iCloud frustration

I’ll try to keep this short. iCloud has problems — I take it we all accept this. But I’m not talking about a problem in practice, I’m talking about a more inherent problem.

iTunes used to be the hub. We knew that if we didn’t plug our iPhones into our computers that our music wouldn’t be up to date. So one day, you organize iTunes just how you want it, you import a few CDs, buy a few new albums from the iTunes Store, you plug that iPhone in, and everything is nice and synchronized.

Then along comes iCloud, which demotes the PC to “just another device.” iTunes is no longer the hub — iCloud is. It sounded great. My devices would always mirror one another perfectly. I could change something in iPhoto on my MacBook and that change would appear seamlessly on my iPad and/or iPhone. Great…except that’s rarely happened, at least in my experience.

For one (to continue using iPhoto as an example), iPhoto events don’t automatically push to all devices via the cloud. You still need to plug your devices into your computer. What’s more, upon “syncing” the two, iPhoto for iOS looks nothing like iPhoto for OS X, and I don’t just mean the design. Albums absent from my computer annoyingly appear on the iPad. Photostream is empty in one device and full of photos in another.

Perhaps I’m merely “using iPhoto wrong” or missing some important step. That’s not the point. The point is, I kind of miss the hub. My devices sync with iCloud, but where is iCloud? When a rogue file appears on some device, where did it come from, and how do I know when it’s gone? It just seems that by demoting the PC to “just another device” we’ve lost a certain amount of control.