Anyone else here in the post-PC era?

I think Siri is just the iPhone 4S.--Percy

I just visited iCloud for the first time and am wondering how it is supposed to work. No longer do I have to sync with iTunes, I'm supposedly sync'd with the cloud, but there's no record of anything from my iPad2 in the cloud.I assume this is because my backup to the cloud failed, the one that should have happened before installation, but when will my "stuff" get backed up to the cloud? There doesn't seem to be any way to initiate this manually.Is there an "iCloud Fully Explained" page online somewhere? I've Googled about, but haven't come across a good one yet.--Percy

I've learned a little bit more about how IOS 5 keeps iPads up to date, but I still have many questions.I gave my mother an iPad this past summer. She's visiting right now, and so yesterday I updated her iPad to IOS 5. So now I have two iPads in the house with IOS 5. Under settings I checked the "WiFo Syncing" for both of them.So now when I open iTunes I see two iPad devices all the time: "Percy's iPad" and "Mom's iPad". Every once in a while one of them does a sync, I think it probably happens once a day. As near as I can tell, unless you've powered the iPad off, iTunes can communicate with it. I can click on the Apps tab and see all the apps on either iPad.But where does the iCloud fit into this? Is iTunes displaying the apps that are actually on the iPad? Or the apps that are saved in the cloud? Or are the apps actually stored in iTunes? Both iTunes and the cloud?If my iPad accidentally gets wiped clean and I want to restore, will I be able to restore all my apps from the cloud? Is there some way to see when the last sync was, and whether the sync was to iTunes, the cloud, or both?If either update to IOS 5 had gone smoothly I probably wouldn't be asking these questions, but they didn't. My iPad had to start out clean and I had to reconstruct it's original state from memory. Fortunately my apps were still in iTunes (I think - the cloud denied I had anything stored) and was able to restore from there. My mother's iPad had trouble sync'ing, and in the end I had to restore from my iPad's state. iTunes and iClould denied that anything from her iPad had been stored, despite the fact that just 10 minutes before in the process it stated that it was backing up her iPad. She lost 7 apps and an iBook.--Percy

Okay, sure, we're in the post-PC era, but when I want to sit back in an easy chair and answer some email or post some messages at EvC Forum I use my laptop, not my iPad. iPad's on-screen keyboard is not useful for anything but short messages. I could use an external keyboard, but now I'm juggling two items in my lap instead of just one - maybe some have mastered this, but it doesn't work for me.When I last posted to this thread I had upgraded the laptop to Lion, after which the camera didn't work. Any tool using the camera would give "Camera not connected" messages. Scouring the net for solutions I discovered that this is a common problem after a Lion upgrade, but I didn't find any solutions.I took the lap top to the Genius Bar at our local Apple store, and my assigned genius tested the camera on both Lion and on 10.5.5, which he booted up off a USB drive. The camera did not work on either OS.I showed the genius the on-line discussion threads about others having the same camera problem after upgrading to Lion, and he conceded the unlikelihood of the camera failing simultaneously with the upgrade, but he said all the evidence indicated that the camera was broken. I agreed to a camera replacement for $78 and left the laptop with them.Apple called the next day and said they'd upgraded something (the person who called had no specific information) and that the camera was now working. They acknowledged that there were problems with the Lion upgrade, and they said there was no charge.Okay, I'm happy, I guess, but gee, what a surprise, the camera was never broken.My guess is that there's firmware for the camera that in some cases is affected by the Lion upgrade. I'm happy that the camera is fixed but very disappointed at the process. The people who actually fix the hardware are not the genius bar people helping customers, and I'm sure the guy who helped me still has no idea that Lion upgrades really can "break" cameras.Assuming the iPod is part of the post-PC era, at the same time I picked up the laptop I attempted to get my iPod battery replaced. It turns out that Apple no longer replaces iPod batteries. They will sell you a brand new 120GB iPod Classic for $59 (probably regular price around $200), but they will no longer replace the battery. It's a good deal, but I really only wanted to spend $25 or $30. I was very disappointed.So now I have a brand new 120GB iPod Classic, it'll probably last as long as my old iPod (5 years), but all I wanted was a new battery because I'm just trying to get by until we get 4G in our area when I will buy a smart phone.Thanks to those who tried to interpret the iCloud for me, but it still feels ambiguous and fuzzy to me. Some iPad data is stored in iTunes, some is in the cloud, and I would love to see an explicit statement from Apple about which is where. But maybe this just comes with the territory of the post-PC era, that we never really know for sure what's going on.--Percy