As most people who are going to read anything I write will already know, Apple released their new cloud service today. The Apple pages are already up, with a splash page on the main site pointing to a dedicated iCloud page. Apple has also anticipated some of the questions that most of us using MobileMe were going to ask in a short Kbase article re: the transition from MobileMe to iCloud:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4597
Additionally, an email went out to MobileMe users today that read:
We’d like to share some exciting news with you about iCloud — Apple’s upcoming cloud service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to your devices. iCloud integrates seamlessly with your apps, so everything happens automatically. Available this fall, iCloud is free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users.
What does this mean for you as a MobileMe member?
When you sign up for iCloud, you’ll be able to keep your MobileMe email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.
Your MobileMe subscription will be automatically extended through June 30, 2012, at no additional charge. After that date, MobileMe will no longer be available.
When iCloud becomes available this fall, we will provide more details and instructions on how to make the move. In the meantime, we encourage you to learn more about iCloud.
Immediately, users of iOS 4.3.3 or higher, can make use of the new music features. I purchased a song in iTunes and received an alert from the iTunes store to enable the feature.
I could then go over to Store -> Settings from within the iPhone and enable Music and Apps automatically downloading when purchased from another device. It’s also possible to enable transfers over cell networks, although I can’t imagine a lot of people using such an option.
Apple also announced a slew of new features for iOS 5 and for Mac OS X 10.7, Lion. To me the most critical things announced today is that iOS 5 will not need to be tethered to a computer to activate and that it can wirelessly run software updates. Those items are extremely important for growing enterprises of iOS-based devices. The most important things that weren’t bothered to be announced is that Xsan is included in Mac OS X now and that Mac OS X Server survives another profitable year at Apple, but now as an App (or as much an App as you can be when you’re an operating system). These were published to the Apple website. Many thought Xsan would be disappearing, but it is obviously here to stay for some time. The most important thing that we haven’t heard jack-diddly-squat about is the future of our friend Final Cut Server given that Mac OS X can now do a subset of the features out of the box (versioning).
Considering that I have more Apple computers than Imelda Marcos had shoes I have a lot of mixed feelings about synchronizing media between devices. Luckily I don’t have to enable the new features on all of them, although I already have on some…