Written by About two weeks ago my new 2TB external drive, where I store all my iTunes content among other things lost its mind, and I realized how much stuff I just didn’t have backed up. Don’t you hate that feeling? I contacted Apple, and knowing all well that it is not their responsibility but that sometimes they will help you out, they allowed me to redownload all my content. The side-effects of that are what I want to get into.
When iTunes had started to redownload everything, I tried to pause things, so that I could spread it out over the month. Why? Because I figured that I was probably going to go way over my bandwidth limit if I didn’t manage it. The worst part? Some things ended up re-re-downloading without my control, putting me 180 Gigs over my 122 Gigs a month limit. The software just wasn’t made to allow me to manage this, because the assumption is of course, that you have all the bandwidth you need. That got me thinking this morning.
If my iPad and iPhone were also downloading the content from the internet as per the coming iCloud scenario, would that have been 3x? I think it would have. I think this is a real issue if this is the case, and that would logically have to move to a device to device synch that would use the cloud as the source of truth, but otherwise think about the bandwidth impact on the individual. If I decide to download a 2 gig movie, and I have a laptop, an iPad and an iPhone, that means I’m going to be downloading 6 gigs of material?
For the carriers and Internet providers this is a double edged sword, good in that it makes people consume more bandwidth and allows them to charge people for downloading more but then comes the other side which is that pricing pressure will limit how much they can recoup out of that, and their infrastructure costs are going to go up. Is Apple planning on buying Cisco, because if so this makes a lot of sense. Otherwise this really comes across as an absent minded miss, an assumption of a Microsoft order about the behaviour and expectations of consumers in terms of their bandwidth and the costs of that bandwidth.
I don’t know, am I missing something? For me the optimal strategy should be that my devices should synch with each other, that one gets the new content and that it then shares it with my other devices. Now if I grabbed my iPad and headed off with it, without having allowed the new movie I downloaded to my iPhone to synch to it, then I should be allowed to select that I want to download it from the Cloud, if I so choose. It shouldn’t be automatic.
I know this can sound very user interventionist, but I think that there’s some level of involvement that’s got to happen because otherwise it’s not just me that’s going to be surprised at a suddenly much higher bill at the end of the month.
