[TheSoftwareGuy]

>I don’t think anyone has been impressed by apple online services or technologies on their own merits...

I disagree with that. iMessage is perhaps the best IM service out there. iCloud works seeessly across devices, in a way im not sure any other cloud storage solution does

[adamson]

I imagine it’s a lot easier to integrate your storage service with devices when you have the freedom to change the storage APIs on said devices as you see fit

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Never let it be said that vertical integration is without significant benefits :-)

[bsaul]

iMessage is the only IM platform where i’m never sure if the person has actually received my message, if he’ll be able to respond to me, and where group conversation fork half the time into split conversations between members of the group.

All this because they tried to transparently merge phone number and icloud account as well as SMS and internet messages. Between people that may or may not be using iOS , icloud, or imessage ( or any combination of the above).

As for icloud, i suppose you’ve never ran out of space as a user, nor as a developer have you tried syncing a core data db or keychain custom data over that service. I’ve been developping on iOS since iOS 3 and i still can’t give you a good forecast on how syncing will work in practice.