iCloud

While Apple may be planning to unveil its ‘Siri Speaker’ next week at WWDC, Amazon is updating its Echo ecosystem to work with iCloud Calendars. Amazon’s Alexa app can now link Apple iCloud Calendars to enable Echo integration.

Expand
Expanding
Close

iCloud offers a lot of convenience, and if you have an icloud.com or me.com email address you can use one account for access to your device backups, photos and videos, purchases, email, and more. Follow along for some basic tips and tricks for iCloud Mail, where to login with your iCloud account, and more.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Russian software company ElcomSoft has made headlines in the past for making discoveries related to how Apple handles cloud data. Now, the company claims that Apple is holding onto deleted notes well past the thirty-day grace period during which they’re kept in the “Recently Deleted” folder…

Expand
Expanding
Close

In its ongoing efforts to ensure strong security for customers, Apple will require the use of app-specific passwords from June 15th. This affects you if you use a third-party app that logs in with an iCloud email and password (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) to access contacts, calendar and mail messages.

If you don’t migrate to app-specific passwords by the June 15 deadline, then those apps will stop working. Luckily, it’s easy to fix: read on for step-by-step instructions on how to make app-specific passwords for your Apple ID.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Earlier this week, some iCloud users noticed that the $0.99/mo 50 GB and $2.99/mo 200 GB iCloud plans had seemingly disappeared. Furthermore, some users received emails informing them that their 50GB or 100GB plan had been discontinued. While the issues eventually resolved themselves, Apple today has sent out an email to affected customers offering a bit more insight…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: Apple appears to have fixed the issues; the page is now accessible as normal. There are no changes to iCloud tiers or prices. Original story below.

The iCloud storage plan settings on iPhone, iPad and Mac are acting a bit strangely at the moment. For some users, the panel loads but the $0.99/mo 50 GB and $2.99/mo 200 GB iCloud plans have vanished completely, leaving only the $9.99 1 TB and $19.99 2 TB options.

For other iCloud accounts, the storage settings panel simply doesn’t load at all, instead displaying an error. Apple has not announced any changes to iCloud storage tiers, so this is most likely a server-side bug …

Expand
Expanding
Close

iCloud Photo Library is a great feature built into Apple’s iOS and macOS operating systems, but it can feel a bit foreign depending on how you have been managing your photos and videos up until now. Follow along for how to set up this feature across your various Apple devices as well as upload photos to iCloud Photo Library.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple last week released iOS 10.3 to the public after a lengthy beta process. The update includes a handful of new features such as Find My AirPods. One issue related to the update that is just now emerging, however, relates to iCloud. Some users have apparently had iCloud services they once turned off, automatically come back on…

Expand
Expanding
Close

While the evidence seems pretty clear that a hacking group’s claim to have obtained the details of 600M iCloud accounts is a hoax, many less techy people have only heard the claim, not Apple’s refutation. Telephone scammers are now taking advantage of this fact to pretend to be calling from Apple in order to obtain actual login details and other personal information …

Expand
Expanding
Close

I’ve been an Apple guy since forever. I bought the very first Macintosh back in 1984. My current mobile technology line-up is a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, 11-inch MacBook Air (now just a backup Mac), 9.7-inch iPad Pro and an iPhone SE. I’m all-in on Apple, and the ecosystem is a large part of that. Things may not always Just Work, but the Apple ecosystem gets closer to that than anyone else.

However, while I do make some use of iCloud, I’m not all-in on Apple’s cloud storage. In this piece, I compare the main cloud services out there, and finally describe the mix-and-match approach I use to get what I consider to be the best of all worlds …

Expand
Expanding
Close

While the available evidence suggests that hackers have not gained direct access to more than 600 million iCloud accounts, some of the sample login credentials supplied by the group have been found to be valid. ZDNet, for example, used Apple’s password reset function to test 54 logins supplied by the hackers, and found that all of them worked.

Apple has said that there have been no breaches of its own systems, and that the credentials likely came from ‘previously compromised third-party services.’ Most of the account owners contacted by ZDNet lent weight to this claim …

Expand
Expanding
Close

Earlier this week, Amazon’s Web Services suffered from a significant outage, bringing down a number of online services and plaguing Apple’s own iCloud platform. While not much was known about what caused the lengthy outage at the time, Amazon has published a new blog post detailing what exactly went wrong, pinpointing it on a human error.

Expand
Expanding
Close

It’s never a great experience when iCloud goes down and Apple services are affected, but it always helps to know it’s not just you having issues. Apple typically acknowledges ongoing outages on its System Status site with a brief description of the problem, and this week Apple has updated its design to emphasize last known issues.

Expand
Expanding
Close

According to a new report from TechCrunch, Apple recently acquired the domain name iCloud.net, one of the last remaining pieces related to iCloud that the company itself did not own. While it’s unclear when Apple made the purchase, the social network previously linked to that domain will shut down by the end of this month.

Expand
Expanding
Close