Apple Intros iCloud

[admin]

Apple Intros iCloud
Monday, June 6, 2011
Posted by: Glenn

Apple today introduced iCloud, a new set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

"Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it's integrated into our apps you don't even need to think about it - it all just works."

The free iCloud services include:

- The former MobileMe services - Contacts, Calendar and Mail - all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

- The App Store and iBookstore now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

- iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your iOS devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when you charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Backed up content includes purchased music, apps and books, Camera Roll (photos and videos), device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, just enter your Apple ID and password during setup and iCloud restores your new device.

- iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup - which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn't count towards this 5GB total. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall.

- iCloud's innovative Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take a dozen photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV) when you return home. Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.

- iTunes in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members at developer.apple.com. iCloud will be available this fall concurrent with iOS 5. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).



http://www.123macmini.com/news/story/1633.html

[devo]

Some of this and iOS 5 might bring me back to an iPhone after switching to Android. I just don't know yet.

[Fox]

I'm not sure I like the idea of having certain types of data stored automatically on cloud. I hope there will be options for turning off functions you don't want.
_________________
Mini 1: 2.3 ghz Core i5; 8 gb RAM, Corsair 240gb SSD, 500 gb Seagate XT
Mini 2: 2.26 ghz Core 2 duo, 8 gb RAM, 500 gb Seagate
Also a Cube, 13" MacBook Air, 20" 2.66 ghz iMac & 11.6" Acer 1810TZ running Ubuntu, Mint & openSuse

[Ray Finkle]

Remember when Macs were sneaky? Now they want to know if you had a bowel movement today.

[myminirocks]

Ok, I know the iTunes match feature will replace all my dodgy crappy rips with 256AAC from the iTunes store, but what about all my lossless rips, I hope they are not going to be pushed to my other Mac's in crappy 256AAC.

The most exciting feature for this that I see is that it is finally a solution for keeping all my mac itunes/iphoto libraries in sync.
_________________
Intel 2.4Ghz/4G Ram/1TB HDD/Server MacMini
WD MyBook Studio II 2 TB External
3.06GHz/4G Ram/500G HDD/SuperDrive iMac
Elgato EyeTV Diversity
16G iPhone 3G

[OGN]

[macmanmacman]

Not impressed with this service change at all.

Let me explain..

I purchased a new mobile me subscription before they announced icloud and now i am mad they decided to cancel my subscription to mobile me affective june 30,2011 which was uncalled for to terminate service when people still have a year to go on there mobile me accounts i think apple should refund those users there 99.99 because if we already paid the 100.00 for the service the service should finish after our year is up

[Bandit Bill]

[devo]

It sucks that cancelling your account wipes you out immediately, but I guess Apple has to draw the line somewhere between MobileMe and iCloud. They are giving you a break if you renewed more than 45 days ago though.