[brokencode]

This makes me worried for Apple. IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services, and Watson in particular has seemed to be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and H&R Block come to mind).

Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

[zapita]

Apple is not delegating cloud services to IBM. They are partnering with IBM for enterprise go-to-market, as they have done before.

It just happens that cloud services is IBM's preferred method of selling enterprise software and services.

[jedberg]

> Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone else on how to run a cloud service.

Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows, would you pay to use any of their services?

I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple services.

[ninkendo]

I think you're missing the point of Apple's cloud services.

They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.

I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.

[awakeasleep]

The user experiences of Notes and Contacts are both perfect, and they're an enormous part of what I do with a computing device

[tomduncalf]

Agreed, Notes is now fully featured enough that it’s the only app I use for any kind of note taking.

[mark_l_watson]

How do you backup Apple Notes? I reluctantly stopped using Notes because there is no easy way to back up all Notes.

[Moto7451]

They backup to iCloud. Just toggle the sync on in th iCloud preferences on your Mac/iDevice.

[mark_l_watson]

But the format is opaque. I would like to archive as html, pdf, etc. - and not by saving them one at a time.

[inferiorhuman]

FWIW Notes can store its data on any IMAP server.

[moonlighter]

Time Machine backs them up, as well as iCloud.

[threeseed]

I would absolutely pay for Music, Messages, Notes and iCloud Desktop.

The alternatives do lack a number of features.

[brokencode]

I agree completely that Apple’s cloud services aren’t very compelling right now. I’m just worried that they are trying to use IBM’s cloud instead of building out their own capabilities.

If they are going to improve integration with third party services, I would love to have better integration with Google’s services, not IBM’s..

[cptskippy]

This isn't outsourcing, it is advertising. Apple and IBM have complimentary services that they've just made easier to integrate.

There is a vacuum in the Enterprise from when Blackberry was the go-to device. This smells of an in-road Apple might be taking to make itself the defacto Mobile Device for Enterprise.

IBM benefits from this by being able to market Watson services easier to App makers.

[sumoboy]

Also how this really a cross-platform path factoring in Android? Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

[cptskippy]

> Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

You use things developed by IBM daily without even knowing it. Barcodes, credit cards, RAM, hard drives, modern microprocessors, airline travel, laser eye surgery, and even relational databases are all possible thanks to advances by IBM. Almost all nanotechnology research utilizes scanning tunneling microscopy which was invented IBM.

IBM Research is usually bleeding edge technology. They work on technology decades before it becomes mainstream. Currently they're doing research in things like High temperature superconductivity, Quantum Computing, and Nanotechnology.

IBM also develops solutions for the financial services industry and are working on Blockchain technologies for the banking system. They're doing advanced AI research. They have healthcare and geo-spatial initiatives as well.

[pjmlp]

They have one of the best JVMs.

Are the ones porting Go to their UNIX and mainframe variants.

Used to be the biggest contributor to Swift on Linux (not sure about nowadays).

Seat on the ANSI C++ table.

I imagine many Linux kernel goodies are still coming from them.

They are still one of the companies with biggest amount of patents per year.

[coldtea]

>Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

For your line of work, perhaps not. For the enterprise and government customers, where they make billions, very much so.

[threeseed]

IBM Cloud does have a few unique and killer features mainly courtesy of their acquisitions of Cloudant and Compose.

Show me any other cloud provider with hosted MongoDB, JanusGraph, Etcd, ScyllaDB, RethinkDB as well as Cloudant itself.

If it wasn't for the pricing I would definitely have considered IBM Cloud for my project.

[godzillabrennus]

Remember the Motorola phones with iTunes integrated?

Apple has proven that a partnership with an established vendor can be their first step into a market they want to own.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2005/09/07...

[zitterbewegung]

It would make sense . They want to grow their services division so why not branch out to ML?

IBM has been struggling retaining people and their cloud efforts have been at best a distant fourth (AWS, AZURE and GCE). I tried using it and it had no advantage . At least Microsoft has a nice windows integration and UX and google has good UX and integration into Google services. AWS is the incumbent and what I personally use since I don’t trust Google and Azure doesn’t appeal to me due to my lack of need of Windows.

[solotronics]

Actually by the sales numbers GCE lags far behind and IBM Cloud is almost tied with AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/01/26/amazon-to-...

[euroclydon]

I really have to wonder about what IBM includes in cloud revenue and how thier profitability compares with AWS.

[coldtea]

>This makes me worried for Apple.

Yeah, Apple is doomed /s

>Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

Apple doesn't outsource their Cloud services to IBM. This story is not about that at all.

(They do use Azure and Google Cloud though, and perhaps Amazon too).

[pathseeker]

>IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services

"Cloud services" is a pretty nebulous term. When it comes to ML cloud services I don't think there are any clear leaders. AWS services don't really compare to this.

[autismo]

AWS actually has services that directly mirror this. See SageMaker, Rekognition, Polly, ML AMIs, etc.

One can only speculate as to who is the current leader of the cloud ML space, but let's just say that Watson hasn't been warmly received in the past.

[jldugger]

> IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services

But Apple is?

[ksec]

Not exactly cutting edge, but;

They now have their own fairly large CDN, and growing, likely even more so once they have their own Original TV Programme.

They have the largest Mesos system running in production.

iMessages is likely Third in terms of toal messages sent in Global IM Market Share. First being WeChat, 2nd being Whatsapp.

[IBM]

How is this any different than Core ML supporting the other tools for creating NNs?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_...

[lemming]

Watson in particular has seemed to be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and H&R Block come to mind)

FWIW, I thought that Watson playing Jeopardy was flat out amazing.

[tinus_hn]

Apple pushes their own stuff: they are monopolists! Ready the pitchforks!

Apple pushes someone else’s stuff: They lack confidence! They look weak!

[Spooky23]

You should check them out. They have some really interesting “framework”apps that you can quickly customize and deploy.