All this speculation about iCloud being Apple's answer to the Amazon Cloud Drive / Cloud Player is missing the forest for the trees. If iCloud is about iTunes, why isn't it being announced in September with the iPod family updates, instead of at WWDC?
The logical answer is that it's not a consumer service, but a developer-focused service. iCloud will no doubt be the platform for the Lala-derived service unveiled in September, but the platform is the big deal here: Think Amazon Web Services, but built specifically for integrating with iOS and MacOS, complete with a new Core Data Cloud API that makes adding sync to any app barely more challenging than writing for Core Data in the first place. And the basic tier (more than enough unless you're a top-100 app) is included in the $99/year membership.
Do they really have the infrastructure? Which other datacenters besides the NC one have they been building? (I think AWS has many more datacenters, both in the US and outside).
That's a really good question. The reported buildout is likely well short of AWS, but I simply cannot believe Apple would make an investment at that scale just to store millions of redundant copies of music files!
From what I have understood of following the company for the past years is that it does not really bother satisfying tech blogs. So this is still weird behaviour for them.
I would not go to the extent of blatantly calling out an iPhone 4S to be announced but the following should add up to something:
1) Apple recommending journalists to personally come for the event
2) Already announcing what was widely believed by many to be the highlight of the show. Point to note is Apple had never before this announced the name. So to do it in a non grandeur way via a PR article is so not Apple.
Something is cooking. Can't really smell what it is though.
Nah, Apple does care. They are very good at playing the expectations game and have gotten better with time.
Their invitations have become less cryptic and outright explicit (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apple-hints-at-ipa...), probably precisely because disappointment about a lack of flashy announcements was fast becoming a big deal after Apple events.
There will always be stupid speculation – also before next Monday – and there will always be people complaining – also after next Monday – Apple just doesn’t want that to turn into the main thing.
That press release is in context not much more explicit than above invitation to the iPad event. It’s just a different tool.
Maybe they have some external reason to care about it this time, like the impact on stock prices or something? Analysts making stuff up and then being disappointed has caused stock volatility in the past, and Apple may want to avoid that this time.
You're on to something. Apple is announcing this now so journos get it out of their system before the show, and are primed to write about the real event.
Apple wants everyone talking about the same thing on show day, and leaking the small stuff is the way to do it.
I'm hanging out for an Apple TV app store. It'll be absolutely huge when it happens.
Glad to hear Steve will be presenting. It would have been kinda fun if they set the expectation that he wouldn't be there and made us sit through an hour of Phil Schiller, just for Steve to run out on the end to have a one more thing moment.
I don't see an Apple TV store happening soon. They don't want apps that compete with iTunes. Probably they would welcome games, but Amazon VOD? Never. Netflix is the one exception because it's too big to ignore.
There's been a quiet battle going on for 10+ years to work out who will own your living room entertainment experience.
One of the theories about why MS dumped so much money in to the XBox over the years was that it was really a trojan horse that was trying to be the hub of your media centre. The problem with the XBox is that it stays switched off when you're watching broadcast TV, which is still what most people do in their living rooms.
Whoever can get in between you and "broadcast" (or VOD) TV content and control that experience has just taken control of a multi billion dollar market.
Soon enough when you switch on your TV you'll be presented with a customised line up of viewing across different channels/sources, lists of what your friends and favorite celebs(/brands/whatever) are watching, suggestions of new shows you might like, enhanced experiences around live content (polls on news topics on CNN, click to buy the track that's playing on Glee, etc), and, most importantly, targeted commercials.
All I want is Android style widgets (ie, Google Voice SMS app or RSS feed reader) overlay or with TV inset (like your cable/dish box showing menu + current stream).
GoogleTV's first iteration sucks, but I think the Market alone will change that. There's a netflix app and the Al Jazeera Live app is pretty good. If you get a dozen big names (BBC news, CNN, etc) delivering their content directly to consumers via apps, then it will become a viable replacement for basic cable. Adding the full range of things Android can do, along with their rental service will only be icing on that cake.
iOS 5 is definitely going to be a major part of the keynote. The question is what iOS 5 will actually entail.
I'm confident that notifications are going to be a part of it, but when they plan on dedicating the whole keynote to software releases, one wonders how they can sell it.
iCloud, iOS 5 - maybe some great stuff for developers such as Apple-hosted databases. Personally, I am crossing my fingers for an iBooks overhaul, but that's probably too optimistic.
Cloud-synced bookmarks and notes - preferably with a social profile like that of Kindle[1][2]. The way I read books is to make a lot of notes and highlights; I know some people don't do this, but this helps me summarize books more easily and "reread" them, if I need to. Picking out your favourite passages of Aesop, The Art of War and The Prince is extremely convenient. That not how everyone reads and digests books, but it's definitely how I do - and I assume that many students will want to do the same with their textbooks.
The book selection is also very meagre[3] (at least in this country), but more important, some of the available free books are typeset from hell. It's just a copy-paste of Project Gutenberg and similar endeavours, which are not formatted for iBooks at all. This does not inspire me to buy any iBooks, and it leaves me to wonder how the (free) book user experience can be so bad, when Apple make such an effort of vetting apps from trivial ailments.
Another, perhaps minor, thing is that I can't highlight across pages, which drives me absolutely bonkers.
If I were an author (or worked for one) and wanted to release a book on iOS, would I distribute it via iBooks or create a native app for it like Al Gore did? I honestly don't know, and I have a feeling that my hesitation has more to do with the shortcomings of iBooks than the allure of making a standalone app.
[2]: I'm sure it would be in Steve Jobs's best interest to make us forget Ping as soon as possible. Better to replace something vapid with something slightly high-brow.
iBooks doesn't have a social profile, but it does have syncing of bookmarks, notes, and progress to other iOS devices. Not accessible from the Web or your Mac (since there's no iBooks for Mac), though... anyway, I definitely agree with you about iBooks' shortcomings.
Yeah, I know it cross-syncs, but the back-ups process is a real pain, and if people lose the back-up, they risk losing everything. It also bothers me ever so slightly that I can't read the iBooks in iTunes.
How about not making it so closed and limited? The Kindle app lets me read my books on my PC, my Mac, my BlackBerry, iPad, iPod Touch, Kindle, and the list goes on.
Buy a book on the App Store and you're confined to ONLY iOS devices.
I said, "Smart money ...", which implies speculation. The other person responded "Sources?". If I had sources it wouldn't be "smart money" (or I guess you could argue that it would be "really smart money"). Since my statement was purely speculative, I referenced a speculative source -- directly back to the echo chamber -- myself.
some kind of basic sync and and a revamp of their notifications are good bets. better lockscreen? maybe. 3rd party lockscreen widgets? no way. Apple has resisted any kind of widgety-apps or hacks so it would be a huge reversal for them (though a very welcome one).
Does anyone know how a Cloud music service would work for non-iTunes bought music? While I would never pirate music cough, I'm wondering whether music obtained in such a manner would be available in the cloud. I can see three different ways the iCloud could work:
1) The only music available via the cloud are songs you've purchased. You have to sign in to get access to the music and only songs purchased with the account are available. Possible, but I doubt anyone would really use it if this was the case.
2) You are able to upload any music that you haven't purchased and add it to your cloud account. I think this is most likely but doesn't really differentiate it from current competitors.
3) Any music that you have in your itunes is instantly available online. I highly doubt this will be the case.
Anyone else have any thoughts on how it would work? Would you use it if you can't get pirated music on the cloud?
Option 3 is pretty much exactly what the most recent rumors suggested: "Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers' digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user's hard drive isn't good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars." [1]
"We've scanned your iTunes library of 12,000 songs. The price to stream each song over iCloud will be $0.09/song. Click here to bill the $1,080 directly to your card."
If that's not the scenario, than what is? You can only stream songs newly purchased over iTunes and only iTunes?
I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again).
> I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again).
This is how I see it too. Customers with smaller collections (i.e. the majority) will have higher margins, and effectively subsidise those with larger (and therefore with larger royalty payouts) collections.
Works similarly to the way ISP's do: users who use say, 20GB of a 60GB cap are more profitable than a user who uses 145GB of a 150GB. Bandwidth costs are small, but on a large scale, it works.
But that kind of negates the whole attractive sales point of "your whole music collection INSTANTLY ONLINE!"
I think wmf might be onto it. It could be a subscription thing. But as someone highly rated noted above, this whole iCloud thing might just be the developer's platform at this point in time (it is WWDC, after all), and the music stuff comes later in the fall with the iPod cycle.
By excluding pirated music, they'd also be excluding people who bought music legally on CD or via another music service like Amazon, or music that is released under a free to trade license, like the stuff on archive.org and etree.org.
Amazon, archive and etree are very marginal groups, but I can't imagine they'd lock out everyone's old CD purchases.
If you couldn't upload your own music files, and thus only play tracks you've purchased, then this isn't much of a cloud "music locker" at all. It's essentially just letting you play/stream the music you own from multiple devices (where currently you can only download the music file once). Of course, that's not to say this isn't what iCloud will be, but I'd be a little disappointed if it were the case.
I'd make great use of it if I could upload my own files, and probably not otherwise.
Also I'd just like to toss in it wouldn't shock me if this were "US Only" at least initially.
I could make a case for all three, but ultimately I think #3 is most likely, given that Lala did it.
The key: Lala’s song-identification-and-upload technologies (also discontinued as of today) allowed users to mirror their local music -- including an iTunes library -- onto cloud-based Lala accounts. -- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-kills-lala-musi...
There's two scenarios but both have their problems
1) only works with music purchased from iTunes. Not much use
2) works with all music. how does Apple verify that you actually own the music (and if they've got a licensing deal with the record labels they'll need to keep them happy)
The way to solve both problems is to offer a subscription service like Microsoft's Zune Pass. Pay a monthly fee and stream any music you like.
Question of the Day: will apple finally release a "cloud" service worth using, and at what price?
The previous tentative (.Mac, and its reincarnation in MobileMe) was "not conclusive" (slow, lacking features and not worth anywhere near the asking price), and Apple has now been providing a terrible "cloud" service for 9 years (since the rebranding of iTools to .Mac).
I don't know what others think of it, but as far as I'm concerned this may make or break the next phone I go with (between iOS, WebOS and Android)
Android is a much more integrated and native citizen of the web. Apple is playing catchup here and I have my doubts that they'll make it work this time after several lackluster previous attempts. It just doesn't seem to be in Apple's blood, just as social isn't in Google's.
It's good and bad to see Apple really joining in to the cloud phenomenon. On the good note, nobody has really built a cloud service worth using yet, so Apple may very well be the first to do that. On the bad side, it's Apple, so it's probably going to come with a cost and interested developers will probably have to handcuff their left hand to a mac.
A true cloud service decouples your usage from your data. Email has almost always been "cloud" (IMAP, anyway).
Dropbox and Flickr? Those aren't good examples of cloud services to me because I think the biggest benefit of the cloud is that you can stop using a service but still have access to your data.
I'm curious as to why you think Dropbox isn't a good example. You can walk away at any time and all your data is still exactly where it was last sync'd. That seems to be ideal.
The Dropbox app creates a local copy of your data that will sync with your data in the cloud. The result of this is that you always have a local copy of your data. If you stop using Dropbox all the data remains where it is on your computer.
Ok, you do have (kinda) a point with Dropbox since they store the file locally on all computers.
What I'm saying though, is that the cloud storage (not local) can be decoupled from the service. Such that if I decide I don't want to use Dropbox anymore, I still have a access copy of my files in the cloud - just not via the Dropbox software.
Imagine if Dropbox sync'ed your local files with your personal Amazon S3 bucket. That's what I'm hinting at.
I am as well, but I also understand it is a very simple way of branding it and having everyone know, at a glance, that it's an Apple product.
As an example, if you asked an outsider to the tech world which brand makes the EVO, Nexus S, Veer, or iPhone, the only one they'd likely get right is the iPhone. This is a bit of a loaded example because the iPhone is super popular, but then ask a random consumer who makes the follow made up products, the MOVE, Slider, Jump, iThing and they know that the i prefix means Apple and likely wouldn't have a clue who makes the other things.
So anyway, it's a tad annoying, but it is also a dead simple, one-letter way of identifying the source manufacturer. It's quicker and shorter to write "iCloud" than it is "Amazon Cloud Drive" or "Google Music" and identify the source with most consumers. In this way, it's subtly brilliant.
I hate it as well but it's easy to see you're right as customers themselves go ahead and add the missing "i" in front of products. How many times have you heard people say "iTouch" instead of "iPod Touch" and "iTV" instead of "Apple TV"?
I can just imagine, if Apple's cash pile keeps growing, Steve Jobs buying Microsoft and doing nothing with it other than changing the name of Windows to iWin
I don't mind it when paired with a unique product name but do find it boring when paired with an every day word, iPhoto, iBook, iPad, iCloud. What's worse is that this one uses the 'i' and 'Cloud' together... my Apple fanatic marketer is going to have a heart attack!
'iPod' is perhaps unlike any of the others - even iMac - in that even though 'pod' is an everyday word, the resulting product name is almost completely opaque.
Currently iOS devices are peripherals that need to be plugged into iTunes on a Mac for syncing purposes.
iCloud might be a step away from that.
We don't know yet what the cloud service is, but Apple has been building out some impressive amounts of data center resources, so it's likely to be an interesting service, whatever it is.
I'm sorry, I took the word "excitement" to indicate a heightened emotional state of some sort. Yes, I agree there are lots of sites out there pumping this for page views. I don't find that out of the ordinary, though.
Ah my misunderstanding. I'll just add then that I'm personally excited to see where iCloud will land on the speculation spectrum from a full AWS cloud infrastructure to a simple online iTunes media player. ;)
I wonder if the early announcement is to put pressure on the record companies to finish the negotiations. They now have a hard deadline to get the deals signed.
If it were that, would not it have been wise to mention the word music somewhere in that. Just saying that what you state does not seem to fit in as the motive here.
It makes sense that they would pre-announce this given that it will likely include transitioning MobileMe accounts to it as well. Thus, it's probably the worst kept secret in tech that iCloud is coming.
Thus, I'm guessing all the "big surprises" have to do with iOS 5. Also, given that WWDC is a dev conference, I expect that some of the coolest announcements will be dev related and won't be talked about much in the press.
Here's to hoping that iCloud being announced at WWDC (and not an iPod event) means the cloud storage part will be available for third party apps to store/sync documents/preferences/saves/etc.
The logical answer is that it's not a consumer service, but a developer-focused service. iCloud will no doubt be the platform for the Lala-derived service unveiled in September, but the platform is the big deal here: Think Amazon Web Services, but built specifically for integrating with iOS and MacOS, complete with a new Core Data Cloud API that makes adding sync to any app barely more challenging than writing for Core Data in the first place. And the basic tier (more than enough unless you're a top-100 app) is included in the $99/year membership.
That would be a game-changer.