Live Blog: Steve Jobs Introduces Apple's iCloud
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.)
2:33 PM/ET: Three apps come to iCloud:
The App Store: brings all your downloaded app history to all of your devices.
IBooks: same thing.
It also syncs the bookmark to your other devices, so you can pick up reading at the same place from any device.
Backup: once a day everything will backup to the cloud over wifi. It backs up purchased music, apps and books, and more.
2:30 PM/ET: (A big question here is whether iCloud will allow calendar sharing with non-Apple users.)
All the apps and features described will be free, and MobileMe ceases to exist.
2:26 PM/ET: Jobs says MobileMe has been completely rewritten for the cloud.
Contacts and calendars automatically sync.
You can also share calendars with others.
2:26 PM/ET: The cloud is more than a hard disk in the cloud.
It stores your content, and automatically pushes it.
You might ask, "Why should I believe them? They're the ones who brought us MobileMe!"
2:24 PM/ET: Keeping devices in sync is driving us crazy, Jobs says. We're going to demote the PC and Mac to being just a device, and the cloud will become the hub.
Everything stays in sync automatically.
2:23 PM/ET: Steve Jobs is back to talk iCloud.
He says that 10 years ago, Apple positioned the PC as the digital hub. (For more on this and how the cloud needs to be the new hub, see my blog post from this morning.)
2:21 PM/ET: Interesting note at the end: You can now mirror your iPad screen on your TV, and wirelessly sync iTunes.
Developer preview of iOS 5 is available now.
The final version will be available "this fall."
2:15 PM/ET: Finally: iMessage.
Now, a new messaging service that works between all iOS devices, including iPad and iPod touch, which don't have phone numbers connected to them for standard SMS.
The message streams are pushed to all your iOS devices.
This is interesting in that it positions iOS devices as a network unto themselves. But I wonder how useful it will be, since most of us communicate with people who use lots of different device types.
2:14 PM/ET: Number 9: Game Center.
This is Apple's game network for multiplayer and achievements. It has some updates including support for turn-based games.
2:10 PM/ET: Eighth feature: PC Free.
(Finally.)
This will allow users to set up and use iOS devices without connecting to a PC. Software updates will now come over the air. And downloads will be thinner, just containing the new code.
(This is very important, and starts to put iOS on par with Google . Android devices are easier to use without a PC.)
2:09 PM/ET: Also: there is a new keyboard configuration available with a split keyboard that makes it easier to type with your thumbs.
2:07 PM/ET:Apple also includes S/MIME support in Mail, so you can see that your message will be encrypted.
2:06 PM/ET: Mail: rich text formatting now available, dragging addresses, flagging, searching full message contents.
2:05 PM/ET: Now, cameras:
Now there will be a camera button on the lock screen. And the volume up button can be used to take the picture.
There are optional grid lines, pinch to zoom, and auto-exposure and autofocus lock.
Also, simple photo editing is now available within the app. You can crop, rotate, enhance, all within the app.
1:58 PM/ET: A "reading list" feature let's you save articles for reading later on any device (much like Instapaper).
Tabbed browsing brings the desktop feature to mobile — and it looks pretty fast.
1:56 PM/ET: Now, Safari.
A new "reader" feature takes content into a single clean window and let's you read or email it. (It also strips out ads, which publishers will absolutely hate.)
1:54 PM/ET: Now, Twitter.
IOS 5 allows a single sign-on to automatically sign you into Twitter for any app. Apple also integrates this with photos, articles, videos, etc very simply. (This is nice, but the same level of Facebook integration would probably be even more popular and useful.)
1:52 PM/ET: Next feature: Newsstand.
Apple has created a single place in the App Store that is specifically for publications.
Not only does it organize them and allow purchasing, it downloads them in the background.
1:51 PM/ET: Apple is clearly plugging away at nitty-gritty software details developers have been requesting for quite a while now.
1:50 PM/ET: Now, iOS 5: more than 1500 APIs. Lots of new features.
He'll look at 10.
First: Notifications.
Apple has pushed more than 100 billion notifications so far. Apple has created a Notification Center that makes notifications easier to manage. It's accessible with a single finger swipe down the screen. Also, notifications no longer interrupt you — they appear in a banner at the top of the screen. Notifications also now appear on the lock screen and you can go directly to the relevant app from the lock screen.
1:44 PM/ET: There are more than 225 million accounts on file for the app stores.
1:44 PM/ET: Apple has paid out more than 2.5 billion dollars to developers, and there have been more than 14 billion app downloads.
1:43 PM/ET: He says Apple has sold more than 15 billion songs on iTunes.
Customers have downloaded more than 130 million books on iBooks.
There are more than 425k apps on the app store, more than 90k for iPad specifically.
1:41 PM/ET: Scott Forstall is up to talk iOS 5.
He says Apple has sold more than 200 million iOS devices, with more than 44 percent of the market. He says Apple has sold more than 25m iPads in 14 months.
1:39 PM/ET: Schiller announces that Lion will be available for download through the Mac App Store.
It will be 4GB in size.
Buy one copy to install on all authorized Macs.
Apple will charge $29 for the upgrade.
Developer preview is available today, broadly available "in July."
1:37 PM/ET: This is clearly a software-heavy keynote with lots of detail geared toward developers.
Not the most exciting WWDC ever.
And much of this Apple already previewed.
Gotta hope iOS 5 and iCloud are more exciting.
1:35 PM/ET: Now a Mail demo: suggestions will prompt you for specific people, subjects or time periods. Or, you can filter by multiple parameters at once (which is particularly compelling)
1:34 PM/ET : Number 10: Mail.
Mail now looks more like the iPad version. Search is more sophisticated, offering search suggestions. Also, there's a conversation view like iOS.
1:32 PM/ET: Feature # 9 (how did we get there so fast?) AirDrop.
It's a peer-to-peer network that let's you send documents to an open drop box on nearby computers. Nothing to set up — and there's confirmation on both ends.
1:29 PM/ET: We see how Versions stores snapshots of a document and automatically saves them all along, so that when you quit, there's never a prompt for you to save —the system has been saving automatically.
1:25 PM/ET: The "versions" feature also saves every saved version of a document. You can scroll through previous versions of something (which leads to a demo).
1:24 PM/ET: #7: Auto Save.
In Lion, auto save is constantly backing up. You can also lock documents to keep a document from changing, or revert to the last saved version — kind of a way of overriding auto save.
1:23 PM/ET: #5: Launchpad, a new place for launching apps.
#6: Resume. With this feature, apps bring you back to where you were when you quit. Same windows, apps, spaces, everything.
1:20 PM/ET: The Mac App Store (#4) is built into Lion, and will include in-app purchase, push notifications, and more.
1:19 PM/ET: Schiller is back, talking about the Mac App Store: in the last six months, the Mac App Store has become the number-one PC software channel, Schiller says. Autodesk has gotten a million new users on the Mac App Store.
1:18 PM/ET: The demo moves on to Mission Control, showing how it allows easy switching between apps. It's also possible to swipe between different workspaces.
1:16 PM/ET: Now, full-screen apps: You can swipe side-to-side to get to different apps. He's demoing the Photo Booth app in full screen.
1:14 PM/ET: Now, a demo:
Gestures. There are no permanent scroll bars on windows, because gestures allow easy scrolling. You can also swipe through your browsing history rather than click a back button.
1:12 PM/ET: 3: Mission Control. (This is something Apple previewed before.) It gives a quick look at everything that's running on the system.
1:11 PM/ET: First: Multi-touch gestures. This is a feature from iOS coming over.
2: Full-screen applications. With Lion, it's easy for developers to bring apps full screen, and to move between the app and others even in full-screen mode.
1:09 PM/ET: Schiller does an OSX retrospective, then says there are 250 new features — he'll talk about 10 of them.
1:07 PM/ET: Phil Schiller is on stage, talking about Mac growth; it grew 28 percent last quarter as the PC industry shrank 1 percent.
1:06 PM/ET: I'll note that Jobs sounds very tired right off the top; I expect he'll hand off most presenting duties to others
1:04 PM/ET: Jobs: We're going to talk about three things: OS X Lion, iOS 5, and the Cloud.
1:03 PM/ET: Someone shouted "we love you" when Jobs came out, and he said "it helps."
1:03 PM/ET: Jobs says there are over 5200 in attendance, the event sold out within two hours
1:02 PM/ET: Jobs enters as the song ends.
1:00 PM/ET: James Brown's "I Feel Good" plays in the pre-keynote medley, to murmurs of approval from the crowd.
Clearly folks are hoping Steve Jobs feels good.
12:53 PM/ET: They've opened the doors and attendees are filing into their seats.
Apple executives are in front as usual, greeting VIPs .... Greg Joswiak, VP of iPhone product marketing, Ron Johnson, Senior VP retail, Tim Cook, COO, and others are in view.
Editor's Note: Apple's kicks off today in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.
Chief Executive Steve Jobs is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET), and is expected to announce several new software offerings.
Investors are most excited to see if indeed Jobs will announce the company’s next source of growth – the long-awaited iCloud service.
Using the iCloud consumers will be able to stream music they bought to any Apple device, pitting it against rivals Google and Amazon.
Jobs who has been on medical leave for months having survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer, last took the stage in March to present the iPad 2.
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