iCloud a delightful and necessary part of a Mac user's experience
February 15, 2019
iCloud a delightful and necessary part of a Mac user's experience
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apple iCloud
We use iCloud across our entire team. I also use it for personal applications. We use several file sharing and collaboration platforms, but as an all-Mac shop, iCloud is the best for in-house sharing. Various Mac and iOS apps that use iCloud for syncing data and file sharing also work extremely well with it.
- File sharing - since its recent updates to allow you to share any type of file and access the whole file system through Finder on Mac and an app in iOS, iCloud is becoming the easiest to use file sharing and collaboration app in our toolkit.
- Document collaboration: iWork apps and Handoff make document collaboration extremely easy across our organization. I even am able to use it with non-Mac users via their iWork in iCloud apps.
- Handoff - the ease of transitioning between devices (handheld, desktop, laptop) has been extremely useful for client presentations and on-the-fly capturing of ideas.
- Sharing interface - the sharing interface is a little bit clunky (relative to most Mac apps) at the moment, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the sharing functionality is working properly.
- Windows integration - as a Mac-first platform, windows users may find working with iCloud to be difficult. iCloud is perfect for mac-only environments, but will not be as ubiquitous as Google Suite until this improves.
- User experience is excellent and leads to low friction for file storage, sharing, retrieval and collaboration. It is a joy to work with.
- Pricing is competitive with other platforms.
- Integration with Mac software and third-party apps is seamless.
- Dropbox and Google Drive
For a Mac user in a Mac-only shop, iCloud is by far the best of breed. If your company has a mix of Mac and Windows users, it will not be the right primary tool (go to Google Drive for that). iCloud is a necessary and built-in part of a Mac user's experience and so will function well for an individual to keep their devices synchronized, but when interacting with non-Mac users, will not be the primary team tool for collaboration.