Triumphant and back – at least temporarily – from ill health, Apple CEO Steve Jobs surprised the computing world by declaring the PC – including the Mac – dead as the centre of computing life, with Apple’s future headed for the cloud and the devices that feed off it.He also announced a new US$25-a-year service which will allow people to store entire music collections – even including illegal downloads – in the cloud and listen to it legitimately on any Apple device. Amazingly to some, the service has the blessing of the major record labels, though initially it will be limited to US-based users.
Addressing an audience of 5000 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Jobs announced the company’s new online storage and syncing service for music, photos, files and software – dubbed iCloud – and said that the personal computer – which he helped invent – would no longer be the central hub of people’s digital lives.
The new free iCloud service replaces Apple’s MobileMe service, which cost US$99 a year. Jobs said iCloud will simplify how people manage content and apps across devices, and end the Mac/PC-centric era of computing.
The developments announced by Apple at the WWDC included:
- A new “ITunes Match” music service for $24.99 a year. No need to upload anything, Amazon or Goggle style: it will automatically scan a user’s library of songs, including those ripped from their own CDs or other collections, and match the songs up with the library of 18 million songs available through iTunes. Users will be able to listen to the same tunes on any device.
- The free iCloud will automatically sync data between Macs, PCs and iOS devices. It will store content, wirelessly pushing it to devices, and integrating with applications, all at no cost to users.
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A new iOS 5 for iPad and iPhones will have a claimed 200 new user features, including a simple iMessage application; a Notification Centre that signals the arrival of text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts and app alerts; and Newsstand, which displays popular newspapers and magazines t0 which users have subscribed.
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The OS X 10.7 “Lion” operating system for the Mac, set to debut in July with a claimed 250 new features, will only be available for downloading via the Mac App Store – there are to be no CD sales. In Australia it will cost A$31.99.
Lion has more multi-touch gestures, full-screen apps, and a system called Mission Control that provides a bird’s-eye-view of every running app and window.
While some observers were incredulous that the record companies have agreed to go along with a system that allows Apple device users to listen to material they have not bought, the reasoning seems simple enough. Apple is understood to have agreed to give the labels 58 percent of the $25 subscription fees, with publishers getting 12 percent and Apple 30 percent.
At the moment the labels get precisely nothing from illegal downloads and shared files. By contrast, if Apple can persuade, say, 10 million users to sign up, the four record companies would split something like $145 million.
Meanwhile Jobs said that, thanks to iCloud, people will no longer have to manually sync mobile devices like iPads, iPhones and iPods with their PCs, an approach that he said has become too unruly now that millions of people own music players, smartphones and tablets, each with photos, music, apps and other types of documents.
He said iCloud will “automatically store on Apple’s servers many of the new files that a person loads onto a Mac, iPad or iPhone, and then make those files available on any other Apple devices owned by the same person.”
The iTunes in the Cloud service is available now in the US – other nations including Australia must await deals with the local copyright holders. The other iCloud services will be available later in the year, when Apple releases the new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5.
