[krbbltr]

I feel that Apple was in a unique position to do that. As we all know, they make their money from hardware and don't have much interest in taking control of users' data (beyond what is necessery for some nice vendor lock-in of course; not unlike the Microsoft of the distant past).

Better yet, they already had popular consumer hardware in place on which they could have built a decentralized cloud service: Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme. They could have just iterated on those devices.

But no, they chose instead to build that stupid, useless iCloud thing with the faux linen website. And while they were at it, made their networking hardware worse than before.

Maybe there were sound technical reasons for not going the decentralized route (like crappy bandwidth and latency, or increased complexity), but it still feels like a missed opportunity.