Interesting find by Apple Daily Report of an about the possibility to add a local storage device to augment iCloud.

When I saw this patent I immediately thought of this old post of mine, written the day before WWDC 2011 keynote.

In that post I was speculating that iCloud would be somehow augmented by a local storage device such as an updated Time Capsule, to make up for the bandwidth needed to backup to iCloud, reduce the latency when streaming music and movies and so forth.

A random section of the patent:

For example, if the external network storage device is closer than the cloud-based storage 244, storing the data item on the external network storage device can reduce the latency and increase performance. Additionally, in some cases, the data management module 232 can be configured to choose to store a data item on an authorized external network storage device based on user preference. For example, a user can specify that a particular data item or a particular type of data item should be stored on the external network storage device.

Of course, this is just a coincidence, but it’s funny that I had some similar ideas back in 2011.

Incidentally that post was shared quite a bit, making the most visited article of macography.net of all time.