Live Blog: Steve Jobs Introduces Apple's iCloud
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Editor's note: On Monday, June 6, 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iCloud, a music-streaming service that Apple hopes will power its next stage of growth and popularize Web-based consumer services. You can read how Mr. Jobs unveiled the iCloud and more when he gave the keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference in downtown San Francisco's Moscone Center. The beginning starts at the bottom of this post.
3:01 PM/ET: About music on iTunes: iTunes Match service.
Apple will automatically scan your ripped CDs and match them with iTunes. It will upgrade uploaded songs. The Match service will be $25 per year.
That price holds for 5000 or 20,000 songs.
"It's an industry-leading offer, let's put it that way."
"If you don't think we're serious about this, you're wrong," Jobs says. He's showing photos of one of the iCloud data centers in North Carolina.
Jobs is now wrapping up.
He thanks everyone for coming.
2:54 PM/ET:Apple is giving 5GB of free storage for mail, documents, etc.
Doesn't include purchased media or Photo Stream. The iTunes cloud portion will be available today on iOS 4.3.
The full iCloud will ship with iOS 5.
2:52 PM/ET: Jobs is back: up to 10 devices get the automatic downloads.
All nine apps comprise iCloud, and they're all free.
(What's absent here is a browser component. Is there one?)
2:49 PM/ET: So far this is different from what many expected.
Is there going to be a streaming component to the cloud iTunes, or just downloads?
If it's just downloads, lots of people will find that disappointing.
2:47 PM/ET: Finally, iTunes in the cloud:
Anything you've bought you can download to any device at no additional charge. For the future, any song you buy will push to all devices.
2:46 PM/ET: Eddie Cue is demoing.
(Photo Stream really is remarkable for the problem it solves.)
2:44 PM/ET: Next cloud app: Photo Stream.
Take a picture and it automatically uploads to the cloud. Photos imported into iPhoto also sync with the cloud and automatically push to all your devices.
On a PC, Apple uses the Pictures folder to sync. Apple TV will talk directly to the Photo Stream service to get the images.
Apple will store the last 1000 photos automatically on devices. On a Mac or PC it will store all of them. (This is interesting. It's not a photo storage service, it's a "most recent photos" service.
2:42 PM/ET: Rosner gives a demo. The changes automatically sync.
Jobs is back.
He says this completes the document storage story, making it simple. By storing documents in the cloud, it simplifies things. Also, Apple is releasing a document storage API to developers, letting them store info for documents and key value data. It also works across Macs and PCs.
2:35 PM/ET: "But we couldn't stop there."
Three more cloud apps.
First: documents. It works with the Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps Apple released last week.
Roger Rosner, VP iWork, is up to demo.
(I'll note that Jobs sounded a lot stronger during his last turn on stage than he did at the very beginning, which of course is great.)
