In article , Roger Blake
wrote:

If you have an Android phone and you take photos, those photos upload to
Google and your storage on the local device is not hampered by the
storage limitations of you local device.

I don't have a smartphone, Android or otherwise.

your loss. they're very capable devices that can do all sorts of things
that were once considered impossible.

Google's excellent AI is the result of cloud computing analysis which is
far greater than the mobile device itself.

I'm not interested in having a device that listens to everything around
it and uploads it.

where did you get the ridiculous idea that a phone listens to
everything around it and then uploads it? seriously, wtf???

the entire concept is ludicrous. it's tinfoil hat material.

not only would the battery be dead in a short time, but the cell system
would be overloaded with billions of people uploading all that data.

and then where does all that data go and who is going to analyze it
all? do you even realize how much data that would be? (no).

When someone sends you mail, the cloud routes it all and places it in
your inbox. The next time your device polls for new email, you then
retrieve it.

I've been managing mail servers for decades. What you insist on
referring to as "the cloud" as though it is some magical thing
is just a collection of servers.

the cloud is much more than 'just a collection of servers'.

that's like saying a computer is 'just a collection of transistors'.

On my iPhone, I have access to 50 million songs. I don't have to store
them all.

I'm not interested in that. I prefer to store my own stuff rather than
trust it to someone else's server and network.

it's more reliable than anything you could possibly do with your own
system, unless you have a similar budget as they do, which is extremely
unlikely.

like a song others are suggested and in general it's good at picking
songs I will like. That's a benefit of could computing.

This and all of the things you refer to are simply exchanging data
with remote servers. That's what we did in the 1970s using terminals
connecting to computer service bureaus. (I was there.)

you weren't streaming music or video in the 1970s, locally or the cloud.

When I request an Uber, the cloud calculates all the drivers near me and

"The cloud" again is just someone else's server, or collection of servers.

missing the point entirely.

You can call this market speak if you like. I say you're wrong about
that, but I don't see that at matters at all anyway. It's a benefit
offered to everyone. If you're excited about this opportunity and wish
to downplay it, that's your choice. I like "cloud" computing.

It is market speak, and I do not see it as a benefit. I prefer to keep
as much as possible under my own control.

nothing about the cloud prevents that.