The iCloud is going to be a massive pain in the arse.

I have a family. I have an iPad and an iPhone. So does my wife. We own things together. You know, the house, it's contents, the CDs... The iTunes library. And herein lies my first problem with iCloud. All of my wife's future purchases are going to AUTOMATICALLY load themselves onto my devices. I don't want Michael Bublé on my phone thanks. And I'm pretty sure my wife doesn't want the Astronomy podcast on hers. But we will end up filling each other's 16Gb pretty quickly with unwanted presents.
The same goes for Apps. My iPhone and my iPad are very different devices for very different things. Both are used very differently from each other, and from my wife's devices. If I download an app on the phone, I don't want it automatically on my iPad. Waste of time, space, and data.
I also don't want my music purchases on my iPad. It's primarily a visual device, so I may want films on it. But I sure as he'll don't want those films to automatically download onto my phone. It will crucify my 16Gb disc space and my 3G data cap. If I use my phone as a hotspot, I don't want my iPad wasting my limited hotspot data by background synching photos and iBooks purchases over my phone's 3G, it will slow everything down massively. And if I'm abroad and switch on the data roaming for an important incoming email, I don't want to pay for the extra fluff that the phone is going to try and grab from the cloud.

Wandering around with my phone in my pocket, leaking a cloud of location (and other) data as I go is not a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Splitting what MY phone does and doesn't download from what my wife's does and doesn't download is a pain already, and we are just juggling a single mobile me account and a hotmail account each.

I also really don't understand all the hate for mobile me. It was a little pricey, but I have never had a problem with how it functions. What the iCloud will do with mail, calendar and contacts is no different. Also, if MobileMe no longer exists as of today, can I have my subscription back? (I'm be happy to pay for the 3 months I have used this year but I paid for 12)

Cloud documents is , I grant, probably quite useful- as long as my mac has access.
And the cloud backup that will synch your new phone looks very slick. The fact that a PC is no longer required may just sway me into getting my parents an iPad for Christmas.

I'm looking forward to Lion, it looks great.
And the enhancements coming in iOS5 are excellent (and with that volume button shutter long overdue) but the message from Apple to anyone making a really slick, functional app, like dropbox is - if your idea really makes our product better... We will nick it and call it a software upgrade. Apple have form with this. Look at what happened to the beautiful but ow abandoned "Classics" app and iBooks.

It might just be that I'm doing it wrong, but iCloud looks like it's going to add some unnecessary complexity to my apple family.

- Blogged from my iPad