If you put together my 2011 predictions so far they create a world view of tech culture and business as I see it for the coming year. Each prediction builds on the others until we get to these last two, which present a couple boffo conclusions, the big question being “What does Apple need with a 500,000 (soon to be one million) square foot data center in rural North Carolina?”
First we have Apple working to kill small hard drives. We’ll shortly see Apple also killing optical drives in its notebooks. This is to save money, space, and weight, sure, but it is mainly to limit local storage. We need local storage, but Steve doesn’t want us to have too much or we won’t need his big data center, which is about to open. In that respect Apple likes it that flash storage is still too expensive to have in unlimited amounts. His various App Stores, too, are intended to change the mechanics of software storage and distribution.
The iPad has no real file system, why is that? Because its intended file system is that late-in-opening Apple data center in Maiden, NC. Also look for the new MacBooks to take advantage of the same cloud filing system through OS X 10.7 Lion. Steve said the new MacBook air was the future of Apple laptops. But with low capacity solid state drives, where will all the media be stored? The answer, of course, is in North Carolina. Look for updated versions of iWork to also take advantage of the data center for storage and collaboration.
Apple is heading toward a world of thin client computing networked out of the box. It’s the new MobileMe. Content creation will take place on solid state drive MacBooks/iMacs and content consumption will take place on iPads and iPhones.
This is also their corporate strategy. Apple sees companies abandoning IT departments in favor of simply passing out iPads and MacBooks – already networked out of the box to secure storage, email, and collaborative services. In typical Apple fashion, this strategy completely does an end-run around the status quo, revolutionizing the way businesses think about computing. Why else would Apple abandon their corporate server (xServe) strategy?
Steve has always seen Apple as a solutions provider, giving customers completely finished functionality. The data center connects subnet functionally to other subnets, extending the reach of Apple computing devices by connecting them to as many subnets as required.
Redundancy, redundancy — where art thou?
It worked so well for Oracle, Sun and Novell. Why not?
The network is the computer. Thin/thick clients. Sigh, why does the PC industry always come back to this? Time share is not the ultimate end all be all of computer existence. It just can’t and won’t solve all of business’s needs and won’t (despite management’s wet dreams) replace or make any cheaper in-house IT support.
Ah, but once you’re A Suit, you get the lobotomy.
err.
The consumer does not have an IT staff to support them. Unless you think Geek Squad is the shizzle.
This is _the_ consumer play.
And for corporate types, once you go wireless and/or allow systems to wander outside the corporate (fire)walls, _where_ the data is always more than a couple unmanaged hops away.
Face it…. MOST companies don’t own their data centers… they outsource them to IBM, CSC, etc.
Apple is doing the iPod (and PC) attack model. Get the consumer to buy into it, and the corporate IT types will be soon forced to follow.
I hope you’re right Bob, because if you are, this will be the final Litmus test. Anyone who would go along with this has well and truly drank the Kool-Aid and will be beyond any redemption. I worry far too much about people I know who are careless with their data or who trust it to others. If this happens, I will know I can’
t save them and will stop letting it worry me.
Kind of sucks to have to click back to the main page to see the next part. Since you won’t put it on one page please add links along the chain.
But there are advantages to having the 10 predictions broken up:
* If you want to e-mail someone links to just the Apple-oriented ones (as I do), you can
* Comments are kept much more on-topic as they address only one prediction at a time
I agree–and have it float as you scroll down to read the replies. How about it, Bob? It’s long overdue.
For small screens, how about good old fashioned html with word wrap on zoom, functional text size adjust, and line spacing that increases with both types of enlarging, in the comments as well as the column. Also, there is no room for floaty stuff in the small screen case.
My work is big user of XServes but the iPad in education is failing because there are a handful textbooks and the publishers think they can charge the same price for those eBooks every year too. Where would my potential 2100 simultaneous iPad users save/backup all the content they generate when they mangle/drown/drop their iPads? Normally our servers share out Network Home Folders and it surely won’t be coming from an outside cloud, we don’t have the bandwidth for it inside or outside and never will if we implemented it tomorrow or even next year.
We’ll need to build our own SAN/Cloud on premises and have some magical iOS app that lets us save/backup to it. But I won’t be doing it with Xserves because of the “wisdom” of Steve, it will have to be with new servers running Ubuntu or even Windows. We’d also have to buy all new printers that are “AirPrint” compatible and we will not be any further along than we are now, just poorer and a hell of a lot crankier.
I’ve been following the iPad Project blog (http://speirs.org/blog/tag/theipadproject) and so far I am not convinced that the cloud has anything to offer besides email and stripped down office type apps and that the iPad is not ready for prime time education adoption yet. There are too many parts missing, from app distribution, school control, backup and general availability to basic necessities like textbooks.
Your iPad data woes are exactly the reason that I, a 23-year Apple professional, have shunned the iPad. I got a MacBook Air instead as it’s the same size but has a keyboard, local data storage, and much better interoperability. It was a couple hundred $ more but well worth it and I’ve not regretted it for a moment, nor longed for an iPad instead. Several iPad users I know do look longingly at my MBA though. 😉 You may want to consider recommending MBA’s for your student body instead of iPads. They’re simply more practical, and will remain so for years to come if Apple’s glacial rollout of their Cloud solutions are any indicator.
Agreed, JKT. Tried a friend’s iPad and would love to have it if I could manage it along with my other iToys. The MBA is the way to go if you can keyboard well and need to write a lot. Searching and manipulation is easier and storage is its strength over the iPad. If Steve allows only cloud storage, then I won’t be an adopter, ever. As a teacher, I would see the MBA the perfect engagement for text and process for my students; the iPad, seems to be a distracting toy or at best, a search and reading tool. I wish there was another company to match Apple’s quality and vision.
Xserves are just one hardware implementation of a server – Apple isn’t leaving servers, just that form factor. You can do the same thing with other hardware … not as well, but the solution is there so you don’t need to jump to MS or anyone else.
Why is it there is no easy way to back up or restore an iPod/iPad separate of Apple? There are no tools for doing hard drive recovery or formatting ala Apple Disk Utility. Your only option is to reformat.
I don’t wish to give Apple an additional $100 a year for services like Mobile Me. I feel more confident backing up to my own back-up solution. I simply do not trust that Moble Me will become a future .mac where all the services disappear at the whim of a CEO without consideration to the users.
Check out iomega’s auto magic backup dock (sans DRM content). You can also ssh into an iPad/iPhone (command prompt in windows terminology).
Bob,
This whole thin client(ie computer) model is Oracle/Larry Ellison circa 1996. Now we have the real need to implement it. Note I didn’t say technology because you can argue that even back then this was feasible just not needed.
I thought it was Project Athena’s Dream from MIT in 1985?
Even the NeXT in 1988 shipped in effectively a ‘diskless’ configuration.
Ellison was just touting the fact that IIS/sybase was ill suited for _real_ database solutions.
Apple is going to the crux of computing: Not everyone wants, cares, or needs to be involved in information technology. I want to turn it on and use it… if it’s harder than a TV, it’s too hard.
Apple has a done a good job of making computers numb for people, ie, they just use them without cause/concern of the underlying fundamentals or the nature of its consequences. I doubt many people will put much thought into what the effects will be of storing their data on the cloud. They will happily follow like lambs waiting to get slaughtered (Bob this would be a good title for your write up once Apple announces their cloud computing “final” solution). I, for one, will try to educate my friends about the consequences.
“In typical Apple fashion, this strategy completely does an end run around the status quo, revolutionizing the way businesses think about computing”
?? this isn’t revolutionizing anything … it’s precisely what *all* of the other companies have already been doing. Google with their massive eye in the sky, Microsoft with Azure … they’re just late to the game
But apple is the only one that controls the solution from the point of sale. They build the HW, the software, the hardware store, the app store, the music store, and now want to be the data store. And only by convincing the user/buyer this is the most painless way to get your life done can they be successful, because any one layer delivered poorly, and there will be a revolt to the other solutions.
Google’s model is they don’t _care_ to done anything other than serve up ads and get their cut of each impression.
At this point, I see apple and Google living symbiotically. Microsoft… will go the way of IBM, and become a corporate services company and ‘backoffice’ operator.
Yes, because MS Azure is SO well implemented and ubiquitous.
The country will be full of rural data centers. Google in The Dalles, OR, Apple in NC, MS in … where the heck is MS anyway?
Unless corporations decide that running their business is best done with a Kinect camera and XBox in every office – well at least that would make even accountants get exercise when running spread sheets – MS will be pushed farther into the back rooms and as someone else mentioned, become the 2015 equivalent of IBM. But IBM will have had a 2 decade head start.
“where the heck is MS anyway?”
I’ve no idea what you mean by this rhetoric.
MS, for all its faults, runs large data centers already. You think they run Bing, or HotMail, or any of the kazillion MS Live services off kit rented from Amazon?
They may not have set the world on fire with anything new, but they appear able to deliver an adequate level of service — and if you’re a happy MS customer, adequate would appear to be all you ask of your computing.
As for where they are physically, they are probably spread around the world, so as to be close to customers. But at least one is in Boydton, Virginia:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/08/27/microsoft-picks-virginia-for-major-data-center/
It’s going to be quite a battle between GOOG vs AAPL for consumer + enterprise cloud computing which are blending together. And 10″ tablet’s ( WiFi + 4G ) will likely be the preferred device ( over smartphones and laptops ) in couple yrs. All other players can fight for a distant 3rd place and down from there.
I’ve pinged on the thread for a lot of these items, however I do feel that Apple’s NC data center is the core of a consumer marketplace data center. Most data is duplicative…. Everyone who owns ‘Hey Jude’ doesn’t need their own copy… just their ‘link’ to the master copy through a bundle of my properties for that content (how many times have I played it, is it a favorite, what volume do I like to listen to it). Every app owned is just pressed from the same gold copy. Now it’s a local cache version on your device, a link local config data, and a registered link back to the gold copy in the master data center. Anything I create or modify is just synced back to whereever I choose to get my ‘local storage’ service from (and apple will gladly charge you $100 a year to coordinate your content across all your appliances)
This to me is really an amazing monetized implementation of the old Andrew File System;-)
This makes perfect sense. The death of Xserve makes this very plausible. The only problem I see is buy-in from IT. Sure for small business this will make sense, where a business owner doesn’t really know technical things and essentially outsources it to Apple. He/She no longer has to hire the 13 year old neighbor kid to make his expensive equipment work, it will just work out of the box.
The problem I see is getting corporate buy-in. Corporate IT folks who already see threats everywhere they look (outsourcing, new technologies/skills to replace current skills, etc.) will see this as a threat. Until the business owners demand this solution without the IT people being in the room I think there will always be clever reasons for not taking this approach.
The company I work for is already looking at internal “cloud” storage solutions but I predict that it will be a long time before we would make the move to using cloud storages outside our 4 walls (want to guess who is always involved in making these decisions?).
Seconds after reading this blog post, I came across this article on another website. Seems to tie in …
https://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/05/new_apple_patent_for_network_booting_could_lead_to_cloud_based_mac_os_x.html
This is a trend that has been going on for some time. Consumer goods displace specialized tools. Not because they are immediately better but because they are cheaper and ubiquitous. Because they are ubiquitous everyone knows how to use them and they are easily replaced.
In the case of the cloud Apple (or Google or MS) will eventually develop something that is as common as tap water and will put the IT departments to shame with their high end custom solutions.
Bob, you talk about the next-gen MacBook Pros. Anyone out there heard when these might be announced and/or arrive in stores? Thanks.
Whether or not Googl, Appl, MSFT develop something that ‘puts local IT departments to shame’, what is to stop an unscrupulous provider:
Charging me for storing my own data in their cloud
Using and onselling my intellectual property
Tracking the media and data I use
Using information about my media and data consumption to make predictions about my media and data use
Using information about my media and data consumption to sell me products
Using information about my media and data consumption to profile my personality
Using information about my media and data consumption to predict my crimes in advance..
This one and the cloud prediction previously are starting to make me think Stallman is onto something
This is all about Apple making money and nothing about what’s best for the consumer. For years the holy grail has been not to sell products but services. Rather than making money once by selling something Apple will get to charge a recurring fee. Ultimately, Apple will sell (hopefully reasonably cheaply) a slimmed down computing device and then charge you to use the software, content and storage. You will own nothing other than a gizmo that will have virtually no functionality by itself.
This concept will rely on ubiquitous high speed broadband, something not yet universally available (in the U.S.).
As far as businesses adopting this approach it may work to a limited, and trivial, extent. I know in our ‘publicly traded company’ the auditors would never allow core business data to be stored externally without tons of safeguards and recurring process checks. I can’t imagine any ‘cloud’ company (Apple or otherwise) allowing auditors in, from every client, to make sure their doors are locked and that the backups are valid and verify who really has access to all that data.
Dude, you are not being very rational. Drop the Anti-Apple rhetoric and take a breath. Big corporations are going to have their own servers and backups and security!!!!
This is about consumers and small businesses. And guess what they have data remotely stored already … they are called banks and credit companies and H&R Block and many other places.
Apple will just give you a choice – yes, Apple is about choice. Do you want instant, mobile access to every digital thing you own? If yes, the cloud is the only way to do it. If no, then you will pretend to have all of this great data sitting in your office or home “server farms” eating up resources and making you feel like you are Mr. IT and pretending you are saving yourself from the Matrix.
Whatever.
“Do you want instant, mobile access to every digital thing you own?” That can be accomplished with a single mobile device like a laptop or a dockable umpc. The cloud is useful only if you insist on multiple devices.
I love all this chatter and hesitation about “trusting your data to someone else” … aside from the bills in your wallet, all of your money is a record in a database in some nameless bank.
Right?
The problem is that Apple continues to fall behind at cloud integration. Mobile Me is not that great, and expensive. Why do all the good iPhone / iPad apps have DropBox integration? Because Apple has nothing to offer in this space, yet it’s sorely needed.
When we get seamless cloud integration for all our data & documents between iPad / iPod / iPhone without requiring a third party like DropBox, then Apple might have something.
On that note, Apple should really just buy DropBox.
That North Carolina data center looks to me like a Big Project plagued by logistical problems, problems estimating the resources needed, wobbly strategy, way behind schedule and on its way to being a major embarrassment. One location for..like, everything? A bigger MobileMe? Who’s gonna trust that? I am as tired of hearing about the North Carolina site as I am about the Verizon iPhone.
Unless corporations decide that running their business is best done with a Kinect camera and XBox in every office.
Of course the iPad has a real file system. It’s HFS+, just like we have on the Mac. did you mean to say that the iPad hides the filesystem from the user?
-jcr
JCR is, of course, correct. But with two geeky, technical, corrections.
First I assume what they are running on iOS is actually JHFS+, ie journalled HFS+, which is slightly different from the original (late 90’s) HFS+.
Secondly there are probably minor differences from the JHFS+ running on Macs. It’s not clear where Apple locates flash-specific code to handle things like wear-levelling. Maybe it’s firmware in some controller, maybe it’s in the driver sitting between JHFS+ and the flash, or maybe it’s directly in the file system code. Along the same lines, there are some bits of code in standard JHFS+ for improving the performance of the file system on magnetic media — eg code for tracking hot files and moving them to the start of the disk — and it would not be surprising if this sort of code were removed from the iOS JHFS+, because it’s not needed and allows the footprint of the code to shrink slightly.
Oops, should also have added that, of course it is an iOS UI decision (one that I suspect will in time be revised) to hide the file system from the user, but apps can choose to do otherwise.
For example the (extremely good) GoodReader PDF reading/organizing app makes the folder and file hierarchy of how it is storing its PDFs visible to the user, so that the user can rename PDFs, create new folders, and move PDFs between folders.
You may think this is all an illusion created by the app, but GoodReader allows you to mount its portion of the file system on a Mac via WebDAV, and you see a Finder Window, as expected, with files and folders that you can manipulate just like any other Finder window.
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iCloud…
Cringe FTW.
Thanks for sharing ,very
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