Gruber links to an opinion that Apple will use MobileMe as some sort of hybrid cloud router and filesystem, locating storage on customer machines instead of in their own facilities. He asks:
What if the machine with your iTunes library is asleep, or powered down, and you want to access music or movies from your iOS device? This sounds like a good feature, but it doesn’t sound like a replacement or alternative to true cloud-based storage.
If you ask me, there’s a simple — not easy to implement, but simple — solution. Introduce a Time Capsule-like storage server that can be linked to a MobileMe account. Within the local network, you go directly to the server. Outside, you reuse the existing “Back To My Mac” functionality to route traffic to the storage server.
If this happens, this could be one of the most usable online services. With some work, there’s finally an iTunes Server to stick all your crap on locally without taking up all those gigabytes on every one of your computers. Just like that, you could sync your iPhone from anywhere to any computer as long as you’ve got your account details, probably even wirelessly without a computer, directly to the server. You could maybe even purchase extra space to silently mirror/rsync the contents into Apple’s cloud for redundancy and backup.
Apple’s Airport base station does this for you. Your machines sleep, it grabs their Bonjour records, and pretends to be them by claiming their IP address. When a machine is needed, it wakes it up remotely (even via wireless), relinquishes control of the IP address, and your machine is ready. It’s called Bonjour Sleep Proxy. See 2010 WWDC session 205 for details.
Turn on wide-area Bonjour, Back To My Mac, IPv6 etc. to make all the pieces work and you’re pretty much there except for a little piece of software running on your Mac.
By Steve Weller · 2011.02.15 04:44
I have seen that session; that’s how I know it’s possible.
But putting the library on a separate hard drive and remaking iTunes to work with it is the product scenario. Nearly everyone wants to be able to do this now, and we have to resort to hacks without warranties. Apple could make it a supported scenario and free up precious disk space.
By Jesper · 2011.02.15 07:02
You say “Time Capsule-like storage server” and I think “Mac Mini Server”. Suddenly it all starts to make sense.
By Olly · 2011.02.15 12:06
Of course, the plan could just be for Apple to get 30% of your vertebrae…
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If folks just want Bonjour over the WAN, don’t products like Slink and ShareTool do all of this quite nicely already?
I mean: Time Machine was an improvement over existing OS X backup solutions, but it’s hard to see what Apple is going to do in this space that is an improvement over the existing playing field, no?
By Chucky · 2011.02.15 19:42
Yes, yes, yes. I already have a Mac mini that sort-of functions as a shared family server, but I have long wished Apple would do a better job baking-in sharing at the application level. It needs a little more intelligence and interface than the Time Capsule currently provides.
Just as they provide an iCal server product in Snow Leopard Server, I wish they provided an iPhoto server product to automatically gobble up the photos generated by my family, backing them up once just by getting them on the server, then allowing me to back them up again via Time Machine, or through the evolved MobileMe. Same for iTunes.
As people create more and more content that doesn’t pass through a “computer” — I’m thinking photos uploaded directly to an infrequently-sync’ed iPad or iPhone, but it’s also true for contacts, audio and video, or any “document” created on iOS devices, making sure it’s accessible from other devices and backed up gets tough, and is, I think, the foundation of Dropbox’s success.
By Frank · 2011.02.15 20:01
Chucky: What can they do? Adapt iTunes to work not just in a supported, hack-free way, but actually well with it. If they can do that single thing, I can outsource 30.6% of my SSD’s content to the cloud, with the exception that “the cloud” means “directly to my device on my network, and then falling back on the cloud” in my vision.
30.6% is low. I am a freak for two reasons: I have comparatively little music and I have virtual machines here and there also taking up space. Most people with stuffed hard drives will probably save 50% or more.
Maybe they won’t adapt iTunes. Maybe they’ll make a layer that does this integration that you can hook into with far less worries. If they did that layer, it could be the big “awesome” feature of Lion.
And yes, hopefully they’d do this as an open standard.
By Jesper · 2011.02.15 20:15
Here is a cut and paste of my comment that I had left on the Loop article:
The following is pure speculation. I’ve always view MobileMe (as well as its earlier forms of existence) as beta testing for OS X Server. A great webmail interface as well as improving Groupware features such as CalDav, contact management, iChat/Facetime and Web and Wiki hosting. I think it’s all leading up to the Mac Mini OS X Lion Server 10.7. One machine which is always online, used to sync your families Macs as well as its iOS devices. All that’s missing is an iTunes Server component to administer multi iOS devices. Remember not everyone needs a personal computer.
I’m not a proponent of the “CLOUD”. I want my data under my control and I believe that Apple based upon its past, also thinks that way. For Apple the “digital hub” has always been a user’s machine unlike Google’s as well as MS Exchange’s focus being the net server (cloud). I know not everyone has a need for such a family server or even the necessary bandwidth at present.
Last but not least the new data center will offer it’s services as a Time Machine depot for the Mac Mini OS X Lion Server as well as continuing to host the normal MobileMe offerings such as it’s great family pack plan. 5 exchange like capalable accounts as well as other features for 150 $ a year is a steal. Here in Leipzig, I’m about 6 to 9 months away from having a 50 to 100mb V-DSL line. Although I have a Mac which is collocated at a hosting company I would rather have 24/7 physical access to my server at my home or work space.
As I had mentioned pure speculation.
By Ian · 2011.02.18 00:25