Micro-review of iCloud: Better than its sucky predecessor

Apple’s iCloud service works far better than MobileMe ever did and I am reasonably happy to embrace it going forward, but it certainly hasn’t been entirely problem-free — in particular, I had major calendar corruption at sign-up time — and there are strange limitations, any number of things that it really seems like it should be able to do that it can’t.

For instance, I found myself missing keychain syncing yesterday as I re-entered a series of new passwords on a second Mac. Pre-iCloud, they would have synced via MobileMe, and my system passwords were always available on all my Macs. How is that we’re losing sync functionality in a day and age when we’re supposed to finally be solving decade-old sync hassles? Sigh.

So iCloud mostly seems to be what Mobile Me should have been — more reliable than something that sucked — minus some features and with some new ones. I flipped the switch on iTunes Match a couple weeks ago, and no news is good news: other than some minor oddities, it worked, and it’s kind of dreamy to finally have my music and playlists everywhere and anywhere. And so what? I know it’s a huge technology under the hood, but from the user perspective the utility is pretty trivial — only somewhat more valuable to me than keychain syncing, really.