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Partly Cloud-y

I have grown up with, and never known life without computers. I am lucky enough to live

in an area that can afford to integrate them into home life and education at every grade level.

Consequently, I am incredibly familiar with how macOS and Windows operate, and have

observed their evolution since I began using the former in 2004, and the latter around 2009.

Having used several generations of computers but only recently with any sort of substantial

personal content to put on it, the evolution of computer design has made an impact on me but I

have never had to get accustomed to a large shift in where my data is stored. The most noticeable

change has been switching from school-provided flash drives in elementary school to services

like Google Classroom in high school, for editing and transporting documents. I also have a

major interest in computers, and have extensive knowledge of Apple products released after

2002. Whether it is for media consumption, video editing, Photoshop, virtual machines,

installing operating systems, hardware upgrades, software modifications, file management,

network-attached storage, or virtually any other subject pertaining to consumer devices, I have

done it all and know my way around computers like nobodys business.

Recently, there has been a movement in the movie, music, television, video game, and

technology industries towards digital streaming as opposed to physical media. Starting in 2008

with the MacBook Air, every new Apple computer no longer had optical drives, and services like

Netflix have been at the forefront of two revolutions movies ordered through the internet as

opposed to buying or renting from a physical store, and more recently digital streaming. Netflix,

Amazon, and Hulu also fund their own content now, and are essentially fully fledged media

producers. This intrigues me, as I remember in 2008 when Netflix first allowed streaming to

Windows computers only. We had to use my fathers old work laptop to stream it, the old Dell

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being the only Windows PC in our house. Even so, at that low resolution and with its limited

content, I was deeply impressed. Their service has grown from the proof-of-concept to being

accessible on every device in the house, and Netflix is not the only company that has accelerated

a shift towards reliance on the internet for content delivery. Cloud services like iCloud and

Google Drive encourage personal data storage in the Cloud, which makes it accessible

everywhere and not stored on a single device. While I am unsure exactly when this change

occurred, I have observed that using a smartphone or computer does not feel drastically different

from how it did a decade ago, at least compared to a decade before then. For all those reasons, I

posed the question: How have the internet and the Cloud affected how we use our personal

devices?

My inquiry began last summer. I called in a favor and on July 21st, 2016, I was able to

visit Apples headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Around 2:30 that afternoon

my dad and I arrived in the parking lot, and while waiting for our friend to let us in we checked

out their company store. This store is like any other Apple retail store, except for the fact that

they offer merchandise. You can buy Apple branded t-shirts, mugs, pens, notebooks, water

bottles, and various other items. We met in the lobby with Nadine de Coteau. She is a family

friend and an employee of Lisa Jackson, former head of the EPA under President Obama and

currently works at Apple on environmental and educational projects. De Coteau printed us name

tags, (mine currently resides on the bottom of my laptop), and we passed the security door into

the main lobby. With a massive tree in the center and windows in a half-dome shape opening to

the courtyard, the lobby was filled with employees having coffee and business meetings, and a

huge poster advertising the new MacBook and iPad Pro. Passing through another badge-

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protected door into the courtyard. Nadine pointed out the newly planted drought-friendly native

plants as we made our way into Caff Macs, Apples employee restaurant.

Once there, we sat outside, drank coffee, ate gelato, and caught up (she is a family friend,

after all). She told us what some of her work involves: helping underprivileged schools as part of

President Obamas ConnectED program to provide students with iPads and transition schools to

a more technologically oriented method of education. Apple Geniuses (Specialists) are on

location for a period of time, assisting teachers and students with the new technology and making

them comfortable with the change. This is something that I believe shows how education, one of

the more resistant markets to new technology, is being affected greatly by the availability of

Cloud storage services like Google Drive and iCloud.

Education, while an important market for technology companies, is not the only market

on which the Internet has had a huge effect. Business has been changed and still is changing

drastically thanks to the effects of Cloud storage and computing. Whether in a TV show or real

life, the stereotype of money-oriented corporations still holds true as a major reason for shifting

to Cloud-based solutions. In an article for the online magazine BusinessReviewUSA, Adam Groff

writes, Because Cloud service providers take care of all the maintenance and system updates, it

means large businesses can cut their IT budgets in half. Cloud computing services do cost

money, but its a fraction of the cost of onsite IT services. He goes on to discuss that this

extends to equipment costs as well. Regardless of whatever the Cloud service is, like Amazon

Web Services or Microsoft Azure, they are being paid to maintain and upgrade equipment as

needed, and can save the client thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours in upkeep. In

addition to the labor saved by using Cloud technologies, physical space is saved which greatly

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helps to save money both by requiring less room in a business that might be limited in size, and

the reduction in heat and electricity makes it more than worth it to go to a Cloud service.

When neither at school nor work, the average consumer likes to use social media, watch

movies and TV, or just talk to each other. For IBM, Maamar Ferkoun says, Anyone can turn into

an instant reporter, and live news feeds are constantly streaming the media, at times sparking

social upheavals. Major world events being live-streamed mean that people can get news faster

than ever before, from those who are where the event is happening. Two notable instances of this

are the San Bernardino hospital shooting, and the terror attacks at the Pulse Nightclub shooting

in Orlando, Florida. In the case of San Bernardino, it made national headlines before authorities

had cleared the building so Snapchat set up a live Story. This is essentially a curated feed of clips

filmed by people, in this case those in San Bernardino showing what was happening, as well as

the worldwide reaction to the events. It was more or less the same amount of coverage that

traditional news would give, just in a way that did not require a news crew or channel and

allowed for input from dozens of people rather than a select few presenters.

In the Pulse nightclub, there happened to be multiple videos people had taken with their

phones, the most disturbing of which is likely that of the late Amanda Alvear, whose brother

Brian posted her Snapchat Story online (A Snapchat Story is a collection of photos or videos the

user decides to share with their friends, available for up to 24 hours) Amanda was at the

nightclub on the night of the shooting, and captured moments before and during the shooting. At

the end, her final clips posted contain around 16 gunshots in the background, and she was

confirmed to have died shortly thereafter (Keneally). While hers was not the only video shot

there to have been made public, Amandas was one of the more popular ones and more impactful

than most. Unlike a news or police report, or a secondary source giving anecdotal evidence about

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the shooting, Amandas footage allow us to see exactly what happened from the perspective one

a victim, and not only that but also allows us to see how normal the nightclub was. Everyone was

having a generally good time, and acting normally, so it gives a sense of foreboding and the idea

that it could happen to anyone, a feeling previously only possible in horror movies. For better or

for worse, the ease and encouragement to share quick bits of content enabled by the Internet

allow us to see into the lives and from the perspectives of whoever we want, whether positive or

negative.

Snapchat also has a feature called Memories. Like many other services offered like

Google and iCloud Photo Libraries, it will save photos or Snaps taken in the Cloud and allow

you access those from any device you are signed into. An article written for Scientific American

by Daniel Wagner and Adrian Ward makes the point that relying on the Internet as a sort of

external memory allows individual humans to remember information faster and access new

information faster than asking another human. Since it can remember information more

quickly than a person, the Internet is simultaneously replacing asking others for information and

racking your brain to try and remember a piece of information. It is true that this reduces social

interaction slightly, in addition to replacing forcing someone to exercise and go out in the world

to find the information in a library or elsewhere, with just giving the information. However, this

also means humans spend far less time on menial tasks searching for information, and more time

developing relationships or being productive because they simply have more time and access to

information than ever before.

A major application of this is in the scientific world. MIT physicist and author Frank

Wilczek passionately writes that, the limitation of being much too complicated to be soluble

could be challenged. With todays chips and architectures, we can start to solve the equations for

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chemistry and materials science. By orchestrating the power of billions of tomorrows chips,

linked through the Internet or its successors, we should be able to construct virtual laboratories of

unprecedented flexibility and power We will explore for useful materials more easily and

systematically, by feeding multitudes of possibilities, each defined by a few lines of code, into a

world-spanning grid of linked computers (Wilczek and Brockman 58). This future, predicted six

years ago, is here. Anyone from consumers to corporations can use cloud technologies, like

Amazons S3, to easily buy storage and computing power for whatever they desire. It can make

outsourcing faster and more practical, and can enable employees to work from whatever device

they wish. People can store their entire lives in the Cloud, and services like Siri and Google

Photos take advantage of Cloud processing power to rapidly analyze personal information.

So, if the internet has become such a useful tool for the average person to quickly access

information, why did it take decades from its creation to get in the hands of so many people who

are less tech-savvy? Well, besides speed improvements, the number of internet-connected

devices has increased dramatically in the past ten years, and they have been designed in such a

way that makes it all too easy. A major push was Apples 1998 iMac. Initially meant to be a basic

network terminal, Apples CFO Fred Anderson pushed to add a hard drive and it eventually

became a home desktop computer that could connect to the internet incredibly easily (Isaacson

349). This allowed Apple to promote it as an internet-friendly Mac and along with the

elimination of the floppy disk drive, it was thrust into an internet-connected future.

The internet-connected devices that have come about since 1998 are orders of magnitude

more powerful than the original iMac. The ubiquity of these mobile devices has had indirect

effects on the direction larger computers have taken as well. Once the average person realized

they could replace letters, CDs, turntables, and encyclopedias with an all-in-one box, they began

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to look for more things to do with the increasing power and popularity of computers and

corporations began to look for different business opportunities in the burgeoning personal

computer market. In a Philz Coffee just above Noe Valley in San Francisco, CA, I interviewed

Fred Huxham, a software engineer for Apple. For the better part of thirty years, Huxham has

worked at Apple, primarily as on developing their Final Cut Pro and iMovie software.

Over the course of his time at Apple, when asked if at any point he envisioned the

availability of iMovie on mobile devices as it is today he replied, No, its been more of an over-

time thing where phones have become more powerful and allowed for iMovie to run on iOS.

There wasnt a massive shift at any point. This is but one side effect of our need for increasingly

more powerful mobile devices to quickly access information. As we store more of our

information in the Cloud we have the ability to access it anywhere, and we have the urge to do

more than just view it. In this case, it was reasoned that since we can film, store, and play video

on mobile devices, we should be able to edit as well. Major projects are likely not far off from

being edited on mobile devices. In Huxhams opinion, the major thing holding Final Cut back

from being viable on an iPad is not its raw power, but its storage space. This is more than just an

excuse for why Apple has not gotten around to making Final Cut for iOS yet, this is a real

problem that the Cloud can solve. Huxham gave me the example of his girlfriend. [She] makes

and edits indie TV documentaries, like the kind youd see on KQED, and when she travels she

carries around luggage with terabytes of footage on external drives. This means she is lugging

around hundreds of hours of raw footage that is too high-quality to stream from the Cloud, and

too much to fit on a single storage device. Current storage is still expensive, and the masses will

not have access to devices with an appropriate amount of storage for years. The other, more cost-

effective solution is to store that data in the Cloud, where server farms have more than enough

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space. The only issue is that currently, no internet technology is possible of delivering the same

data speeds that a physical connection can. Eventually, it is likely that some sort of technology

will be able to handle this, but we are not yet at that point.

Just under a week later, I visited the Concord home of Justin Henzie, a software

developer who worked for 10 years at Apple, most notably creating software for Apple TV and

the underlying media player used all throughout iOS devices and Apple Watch. The Apple TV

and other similar products mark a significant transition in the consumer electronics industry. For

the first time, digital set-top boxes granted the ability to stream content from a personal computer

or the internet. In a way, its first iteration was just teasing the possibilities of the future. Henzie

concisely told me that, [Apple TV] was an iTunes machine that became a Cloud machine

because the Cloud is always on to access, unlike your computer. Its second generation dropped

the hard drive in favor of pushing streaming services like Netflix and iTunes, and was, Henzie

admits, a direct competitor to Google TV. Currently, Henzie works at a startup called Caffeine,

which provides live-streaming services that have exponentially less delay than existing services.

They eventually intend to build their own infrastructure of servers to make their services even

better, and use Amazon Web Services to store their information and collaborate on development.

Henzie left Apple and has ended up at this Cloud-oriented company because he believes that

Apple simply is not thinking far into the future anymore. They seem to be focusing on pushing

things as quickly as possible to be shown at keynote presentations, no more than three to six

months into the future. Without Steve Jobs, Henzie says, Apple is not as focused as it used to be.

Speaking of the future, it is likely that one day every device will have access to blazing

internet speeds and as much Cloud storage as they can ever use, but that time is not yet here, and

will not be for years. In addition to being aware of the availability of music and video streaming,

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and Cloud storage services, different perspectives on the effects connectivity has had on the

world in major industries has enlightened me to what the world used to be like. Conversations

were less in-depth, because time was spent asking other people and speculating over facts new

easily available online. Documents were mailed and printed far more often than they are now,

and modern computers dropping the optical disc drive is now nothing new, as these seemingly

timeless technologies have been replaced by better, faster, more efficient solutions. In short, the

Cloud has affected every aspect of the world, letting us create, edit, store, and share our content

far more easily than was thought to be possible just a few decades ago.

The whole experience of this project felt like a dream come true. I had never had a

project assigned to me that allowed me to indulge my hobby like this. I was able to find

something I did not know about computers, and I learned about it. I experienced a whole range

of emotions with each piece of research done: fascination, sadness, and awe most notably. I

reconsidered my own technology habits, and noticed that indeed I do rely on the internet more

than others, though I do not consider this to be a negative thing. I can feel more confident in an

unknown area, whether literally, like a new city, or figuratively, like a new area of expertise I am

researching for myself. Instead of bothering someone else and making them repeat what they

already know, I can focus on discussing more in-depth subject matter and never be lost. I also got

around to doing things that I might not have bothered to do on my own time. I finally got to go

inside Apples headquarters, an experience reserved for guests of employees. I met two people

who have been part of major projects from Apple that I love, who provided information I would

never have heard otherwise. Mr. Huxham has been integral to Final Cut Pro and iMovie, but he

also worked on early efforts to port Mac OS to Intel processors in 1992, which never made it to

market, and still maintains possession of an incredibly rare Intel development unit, one of maybe

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a dozen remaining in the wild. Mr. Henzie began at Apple working on what I consider to be the

best Apple product of all time - Front Row, a media player with the best sound design and visuals

I have ever seen. From him, I learned that the sounds for Front Row came from Pixar, specially

designed for Apple, and other bits and pieces about Apple, including the fact that all their

backend servers are in fact Hackintoshes, (My project, incidentally it means running macOS

on non-Apple computers). Not only was this research good for my own personal edification, but

I now have a more informed view of the industry, and feel more comfortable in my predictions

for its future. If anything, the most disappointing thing I found out was that software like

Aperture, Front Row, and Mac OS for early Intel hardware were all abandoned due to internal

politics. It does remind me that behind the glowing image of the corporation, it does come down

to the flaws of those running it, and reminds me that no company is perfect. Regardless, I have

come out of this with a totally different outlook on the Cloud and how we have integrated the

internet into our lives, and I feel more certain about the tech industrys future than ever.

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Works Cited

Book

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Brockman, John, and Frank Wilczek. Let Us Calculate. Is the Internet Changing the Way You

Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future, Harper Perennial, New York, NY,

2011, pp. 5859. Edge Question Series.Electronic

Ferkoun, Maamar. How Cloud Computing Is Impacting Everyday Life. IBM Cloud Computing

News, IBM, 4 Aug. 2016, www.ibm.com/blogs/Cloud-computing/2013/04/how-Cloud-

computing-is-impacting-. Accessed 10 Feb. 2017.

Groff, Adam. Five Ways Cloud Computing Is Changing How We Do Business. Business

Review USA, 11 Aug. 2014, www.businessreviewusa.com/technology/4689/5-Ways-

Cloud-Computing-is-Changing-How-We-Do-Business. Accessed 10 Feb. 2017.

Keneally, Meghan. Snapchat Video From Inside the Orlando Nightclub Records String of

Gunshot Sounds. ABC News, ABC News Network, 13 June 2016,

abcnews.go.com/US/snapchat-video-inside-orlando-nightclub-records-string-

gunshot/story?id=39816499. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.

Wegner, Daniel M., and Adrian F. Ward. The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for

Our Memories. Scientific American, 29 Oct. 2013,

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-internet-has-become-the-external-hard-drive-for-

our-memories/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2017.

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Primary

Henzie, Justin. Software engineer, Former Software Manager of Apple TV, Concord, CA.

Personal interview. 11 March 2017.

Huxham, Fred. Software engineer at Apple, Inc., San Francisco, CA. Personal interview. 6

March 2017.

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