iCloud Drive is the next generation of development from Apple for iCloud, designed to compete with services like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. It was developed for iOS 8, and will arrive in OS X Yosemite. In addition, from now iCloud Drive arrived also for Windows. If you have a desktop or laptop computer running with Microsoft, then you can brag to have iCloud Drive before your friends on OS X.
To do this, simply direct you to the new page iCloud for Windows to start. “iCloud keeps your mail, documents, contacts and calendars updated between your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac and PC Windows”, explains the support document. Like many other platforms that offer a cloud service, iCloud Drive, can store any file in iCloud. Just drag your documents in iCloud Drive folder on your PC, and access it at any time, on any device.
If you used one of the above cloud storage services, you are already familiar with how iCloud Drive works on Windows. Thus, also any type of file that you can drop into the dedicated directory, iCloud Drive will be able to automatically extract photos from your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Favorites in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome can be kept up to date, like Safari bookmarks.
iCloud has so far offered limited support for Windows devices, either through office applications via a Web browser, and it will be interesting to see how this new desktop application works with native support integrated into all iDevices. Of new prices for iCloud Drive were announced earlier this month. As a reminder, 20 GB costs €0.99 per month, while a terabyte will cost 19.99 euros per month. Each user has 5 GB of free space.
This makes iCloud Drive much more expensive than OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox (which recently lowered its price), and we will see if its close links with the iPhone and the iPad will be enough to help withstand competition. A word of warning, however: do not upgraded your account to iCloud Drive until all your mobile devices – smartphones, tablets or even laptops – are on iOS 8 or OS X Yosemite.
In case you want to stop any program on your Mac OS X computer, you can use Activity Monitor to force quit the application.