FWIW, I am using iCloud Drive exclusively now and I have not had any more issues with it compared to OneDrive. In fact, I find it more solid than OneDrive at this time (still need to use it for the work laptop).
I left Dropbox many years ago, so don’t have any current experience there.
I find iCloud Drive very practical when working interchangeably between my Mac and iPad, and the occasional access from the iPhone. Granted, I don’t have much travel, and when I do, I’m always in range of a 4G/5G cell tower.
Yes, you are absolutely correct! Of course, there is the Finder “Download Now” that you could use, but first, you need to remember to download the folders you would use (not always possible) and second, you need to trust iCloud Drive not to evict those downloaded files on its own before they are needed while offline.
That exactly my point - Dropbox “selective sync” is simply a setting that says “I always want this folder stored locally on this computer” or “I never want this folder stored locally on this computer”.
IMHO, that’s a lot SIMPLER than the smoke and mirrors, black box, “you don’t need to know” way that iCloud works.
I think Apple’s philosophy of trying to keep things simpler is actual an epic fail here. It is simpler for me to understand what I want is or is not here rather than “it might be here” depending on how some wizard behind the curtain decides for me?
To be fair, I haven’t used Dropbox or OneDrive in 5+ years but I don’t recall ever waiting several minutes or longer for a sync to start. Google Drive starts to sync as soon as I save a file, and I’ve seen changes I’ve made on my Mac appear almost immediately on my iPad. That’s probably an advantage of using a web based app.
I don’t know why iCloud is frequently slow to begin syncing apps and files. Apple stores data on both AWS and Google Drive but iCloud has never matched their upload speeds.
I think there are people who know how iCloud should work. I’m not convinced they know how it doesn’t work.
But, as you say, those who know most probably aren’t saddled with looking at problems. I would have dearly loved to have heard from someone who could tell me what an ‘iCloud reset’ actually did. Multiple senior advisors and ‘engineering’ could not tell me anything more than trite generalisations and when I fired questions back the response was usually ‘Oh, good point. We don’t know.’
Oh, iCloud is up. It’s just not doing what you expect. Like a car that reliably starts, but the steering wheel occasionally disconnects from the steering rack.
