How Apple's iCloud Stacks Up Against Offerings From Amazon

Apple launched iCloud.com for developers Monday, offering a sneak peek at the web interface for its iCloud suite of online services and revealing its pricing plan for additional storage on the service.

No surprise, Apple’s prices are higher than rival services offered by Amazon and Google. The three services, nevertheless, look radically different. Many users will make use of more than one.

For now, nevertheless, Amazon’s service appears to be the most straightforward, Google’s cloud storage offering is the cheapest, during Apple’s is shaping up to be the one that offers the best integration with your existing devices — if they’re purchased from Apple.

Introduced June 6, iCloud promises to bind Apple’s iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Macintosh line of personal computers to a sprawling suite of online services that allow users to manage the video, music, apps, and books they buy from Apple; store photographs and documents; and synchronize email accounts and calendars. It can be even be used to track down that missing iPhone.

But during iCloud.com offers a slick web interface that can be accessed from any computer, iCloud is obviously built to keep clients on Apple’s hardware and software. The ultimate promise: write a document on Apples iWork suite of applications and you’ll be able to access it from any of your other Apple devices, or the Web.

Major benefit for Apple

“We view iCloud as a major benefit for Apple, facilitating convenience, ease of use and compatibility across its entire ecosystem,” UBS Analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note to investors Tuesday.

Plus, the starting price is right. The first 5 GB of storage on the service are free. During extra storage on the service costs more than either of Apple’s rivals, most users will probably never spend a nickel for the extra space Apple offers. Photos as so then as also as video, music, and apps purchased from Apple don’t count against Apple’s 5 GB limit.

Like Apple’s offering, Google’s cloud services are closely tied to Google’s existing products, which offer plenty of free space. Google offers 7+ GB of free storage on Gmail, 1 GB of free storage with Google Docs, and 1 GB for photos and videos available through Picassa.

Extra storage on Google, but, is much cheaper than what Apple offers. Storage space, which is shared between Gmail, Picassa Web Albums, and Google Docs costs $5 for an additional 20 GB, $20 for an additional 80 GB, $50 for an additional 200 GB, and $256 for an additional 1 TB.

While most Windows and Mac users will never need to tap into this capacity, anyone relying solely on notebooks that use Google’s Chrome operating system — which rely on the Web to put it more exactly than a traditional file system and hard drive — will be glad to know they’ll have a place to stash their stuff.

The public keynote from Apple’s WWDC

If you rewatch the public keynote from Apple’s WWDC, you’ll see that the iCloud storage API includes access from Windows.

Your article emphasized price per gigabyte differences however missed the bigger pricture: Unlike Amazon and Google, Apple’s strategy rests on consumers storing their content locally on their devices. Afterwards the initial synchronization process, iCloud users will NOT be dependent on an Internet connection to access their files. Opposite, the Google and Amazon implementations expose their users to the incremental costs and potential reliability issues of Internet bandwidth.

Beyond that, Apple and its third-party developers are building links into the OS and apps themselves. This is not true for Apple's cloud competitors. By linking iCloud directly to the OS and apps, seamless cloud access and synchronization is assured. Moreover, Apple now has a clear pathway to the creation of novel devices and software that exploit its unparalleled cloud architecture.

I joined Forbes' Silicon Valley bureau in 2007. Between covering covering chips and personal tech, I've fed a laptop to a tiger, staked out a warehouse filled with Apple computers, outsourced my job so I could spend more time writing titles for porn flicks, raced cupcake cars, tried to shoot a laptop computer with a grenade launcher, and outraged most of the gaming press by predicting that Apple would become a force in handheld gaming. I've written cover stories on Facebook funder Peter Thiel and graphics-chip specialist Nvidia. I've interviewed Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini, adult film star Sasha Grey, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I tried not to take it personally when Steve Jobs called my laptop "fat." You can click the "follow" button, below, to track my work here. You can as well find me on Twitter. Upcoming projects may involve otters.