Technology influences our life in ways that we couldn’t even imagine 5 or 6 years ago. Our iPhones are an integral part of our life, either as work tools: using the Calendar, Contacts or other apps like the GPS to find our route. Or for play: checking and uploading to FaceBook, taking and editing photos, playing games across the internet with one another. And on and on the many iDevice uses accumulate.
A few short years ago, 2007 to be precise, saw the first iPhone released to an excited public, including me. I ordered a white one and had to wait a couple of weeks for it. Black was available immediately. But I bet that very few people waiting in those queues had any idea that it would so rapidly become the essential tool that it is now. Can you imagine a gathering of people nowadays where no one had a smart phone? Can you imagine working without it? Going on a trip without it? Keeping accurate up to date phone numbers without it?
My Contacts are an vital aspect of both my working and social lives. They are with me on my iPhone all the time, updated automatically as I change them using either my computer, iPad or iPhone. I don’t need to worry about syncing. If I am away from any of them I could access the data by going to the iCloud website and logging in. Same with my Calendar which I use for all my appointments both work and social and even for shopping lists or To Do reminders. If I take a photo it too is automatically copied into my iPhoto collection on my computer. Seamless it is!
All this is a huge improvement on the manual ‘notes on paper’ system of the recent past. All backed up on Apple’s iCloud servers. And there’s the rub: can we trust Apple with our data? Will they be around in 10 or 20 years when we need them? Do we have any choice?!
We need a company to do everything mentioned in this article. We can and do keep our own data backed up with Time Machine but the automatic aspect of modern data use means relying on a company to be there for us.
So far Apple has excelled at this despite a few glitches. They have kept the nasties out of our lives so far and are the best currently available option in terms of security and freedom from the unpleasant criminal activities that we know are out there. Despite the grumblings by many non Apple users about the ‘closed’ system that Apple uses and it’s occasional drawbacks – like refusing a perfectly reasonable app it’s iTunes accreditation – they do pretty well. I for one an happier with their closed system than being exposed to all the potential unpleasantness that the rival ‘open’ systems offer.
We can only trust and assume that they are working to keep it that way.