Apple's plan to use renewable energy sources to power its $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina by the end of this year has received another important nod from The North Carolina Utilities Commission.
The agency just greenlighted a 4.5-megawatt fuel cell installation that will produce electricity from eco-friendly biogas in order to power a huge array of iCloud servers.
Not bad for a cloud that relies on “19th-century coal energy”...
Apple doesn't run the cleanest of clouds, we all know this. Fortunately, the company's strides to reduce reliance on "19th-century coal energy”, as Greenpeace put it, have received a boost from The North Carolina Utilities Commission which has now approved plans for a massive solar farm to power Apple's $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina.
It's gonna provide 20 megawatts of power to power iCloud servers that host the iTunes infrastructure, your music, photos, contacts and iOS device backups, to name a few...
Environmental friendliness has been an important subject for Apple over the past few years. It's currently building one of the largest solar panel farms in the U.S. to power its North Carolina data center, and plans to do the same thing in Oregon.
But apparently that isn't enough for the folks at Greenpeace. The environmental organization recently staged a major protest outside of Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, CA, pleading with the company to increase its 'Green' efforts...
Having problems accessing your iCloud email today? You aren't alone. A simple search for 'iCloud' on Twitter returns 1000s of results, showing folks started experiencing problems with the service early this morning.
Apple has updated its iCloud System Status page, confirming the outage. And according to the Cupertino company, around 12% of users were unable to access parts of the cloud-based platform for almost two hours...
According to the usually well-informed Wall Street Journal, Apple is readying an upgrade to its iCloud service that will expand on the basic features which sync content between iPhones, iPads, iPods and Mac or PC computers. iCloud also provides device backups in the cloud and supports other capabilities specific to Apple's iOS devices.
Two new features will reportedly enable basic photo sharing features with other iCloud users and will include the ability to sync videos...
Are you a developer? Have you visited the iCloud.com beta login page recently? In case you missed it, two new icons appeared at a beta login page for iCloud.com briefly before Apple took the beta page down. This clearly suggests Apple is working on bringing Notes and Reminders web apps to iCloud.
Folks also discovered references to an upcoming iOS 6 beta in the code strings for this iCloud beta page.
As we told you last week, Apple could be bringing iOS and Mac Notifications to the iCloud website. So it all makes sense now: Reminders and Notes apps, which are now available on iOS devices and are coming to Macs with Mountain Lion installed later this summer, will also be replicated on the iCloud web site along with web notifications.
Let's hope Apple will take the resulting notifications conundrum seriously...
A new feature is being tested by Apple, according to reports, that allows iOS banner notifications to be displayed on the iCloud website. It's unknown whether this particular occurrence was only a one-time test or a sign of things to come.
While notifications on the iCloud website may prompt some to scratch their head, this could actually indicate Apple's plans to roll out rich web apps to iCloud that would benefit from the ability to display notifications, much like Google's Chrome lets web apps render unobtrusive notifications even when the browser is minimized...
Itćs been officially confirmed today that Apple will use cutting-edge, power-efficient, eco-friendly fuel cells from California-based Bloom Energy startup to power its huge iCloud data center located in Maiden, North Carolina.
Hopefully this move will appease Greenpeace, whose recent report titled How Clean Is Your Cloud slammed Apple over the company's use of "19th-century coal energy” for its data centers...
iTunes Match, Apple's $25 a year cloud locker and scan-and-match music service, is being rolled out in additional countries, according to web reports. Last time we heard, Apple expanded iTunes Match to 19 countries, with a focus on the Baltic states, Latin America and the Netherlands.
Macstories first spotted that the iTunes terms and conditions for Italy have been updated with new terms suggesting an imminent launch in the country. Other web reports confirmed a similar changes to iTunes terms and conditions for Greece, Portugal, Austria, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other markets...
Microsoft yesterday updated its iOS SkyDrive client and released a brand new app for both Windows and Mac desktops while putting into effect paid storage upgrades.
At the same time, Dropbox released an updated iOS client with new sharing capabilities and Google upped Google Docs storage to 5 GB.
iDownloadBlog thought you might be interested to check out how major cloud storage services fare in terms of value so we've put together a handy comparison matrix providing an at-a-glance overview of paid tiers available from iCloud, Dropbox, SkyDrive and SugarSync...
A couple of weeks ago version 2.2 of Tweetbot — my favorite Twitter client for iOS — was released to the public.
While that update included a number of interesting new features and obligatory bug fixes, the new iCloud sync capabilities stand head and shoulders above everything else.
One of the things that has always annoyed me about Twitter clients, and by extension Tweetbot, is that there was no reliable method for picking up where you left off across multiple devices. I know Tweet Marker support was there before, but I've never had very much success with it, and it only works with timelines.
I have Tweetbot installed on two iPhones, two iPads, and an iPod touch. As you can probably imagine, it doesn't take long for things to get really messy when tweeting from all of those different devices at various points in time.
That's where the beauty of iCloud comes in. The new iCloud sync makes Tweetbot a seamless Twitter experience, able to sync timelines, mute filters, and even DM read statuses across multiple iOS devices...
A new report out yesterday alleges that Apple is working on an interesting new solution for Geniuses at its retail stores that would bypass the need for tethered desktop iTunes or wireless iCloud backups for people seeking iOS device replacements.
The solution would let Geniuses to quickly and effortlessly backup your entire iPad, iPhone or iPod touch prior to the device exchange process. Likewise, Geniuses would later on be able to easily move that data back onto the replacement devices.
The solution is reportedly being prototyped at Apple’s top-secret Apple Store labs near the company’s Cupertino, California headquarters...