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"This is the first time we've seen this in the music industry, no charge for multiple downloads to different devices."
—-Steve Jobs on Apple's iCloud

APPLE'S HEAD IN THE iCLOUD

Jobs Introduces OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iTunes in the Cloud at Worldwide Developer’s Conference
Steve Jobs walked on-stage to a standing ovation and shouts of “I Love You” at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this morning from 5,200 Apple fanatics.

Among the topics were the introduction of the OS X Lion operating system, iOS 5 for mobile devices and, of most interest to the music industry, iTunes in the Cloud.

As way of introduction, a power point presentation illustrated some impressive Apple facts:

There are now 54 million Mac users in the world, with sales growing 28% over the past five years compared to PCs’ 1% decline during that same period. Almost 75% of all notebooks sold are now Macs.

The OS X Lion was first up. Among its features: multi-touch tap-to-zoom, pinching and two-finger swiping “all with an incredible physical realism that’s never been possible in a PC operating system before.” A number of standard applications now appear in full-screen mode, among them Safari and iMovie. You can also simultaneously view all the docs and apps you’re working on from a single screen, all controllable through two-finger touch.

The Mac App Store, now the largest for buying PC software (more than Best Buy, Walmart and Office Depot) comes built-in on Lion. In addition, the OS will automatically save documents without you having to do anything, storing the various permutations and making them all easily accessible, including to other collaborators. The OS X Lion is available for automatic $30 upgrades of your current OS directly from the Mac App Store.

Next was the iOS 5 mobile operating system, coming this fall. Apple has sold 200 million iOS devices (including iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), grabbing 44% of the market, with Android a distant #2 at 28%. More than 15 billion songs have been sold at iTunes, the #1 retailer of music in the world. The App store has moved more than 14 billion downloads, with $2.5 billion paid out to developers. The iOS 5 also includes a full newsstand, with subscription offers for papers and magazines. There’s also a more fully integrated version of Twitter connecting to apps like Camera and Photos.

Jobs then takes the stage once more to intro “Documents in the Clouds,” which he says “really completes our iOS document storage story,” especially for moving photos and other content to multiple devices. Photos can be kept for 30 days in the Cloud, which will push them out to your individual devices for permanent storage. Devices will store your last 1,000 photos, while Macs and PCS store all photos.

Eddie Cue, VP of Internet Services, and iTunes majordomo, follows, demonstrating the complete interconnection between a photo taken on the iPhone being made instantly available on the iPad. Using the iTunes in the Cloud, anything purchased on any device can now be downloaded to any 10 other devices for no charge.

"This is the first time we've seen this in the music industry, no charge for multiple downloads to different devices," Jobs said. "And for the future, there's a switch where you can tell it to sync all of your songs bought on any device to all of your devices."

The iCloud apps are available in beta form for all current (upgraded) Apple products for free—and will be already installed in all new products this fall, when.iCloud will debut along with iOS 5.

Some other features: iTunes will scan and match your music library without having to upload in minutes (not weeks, a dig at Google Music and Amazon), giving all those songs, regardless of where they were acquired, the same benefits as an iTunes purchase.

The iTunes Match service will cost $24.99 per year for up to 25,000 songs, with every downloaded track upgraded to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free.

Concluded Jobs: "The iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices ... also, iCloud is integrated with your apps, so everything happens automatically."

Not everyone was loving today's presentation, especially Apple's competitors.

7 digital CEO Ben Drury called the new Apple services "a step in the right direction... but only if all your devices are Apple devices. Their platform is essentially closed and proprietary... Customers are forced into choosing Apple for all their devices. 7digital's approach, through our open APIs and partnerships, is to offer cloud functionality that is independent of device. You can use our service on Android, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, Linux, Safari, Chrome, etc."

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