Apple launches iCloud Drive for Windows ahead of Mac

By David Nield Published September 21, 2014

iCloud Drive is Apple’s next-generation upgrade to iCloud, designed to go head-to-head with the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. It’s built into iOS 8, it’s coming in OS X Yosemite, and as of today it’s also out for Windows too. If you run a Microsoft-powered desktop or laptop then you can get up and running with iCloud before your Mac-loving friends.

Head to the new iCloud for Windows page to get started. “iCloud keeps your mail, documents, contacts and calendars up-to-date between your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac and Windows PC,” explains the support document. “With iCloud Drive, you can store any file in iCloud. Simply drag your documents into iCloud Drive folder on your PC and access them at any time, on any device.”

Recommended Videos

If you’ve used any of the aforementioned cloud storage services then you’ll already be familiar with the way that iCloud Drive works on Windows. As well as storing whatever kind of file you throw at it, iCloud Drive also automatically pulls in the photos from your iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome can be kept in sync with your Safari bookmarks too.

iCloud has so far offered limited support for Windows machines, either through desktop applications or via a Web browser, so it will be interesting to see just how well this new desktop application works with the native support built into all iDevices and Apple-powered computers. New price levels for iCloud Drive were announced earlier this month: 20GB costs $0.99 a month, with a full terabyte at $19.99 a month. Each user gets 5GB of room for free.

That makes iCloud Drive substantially more expensive than OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox (which recently dropped its prices) — we’ll have to see whether its close ties to the iPhone and iPad will be enough to help it compete. A word of warning, though: Don’t upgrade to iCloud Drive from the original iCloud until all of your devices — mobiles, tablets, laptops — are running iOS 8 or OS X Yosemite (out sometime this fall).

Former Contributor

Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

Topics

Computing

DigUp lets users find Mac files by describing them, not remembering their names

Can't remember where that screenshot, PDF or recording went? Just describe it and let AI do the digging.

DigUp App in Use screenshot

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with knowing a file exists somewhere on a computer but having absolutely no idea what it's called. Was that screenshot saved as IMG_4837? Which PDF contained that clause? And where did that podcast recording mention the thing worth remembering? DigUp wants to end the filename guessing game, letting Mac users search for files by describing what they remember instead. The free, open-source app uses Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 to search across photos, documents, PDFs, audio recordings and videos, all without sending personal files to the cloud.

DigUp turns everyday descriptions into file searches

Computing

A new AI detector looks beyond words to check whether the ideas came from AI

This could help journals distinguish AI-written research from human work polished with AI.

ai-writing-book

Most AI detectors look for telltale signs of AI-generated text by examining word and sentence patterns. A new tool called IdeaLens takes a different route to solving this problem. It spots AI-generated research by looking at the ideas behind it instead of the wording itself (via TechXplore).

Researchers from the University of Maryland, Google DeepMind, and Simon Fraser University built IdeaLens to check whether a document's core arguments came from a human or a machine, regardless of who wrote the final draft.

Computing

Anthropic warns of imminent self-replicating AI that might even work off an oven or TV

Self-replicating AI could be merely months away, and tests show it can run on the devices sitting at your home.

Illustration of dangerous AI.

Over the past few weeks, nearly every AI lab has released frontier AI models. Earlier today, Google started rolling out Gemini 4, Argon, hot on the heels of Meta announcing its Muse Wonder frontier AI models to compete against the best from OpenAI and Anthropic's Claude. This relentless pace of AI model release comes at a time when the same AI labs are calling for development slowdown and increased regulation, following a series of concerning incidents where these AI models went rogue and broke into private, as well as government-owned, websites.

Now, Anthropic has dropped a chilling set of predictions about the capabilities of these AI models after running a series of tests. The company claims that small AI models could be merely a few months away from self-replicating and turning into a dangerous swarm. More importantly, they won't require a massive data center or an uber-powerful computer to do so. On the contrary, the lab claims that these self-replicating AI swarms will need something with as little computing power as an average Internet-connected device, like a smart oven or an Android TV box.