iCloud

Computing devices are getting more powerful, more varied, and more ubiquitous, but the data storage in these devices hasn't changed that much. We are still beholden to the HDDs, SSDs, and eMMCs or UFS of yesteryears. In fact, the storage story has become even more complicated because each device has its own storage that you have to manage or keep in sync with other devices.

Enter cloud computing and cloud storage, with its promise of being able to access your data anytime, anywhere. Well, as long as you have an Internet connection, that is. It is an inescapable fact of modern day computing life and it pays to know the choices you have. Here are ten of the top cloud storage options this half of the year.

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Apple went into overdrive with the announcements it made yesterday during its WWDC 2017 keynote, but one small yet important change to iCloud wasn't given much attention. It seems that Apple has reconsidered its iCloud pricing, ultimately giving heavy iCloud users more storage for their money. This could very well ignite a cloud storage pricing war between iCloud and competitors like Google Drive at a pretty important moment.

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Amazon's Alexa now supports iCloud Calendar, allowing the virtual assistant to check your schedule on the Apple service. The update means that users of the Amazon Echo - as well as the Echo Dot and Amazon Tap - can get an instant read-out of what's on their agenda for the day, by asking "Alexa, what's on my calendar today?" There's also support for adding new appointments, again all by voice.

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Like many of Apple's apps and services, the Notes app can be synced to iCloud to make the information available on a number of devices. When a user chooses to delete a note, they can recover it within 30 days, but after that Apple states the data is wiped. However, security firm ElcomSoft has discovered that it's able to recover notes well beyond this 30-day window.

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Apple’s cloud-based calendar solution has finally caught up to modern times. Or at least modern e-mail times. Just as any e-mail service worth its salt has an option to flag an e-mail as spam, now the iCloud Calendar finally has such a button as well. At least iCloud on the web. And it only took a mass spamming incident and dozens of vocal Apple users before Apple finally got its act together to roll out such a feature, a bit more than a month after users have started making noise.

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If you haven’t yet experienced receiving unwanted even invitations, a.k.a. spam, on your iPhone or iPad’s Calendar app, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. iOS users have reported suddenly being plagued by numerous such invites on their devices, and declining them seems to make it actually worse. After days of silence, Apple has finally but unofficially acknowledge the situation and is promising to take action. But as spam filtering only happens on Apple’s end (for now), all that users can do is wait and use these workarounds to get rid of those notifications (for now).

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For those who’ve been monitoring consumer technology long enough, the term ‘Apple Tax’ will be familiar. It’s a phrase coined in the late aughts to cleverly describe the high price tag of Apple devices, like the Mac. Prices are still high, but with other manufacturers creating similarly beautiful and expensive machines, ‘Apple Tax’ has slipped out of our vernacular. Without us paying attention, Apple resurfaced it as a real tax levied against how you use your devices.

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It would appear that Apple thinks the development of its cloud services could be more efficient. Anonymous sources close to this issue have told Bloomberg that Apple plans to unify its cloud development teams in the same space, potentially making the production of services like Siri, Maps, iCloud, and Apple Music easier for everyone involved.

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For the modern computer user and knowledge worker, cloud storage is an inevitable fact of life. For mobile device users with very limited internal storage, it becomes a necessity. Apple’s iPhones have long been criticized by some camps for lacking a data storage expansion option and the company is unlikely to change its ways. Instead, it is now offering even more space on its iCloud storage service, up to 2 TB in fact, to give more room for your photos, videos, and files.

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Smartphones these days, even the lower spec ones, are capable of taking high resolution (though not always high quality) photos. That means those photos take up more space on the smartphone's storage. And when you have a measly 16 GB of internal memory, with no microSD card option, you will inevitably run out of space. That is precisely the point that Google is trying to make in a rare and admittedly amusing Google Photos video ad. And it is aiming its guns at, what else, the 16 GB iPhone.

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iOS 10 is bringing with it a number of new features, including the ability to remove stock apps from your homescreen and add stickers to your text messages, but today we're getting word of a particularly exciting feature that offers up a lot of utility. A Reddit user by the name of nite_ has discovered that iOS 10 Beta 1 allows users to prioritize app downloads by utilizing the 3D touch capabilities of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, a feature that's sure to make a lot of iPhone users happy.

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OS X has a new name, but macOS Sierra is otherwise business as usual for Apple: continue to draw together the Mac on your desk and the iPhone in your pocket. That means features we've become familiar with on iOS, like Siri and Apple Pay, making the leap to your Mac, but also a blurring of the lines between your different devices and what's in the cloud.

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