Apple's Cloud

According to some recent reporting ↗, Apple considered launching a cloud service to compete more with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Many people are commenting recently on Apple being late to AI, or potentially even too late to it, but I have long believed that the real boat they missed was with Cloud in general. I would argue that them missing out on Cloud is exactly why they are in such a tough position with AI now.

First, when I talk about Cloud, I’m referring more to AWS, Google Cloud, etc. not really what iCloud is. I don’t think it would be that helpful to completely copy what the other providers are broadly doing. There are plenty of good options, and to some degree it’s just a race to the bottom cost wise, but there are plenty of developer and business focused tools that should be available in an Apple cloud.

Some ideas, off the top of my head -

• Business grade storage for businesses to use. You should be able to pay for whatever you need, not have weird “buckets” of storage like iCloud has for business customers. You should also be able to manage these like a business. You should have shared spaces for storage that multiple people can access, you should have rich ACL’s, you should be able to transfer data from one user to another as an admin if someone is terminated. This needs to be far more like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
  • Bonus - If you had the ability to host static files on an Apple cloud with an S3 compatible endpoint, that would be fantastic.
  • Bonus bonus - Why do we still not have time machine in the cloud?
• Identity manager - Apple should take on the identity providers like Google, Microsoft, Okta, etc. by offering a more capable and business oriented “Sign-in with Apple” infrastructure. At the same time, they need to integrate with the market leaders far more than they currently do. You should have granular access controls, you should be able to federate these identities elsewhere, support SAML and OAuth, allow groups for access controls, much richer HRIS integrations, etc. there is a long list they could do here. It can’t be half-assed, they need to create an alternative that people would want to use because it’s a good product.
  • They should extend this to the EDU market too, for free.
  • You should (optionally) be able to sync essentially your whole Mac through the cloud. You should be able to walk up to a computer, sign in to it, and have everything laid out and installed the way you like it.
• Productivity software - They should push iWork much further than it has ever gone. Make this a real competitor to Office and Google Workspace. They are very nice tools to use, but they seem utterly unaware of how nearly every business uses these tools. They need to be much more interoperable, significantly improve collaboration, and really push the boundaries of what you can do with these apps.
• Mail - Email isn’t going anywhere, particularly in business. Apple should make a real, enterprise-grade email service that is designed for businesses. You need to be able to have WAY more control over email than iCloud allows, and add functionality for groups, access control lists, etc. You also need to make it easy to use business email security tools and backup tools. Take e-discovery seriously and provide a way to do that, and allow 3rd party solutions as well. Importantly - Don’t make it restricted to only Apple devices either.
• Contacts / Calendars, etc. - To finish out the productivity tools they need to make contacts and calendars business ready too. Shared contacts, integrations with CRM’s, directory syncing, functional deduplication, far more flexible calendar options, scheduling, conference call integrations, etc. There is a long list of what they could do here.
• Gaming - If Apple wants to be taken more seriously in gaming (which, honestly I can’t tell if they do or don’t), they should build a similar application to Xbox Live.
• iMessage for businesses - They should make something like Slack but not too much like Slack. Make a business version of iMessage that can be used for those kinds of things.
• Business photo sharing - We work with a lot of businesses who rely heavily on taking photos for the business and then making sure everyone has access to them. This is surprisingly difficult to do in 2025 without a bunch of manual instructions that no one wants to follow. This might not make sense for every business, but I know several who would pay a ton to have this work seamlessly, and have a repository shared with everyone who needs access to it (same thing with ACLs, etc.)
• Remote Desktop - Make this require a cloud subscription. Make it only work for devices in Apple Business Manager. I’d even be fine if it was built in but still required an approval dialogue for the end users before you join to completely share the screen, or maybe a big warning that comes up so you can’t do it without the end user knowing, but this is such a royal pain to deal with on Mac with 3rd party tools, it makes it extremely difficult to support business owned devices.
  • This should extend to iOS too. A lot of the plumbing is in place, just need to make it work for businesses.
• FaceTime for business - Compete with Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams, etc.!

Some of these things they have been making glacial progress in with Apple Business Manager over the last few years, but honestly in many ways, it seems like Apple is just oblivious to how all of this stuff works everywhere else. Most of their services are pretty solid for personal use, but when you try to apply them to businesses, they’re just… Weirdly disconnected from how every other service works.

Some of this is in the name of “privacy”, though over the years I am unfortunately starting to think that some of the reason Apple leans on that so much is to be anticompetitive. Privacy should mean a choice of how to use the device and it’s services, not just lock you out of things that Apple doesn’t want you to use. This should apply to business-owned devices too, and the businesses should be able to do what they need to do.

A large cloud infrastructure to support all of this would lead to several things that are critically important to Apple right now. One - How long have they been beating the “Services revenue” drum? Guess who spends an enormous amount of money - Businesses / Enterprise. Second - I truly believe one of the main reasons Apple is struggling with AI, and frankly why Siri has been so bad for so long is that they don’t take cloud seriously. They need to be able to run large models in a cloud, and it should be controlled and operated by them. The cloud-based responses need to be incredibly fast, which means infrastructure needs to be close to people. Cloud would also mean that Apple would need to deploy updates continuously, and move faster than they ever have in this space. They also need to vastly improve their web apps to support functionality.

I could think of a dozen more examples that to me make a ton of sense, but I’m not convinced Apple could do this, even if they decided to. This would cost a ludicrous amount of money, and they would be trying to catch up to some pretty enormous leads. They have a ludicrous amount of money, but I think culturally Apple is just not prepared for this. Hopefully they can at least be more flexible to integrations, and partner with some cloud services providers in the short term to more rapidly improve the areas they desperately need.