Put another way: "don't have the choice any more".
And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.
No, not particularly. A lot of the world is on ADSL or worse; I now have 200Mb/s symmetric fiber which is fantastic, but until recently I could only get 6Mb/s download, 0.5Mb/sec upload.
Half of all British people can get at most 1Mb/s upload.
That's not good enough to give decent performance. In particular, an iPhone photo is about 2MB, and that's half a minute (or 15 seconds) to download (for this use case).
It's not fast enough to stream most video, for example.
Making it easier would have massive infrastructure requirements.
>Put another way: "don't have the choice any more"
An odd way to describe an optional feature.
>And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier
You've heard of Back To My Mac, no? That's a thing that exists. Pretty simple to use. Free. Built right in to the OS.
It would have been much easier, from a technical standpoint, for Apple to have extended that sort of file sharing to Photos or iTunes, than to go around building huge datacenters and etcetera.
But it wouldn't have been what most people want. Most people don't have the home bandwidth to be hosting their own media. Most people don't want to have to leave a server running 24/7. Nearly all of the drawbacks to cloud storage you've cited in this thread would be considered by most people to be _features_.
(Privacy is the sole exception. It's also the reason I, personally, don't happen to use iCloud. But I don't think Apple is stupid for choosing to implement functionality for the majority of people, even if I don't happen to be part of that majority.)
>as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.
Feel free to want what you want; I'm just pointing out that what you want is idiosyncratic.
Put another way: "don't have the choice any more".
And its only hard to run a home file server because its hard and nobody has made it easier. It could be a lot easier than it is, if only the effort were being made to make their OS more valuable - as it stands, this Cloud business is just another reason not to need a Mac.