Recently, though, I’ve been dealing with a lot of instability and unreliability when it comes to my mail. Spam that should be filtered gets through. Worse, email that is not spam gets sent to my Junk mailbox. (I’ve tried to reset the filters but to no avail.) And an issue that I documented more than a decade ago, where some email gets silently filtered by Apple’s server-side spam detection–with no notice to users–seems to still be happening, according to messages I’ve gotten from other iCloud mail users… More here.
There is no doubt that without iCloud Apple’s products, and especially the ecosystem, would not be do magnetic. It is also undoubtable that there are many areas where iCloud is unambitious and because of this does not perform as we would like.
Mail is poor on any Apple product and this is easily checked by installing the Gmail app on an iPhone and seeing the emails take forever, comparatively, to appear in Apple Mail.
Files is bare bones basic and often does not update across devices in real-time with only slightly better performance in Apple Notes.
And there is always a sense that other offerings, that are dedicated to one specific task such as Dropbox, work much more efficiently.
iCloud is trying to be all things in one, but the reality is that it does not do much particular well. Messages and some of the other handoff features are brilliant, and I just hope that we can look back on iCloud today in a few years and be thankful that it is no longer like it is today.