iCloud
This was by far the biggest announcement of the day. Months of speculation have predicted Apple would be launching a cloud-based service, and this new service is perhaps bigger than all these rumours foretold – it will be completely replacing MobileMe, which Jobs described “as not our finest hour”.
“We’ve been working on this for some time and we’re really excited about it,” Jobs said. He goes on to say that while the PC was once the hub for all of a user’s digital data, that hub has now been replaced by the cloud as users require so much more space and “the devices have changed”.
“We’re going to move the centre of your digital life into the cloud,” Jobs said. “Now if I get something on my iPhone it sends up to the cloud immediately, and they are now pushed down to my devices completely automatically.”
“iCloud stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices, but it’s also completely integrated with your apps and so everything happens automatically.”
iCloud is essentially a way for users to back-up and share everything in their iOS device, including photos, music, documents and other files.
The entire iCloud suite is made up of nine individual apps.
Contacts is one of these. When users make a new contact on their iPhone, it’s automatically pushed to their iPad and Mac devices. The same works for calendar updates and mail as well, although calendar sharing has been added so users can share schedules with each other.
The App Store will be given iCloud features as well. Users can now see their purchase history on all their devices, and download the same apps on separate devices for free. And whenever you buy a new app, it’s downloaded to all your devices at once automatically.
iBooks is essentially the same thing. Users see a purchase history of all their books, they can sync them across devices and new iBooks will sync automatically across devices at the same time.
Wireless back-up has also been added to the cloud as well. This allows you to back-up your iPhone contents to the cloud, including the actual iOS back-up file. This means whenever you get a new phone, all users have to do is input their Apple ID to get their profile back – this is a continuation of the “post-PC” message Apple has been using.
But Jobs added “one more thing” to this feature – a further three apps including “iTunes in the Cloud”.
The first app is called Documents in the Cloud. This allows you to upload documents created in different apps to the cloud, and then push them to all different devices including iPads and iPod Touches. This is integrated into the iWork suite, although APIs will allow this to be opened into other apps.
The next app is Photo Stream. Users upload their photos directly to the cloud, and those can then be streamed to any device – including the Apple TV. Jobs says this essentially removes the pain of having to upload hundreds of photos to a computer, and then move them to all devices.
At this point Jobs pointed out that Photo Stream will store the last 1,000 photos added on your devices, and for Mac and PC users it will store all of them. They’ll be stored for 30 days, which will allow users to download them to individual devices.
The last announcement was by far the biggest – iTunes in the Cloud. This is the service that has been rumoured for over a year now, although many predictions such as streaming have been proven incorrect.
The iTunes in the Cloud feature allows users to download music they have purchased on one device onto other devices. So if a user buys an album on an iPad, they can then download that purchase onto an iPhone – previously they would have been charged for this.
And users will also be able to automatically download a song from the iTunes Store and sync them to all devices at once.
But of course, this doesn’t account for the thousands of other songs users own that they have may have bought on CDs and then ripped to iTunes.
This is where a new future, iTunes Match, comes in.
For $US25 per year, Apple will let you upload all of your own music, (up to 25,000 songs), and then receive higher-quality copies of them in return. And they will allow you to download these higher quality copies to all of your devices and store them in the cloud.
“Chances are good we’ve got the songs you’ve ripped in the store,” Jobs says. “We’ll match your songs up with the songs we have in the store… and it takes minutes, not weeks.”
While Apple has not commented publicly on the negotiation process, analysts point out this is likely a way to compensate music labels and publishers for piracy.
The Amazon and Google program allow users to upload songs for free. By providing Apple users with higher quality versions of their music for a price, labels and publishers will at least be getting some money back for songs that have been pirated rather than purchased legitimately – this is most likely why Apple was the only company reportedly able to get them on board.
However, at this time it appears iTunes Match will only be available to US customers at launch. Beyond that, no information is currently available for a local launch.
iCloud will come with 5GB of storage, but many of the features don’t even count towards your upload limit.
Mac OS X Lion
Apple has also announced and showed off the new version of Mac OS X at the conference – Lion. The new software will cost $US29.99, comes with 250 new features and will actually be available only as a download from the Mac App Store in July.
Apple says the new download will only be 4GB, essentially “the size of an HD movie from the iTunes Store”.
Mac OS X will come with new multi-touch hand gestures for the track pads, full-screen apps, a completely new mail app that allows tracking in conversations. One of the new features is called “momentum scrolling”, which allows users to control their scrolling speed based on the speed they are scrolling on the track pad.
A new feature called Mission Control also allows users to see a window of all the apps that are running at any one time.
“With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full-screen apps and your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a tap,” Apple said in a statement.
Mac OS X also comes with auto-save which automatically saves documents as a user works on them. And a new feature called AirDrop “finds nearby Macs and automatically sets up a peer-to-peer wireless connection to make transferring files quick and easy”.
Apple also announced it will released Mac OS X Lion Server as a download for $US49.99 from the Mac App Store.
