my shoulder” tone given how terrible Apple’s cloud services have been for the past decade.

Before Google and Yahoo allowed you to store things on their servers, before Flickr and YouTube were around and before web hosting was “normal” to people, there was iTools. Greeting cards, storage, email, backup, device sync and web design. It was all in a package that cost nothing. Then it became .Mac and now is called MobileMe and costs $99. You can get everything MobileMe does for the low cost of free from a few providers. The case for MobileMe has gone away and I feel bad for any Apple Store employee who has to sell copies of it. It’s worthless and even the sales pitch of it being a nice bundle is a moot point because Google gives you most of MobileMe simply by creating an account with them.

Here is a break down of what I want in iCloud assuming that Apple cares what I think and assuming that they can even deliver on this for free or in a better package than Google:

1. iTunes Cloud: I do not want all of my purchases to be available cloud only. I want everything on my hard drives at home and I want to manage everything in iTunes but I want a backup in the cloud at all times so I can stream my music to my work PC when i want with all of the features I have in iTunes such as Genius Mixes and Playlists that I’ve already managed on my home iMac. I’d like my iPhone (which only has 32 gigabytes of storage) to display all 200 gigabytes of music just as it was located on the device with an icon next to that song that signaled to me that this song was not local but instead was on Apple’s servers. I could play it (by joining iCloud and using my 3G connection) but it was available if I wanted it. I wanted to play some Gnarls Barkley the other day and realized I don’t have that on my iPhone. I’m a few curse words away from just buying an iPod Classic and modding a 320 gigabyte hard drive into it because I hate not having every track on me. I still want an iTunes purchase to signal a download to iTunes but I want that in the cloud as well. Also, iCloud will not work for me if I’m not able to A) Upload all of my existing music to the cloud B) Have all of my old purchases already in the cloud waiting for me C) Have unlimited storage. I won’t pay for extra storage. I want unlimited storage. I want iTunes Cloud to “just work” with my AppleTV, PC, iPad, iPhone and Mac. I want iCloud music, movies, tv shows and audio books to just be there waiting for me. If my transfer from my iTunes library (200 gigabytes of music) to iCloud isn’t done yet, I want iCloud to reach into my iMac (which is awake) and stream that song to my work PC if I ask it to. I want iTunes on my PC to mimic the exact same library as my home Mac (via Home Sharing) and my Apple ID unlocks all of my content no matter if it’s in the cloud or on my Mac. I can buy an album on my iPhone via iTunes and have it immediately accessible to my work PC without limits. This is the cloud heaven that I want and I’ll pay for it.
2. Syncing via MobileMe across every device should be included. If you are an Apple loyalist, you should have syncing for free. You can charge me for mail but I’m running Lion and OS 5 on all of my devices so I deserve to sync all of those automatically. No exceptions.
3. Back to my Mac, I don’t mind paying for. I use it a lot. Improve it please by working on my work computer. Mimic what LogMeIn has done for the market. Make Back to my Mac work on PCs, Macs and iOS devices and make it work well! It’s only VNC using your AppleID & MobileMe as the relay server to initiate a direct proxy connection between both devices. Just make it work on all platforms. VNC is cross-platform. You can do this. Let’s not forget, Apple Remote Desktop works with both PCs and Macs.
4. My files should be everywhere. I want to access my files on a “home computer” that I designate on any PC or Mac via a web browser or via the 10.7 Finder. Mimic SugarSync here. They do a great job at this. This isn’t storing things on the cloud, this is simply keeping that connection open. This includes accessing files in iMovie, GarageBand and iWork on my iOS devices. What is on my home computer should be accessible on those mobile applications. Of course, it would be a nice iOS feature to finally have that portable home directory that we heard about years ago finally came true in iOS 5.
5. iCloud should run all syncing and updating of my iOS 5 devices. USB will be an option and may be the best option for the first sync of all 64 gigabytes of content to my iPad but all new syncs should be done automatically. Remove contacts syncing from iTunes and make it all cloud based. I want the app install on my iPad to also go to my iPhone or the ability to send it to my iPhone as well.
6. Safari Saved State across devices: The cloud should follow the Android feature of sending pages, addresses, phone numbers and apps to the device via the browser. “Open this map with iPad” should be a feature in Lion. “Call with iPhone” should be added as well. As long as your AppleID is on that Mac and syncs up with your iOS Device, Apple should enable those features. This makes the device a true extension of the computer and, instead of emailing myself links to pages I like on the iPad or sending those to Instapaper / OmniFocus with a bookmarklet, I can choose, “send page to iMac” and it’ll be there when I go to that computer. Perfect.

This is my list for what I want in iCloud. What’s yours?