What's New in iOS 8: iCloud Drive

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Posted June 11, 2014 at 9:47pm by iClarified

Apple is finally expanding the capabilities of iCloud in iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite with the introduction of iCloud Drive. Users can now store any type of file in iCloud and access their files from any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC.

iCloud Drive is now accessible from the OS X 10.10 sidebar, just like a shortcut to any other folder. To upload your files to iCloud, simply drag them into the iCloud Drive on your Mac or PC running Windows 7 or later.

At this point in time Apple has not announced an iCloud Drive app for iOS, so to access your files or create a new one you will need to use an iCloud-enabled app. By the time iOS 8 is released this fall, we should see a lot of third party apps with iCloud Drive support. Apple's apps such as Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and others will be updated as well. At this point, Mail for iOS isn't able to select attachments from iCloud Drive but we're hopeful that we'll see that functionality in a future beta.

As with any cloud storage solution, when you make changes to a file those changes are propagated to all your devices. For example, you can start creating a presentation on your Mac at home, then make final edits and present it in class using your iPad. All the changes you make along the way appear automatically on all your devices.

This makes working with multiple apps much easier as you don't need to find a way to copy or import an image/document to another app.

During its keynote, Apple announced initial pricing for iCloud Drive. Your first 5GB are free. 20GB is just $0.99/month and 200GB is $3.99/month. There will be additional tiers available up to 1TB of space; however, Apple has not revealed pricing for those tiers.

WHAT'S NEW IN IOS 8:
Here's a few of the changes we've posted on already: Family Sharing, Photos, Camera, Mail, Safari, Messages, QuickType, Third-Party Keyboards, Interactive Notifications, and Contact Shortcuts.

There's plenty more new features in iOS 8 and we'll do our best to cover them all. You can follow iClarified on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS for more.

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fquiroga - September 19, 2014 at 9:55am

I have a os x yosemite beta version in my computer, and in my opinion iCloud drive works much much better than mobile me and idisk...I am very happy with apple in general but apps for example, are much better than android at less in education, thanks

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Robert Johnson - June 13, 2014 at 5:17pm

Take away iDisk for 3 years then give it back and call it iCloud Drive.

gamerscul9870 - June 13, 2014 at 5:22pm

That was jobs' idea, now apple made some arrangements for it.

Sacha - June 12, 2014 at 10:48am

Apple is coming back to MobileMe. I hope they will also implement the settings synchronisation among Macs. I really liked that feature.

lepaka - June 12, 2014 at 7:14am

that funny, when I say Apple is just throuing sand to the blind eyes of his consumers. this cloud drive is not new, this cloud drive existed before, exacly the same way, exacly the same functions. and by the era of my first iPhone I had it on my iPhone, on may MAC computers, on my windows computer s at work. as i remmenber, that was part of the mobile.me package, and was evaporated some where in the icloud release. so once more Apple is throuing away the consumers money to develop the wheel !!!

Damon - June 12, 2014 at 4:46pm

I thought the same thing. I do think mobile.me was just ahead of it's time and now that the general public is more in-tune to cloud storage and multiple device management it is ready for prime time.

iHA69 - June 11, 2014 at 10:46pm

I'm more excited about OSX 10.10 than iOS 8.

AppleGuy299 - June 11, 2014 at 10:14pm

Once it gets released, I will buy the 99¢ upgrade. No more iCloud Space errors! :)

Fukran John - June 11, 2014 at 9:53pm

Now that's a straight copy of Google drive and their concept of everything under an ID ( email and password ). Crapple #respect for copying everything around you. Before it was just phone and apps and now just everything. #amazing stuff

Venerando - June 11, 2014 at 10:30pm

I think thats the difference between apple and other companies, apple tends to adapt to anything that they believe can improve user experience and they really listen to the request of apple users. I don't think they will have an issue copying google drive because I think it is an open platform and they don't have a patent for that concept. It's like this, apple studies the patents of the technologies they want to acquire if theres a patent they will buy it. By copying google drive apple admits that Google implementation of Google drive is good, but they believe that Apple users can benefit from a service like it. and I don't see anything wrong with that.

bob53366 - June 13, 2014 at 5:20pm

Except that Google copied that off Apple's iDisk and .Mac from Apple c.2002