Apple iDisk

» see idisk.mac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

idisk was the kind of thing mac users on broadband paid for. i was on neither side of that. through the 2000s i ran windows on a desktop in ankara, with my files saved to whatever ttnet line existed and backed up to whatever cd-rs i had spare. apple's consumer-cloud story reached me as a feature i read about in pc magazines and never had a way to try.

steve jobs announced idisk on january 5, 2000 at macworld san francisco, as part of an itools bundle that gave every mac user 20mb of free online storage and a homepage. it mounted as a network drive in the finder. by 2002 the free tier was gone. idisk became a paying feature of.mac at $99 a year, and the storage cap climbed slowly through the decade.

mobileme replaced.mac in 2008 and idisk came along for the ride at quotas up to 20gb. then in 2011 apple announced icloud and pointedly did not include idisk. the new model was per-app file storage paired with photo stream. there was no general-purpose cloud folder with subfolders you could open in the finder. apple gave existing users until june 30, 2012 to migrate, and then shut the service.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

idisk worked because apple shipped a webdav client inside the finder that made the remote folder feel local. you double-clicked the icon, the os mounted apple's server over webdav, you dragged a file in. for a long time it was the easiest way for non-technical mac users to share a file too big for email. you'd save it to your idisk public folder and send the link.

the special folders were the hook. "sites" hosted whatever you'd published with iweb or homepage. "public" was the share-with-anyone bucket. it was an opinionated layout from a company with opinions about everything.

~ the inheritance ~

icloud drive eventually shipped in 2014 and brought back the general-purpose folder. it was not the same product. idisk had been a dumb webdav share that any os could mount. icloud drive was tightly tied to the apple account and worked best inside the apple stack. a mac user from 2008 could mount idisk from a windows pc with the right webdav client. icloud drive does not encourage that.

~ the funny part ~

the dropbox launch in 2008 did not kill idisk. dropbox was simpler and worked across every os, but apple was not really paying attention. mobileme was famously broken at launch and idisk was the slow folder inside the broken service. when icloud killed idisk in 2012, dropbox already had a hundred million users. apple shipped icloud drive two years too late to win the consumer file-sync category, and it never did.

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