Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

Post by zepto » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

jtdev wrote: post #188

habosa wrote: post #133

I can't tell why this is on the front page of HN. Is the implication that Google would spy on Apple customer's data stored on Google Cloud? Google is evil/dumb/both at times but that's completely outlandish. I do find it interesting that Apple could be one of Google's biggest Cloud clients though, that's very surprising.

Apple has built significant brand trust and brand loyalty on the premise that Apple’s business model is built around devices and services and that your data is not something that Apple is not interested in exploiting/monetizing; Google has a reputation for an antithetical business model in terms of user data.

Post by ip26 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #197

ip26 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

External drives are also spec'd for lower performance and longevity.

Do external drives even have performance/longevity specs? The specs I see on them are pretty basic (eg. capacity, interface, operating temperature), and considering that they're marketed to consumers that's not surprising. As for actual performance/longevity, my understanding is that they're just whatever drives the manufacturer has available. For low capacities they're going to be consumer drives and for higher capa…

Post by kryptozinc » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #198

pmontra wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm, or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm. Some units are usual in some contexts, some are not. In one word, habits.

Them why is t my hard drive four million kilobytes? We already crossed this bridge with gigabytes, and the course was laid in with terabytes, which I first heard in a business setting over 20 years ago, when that was still a rack of hard disks. Cloud providers and the LHC brought us petabytes, and that was over ten years ago. The “oh by the way the next unit is ‘exabyte’” conversations started around the same time.

Post by Dah00n » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

LadyCailin wrote: post #192

Dah00n wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a strawman. Apple could just not host at Google.

Is the assumption that google is going to store, then attempt to decrypt the data at some point in the future? Or is the claim that google's services are less secure than Apple's would be? If not, then I'm not sure that this is worse at all. Sure, if you believe google to be actually malicious, then this would be a problem, but I don't think there's a reasonable argument to say that google would go to this length of…

Post by discodave » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #207

karmasimida wrote: post #9

How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…

Is that stuff even stored on spinning rust these days? I mean solid state might be more expensive upfront but I imagine at scale the energy consumption required to power and cool millions of mechanical devices becomes a big issue. Not to mention the random access performance of spiny disks ain’t too great either.