Apple Touts Post-PC Era With Free iCloud; iTunes 'Match'

Posted by Tiernan Ray

Folks, Apple's (AAPL) Worldwide Developer Conference is underway this afternoon — or morning, in San Francisco time — and yours truly is once again not there. Pause to drink in the shame of that.

However, better people than myself are on hand.

My colleague Mark Veverka, Barron's magazine's Silicon Valley editor, is on hand at the Moscone West Convention center in San Francisco, where James Brown's I Feel Good was playing, "to signal that Steve Jobs is feeling good," as Mark puts it.

For Mark's debriefing on his overall impression of the event, see, "Apple: A Step Into's Computing's Next Generation."

Jobs came on stage to a thunderous standing ovation to talk about the iCloud Web service, among other things. If he doesn't, it would be a major disappointment

In addition to Mark, my friend and former colleague Eric Savitz is doing his usual brilliant work live-blogging the whole matter over at Forbes. (As is Eric's colleague Brian Caufield.)

And the folks at Engadget are doing their usual stupendous work.

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the session noting that there is now an installed base of 54 million Mac computer users around the world. He handed things off to marketing veep Phil Schiller to talk about some of the major changes in the next version of the Mac OS, "Lion." Thins such as doing away with scrollbars, as movement through windows will now be controlled strictly through touchpad gestures.

Schiller walked through several new features, including "Resume," which brings your application and all its contents back to the state where you left them if you exit the program and start it again; "Auto Save," which preserves work you'd done even if you neglect to save that work, and which can preserve multiple versions of a document, much like Apple's Time Capsule; and AirDrop, which makes for easy drag-and-drop file sharing between multiple computers.

The update will be available for $29.99 as a Mac App Store download (4 gigabytes in size) in July, and will not be offered as a boxed retail product.

Apple's software veep Scott Forstall came up to talk about the iOS operating system. More than 14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, he said, resulting in payments by Apple to developers of $2.5 billion.

Over 25 million iPads have been sold so far, said Forstall, in the 14 months since the first model went on sale. The iBook store has had over 130 million downloads. The App Store features over 425,000 apps, including more than 90,000 for the iPad.

Forstall discussed an overhaul of the alerts/notifications that nowadays consist of annoying pop-up boxes on the screen of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Apple has served up over 100 billion of these notifications through its servers.

Instead, alerts will now be displayed in a single window by sliding one's finger across the screen from the top bezel, while alerts may also pop up along the top menu bar. They can be displayed on the lock screen of the device as well.

What was demo'd appeared to borrow heavily from approaches developed on Google's (GOOG) Android operating system, and on the Palm WebOS (now owned by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)), not to mention some hacked apps that evolved for the iPhone, such as the program "LockInfo."

New multi-touch gestures for the iPad also emulate properties found in those operating systems, and in Research in Motion's (RIMM) "PlayBook" tablet computer, including the ability swipe across the screen to switch between running applications.

Apple is also adding an feature called "Newsstand," which holds a shelf on the home screen containing all the periodicals to which one has subscribed through the App Store.

The camera on the devices now gains its own button on the home screen, so one can take pictures withouth unlocking the device.

The Mail program on iOS now searches the entire contents of messages, rather than just header information.

Forstall discussed features to make the iOS devices take advantage of a "Post-PC" world: The system software can receive updates "over the air," without connecting to a Mac or PC, and things that had to be done on a computer before, such as creating new calendars, can now be done from the device itself.

A new messaging service, "iMessage," takes aim at traditional text messaging and RIM's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM): it can send text notes, pictures, videos, etc. to individuals or groups that are on an iOS device, and gives real-time notification when an individual is typing a message.

The iOS 5 update will be available to developers today, available to customers in the fall, Forstall said.

When Jobs retook the stage, he talked about how the clutter of content on people's computers had broken the model of the "digital hub," with the effort to synchronize devices causing frustration. iCloud, he said, will automatically upload one's content from all applications and push it to all of one's devices. iCloud will also allow one to download to a device content — books, apps, etc. — that's been purchased on another registered iOS device, he said.

The service will also automatically back up all content on all of an individual's devices on a daily basis using WiFi connections, for those who wish to be completely free of a traditional computer, said Jobs.

Jobs said the company would do away with its $99 annual MobileMe online subscription, and offer the iCloud service for free.

Jobs remarked that being able to make a document on one machine and have it automatically pushed to all other machines — what he called "documents in the cloud" — crowned a decade of work to do away with the details of the traditional file system, from an end-user point of view.

Jobs said iTunes will also move to the iCloud, with an ability to press a "Cloud" button and have songs previously purchased on iTunes downloaded to the device one is using, if they haven't already been downloaded, with an option to have each device automatically download all new purchases, up to ten devices in total per user account.

For music already owned on CD, Jobs said iTunes will match that music against the iTunes database and save one the trouble of uploading the actual file, and give full treatment to the existing collection as if it had been purchased from iTunes. That service, "iTunes Matching," will cost a fee of $24.99 per year. Jobs said that compared favorably to services from Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com (AMZN), which can cost more and can take "weeks" to upload one's music library.

Jobs ended the presentation with a photo tour of the company's newest data center, the one, I presume, that is in Maiden, North Carolina, and which has been speculated about for some time now. Jobs said no one should doubt how seriously the company takes the iCloud business. He also said the company had made the data center as environmentally friendly as possible, a reference, perhaps, to a critical Greenpeace report back in April.

iCloud will be available when iOS 5 becomes available this fall, Jobs said.

Apple shares are selling on the news at this time, down 60 cents, a fraction of a percent, at $342.84 $2.72, or 0.8%, at $340.72 $4.10, a little over 1%, at $339.34 $5.07, or 1.5%, at $338.37.