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Posts tagged with "iCloud"

Mac App Store Adds In-App Purchases, Push Notification And Delta Updates

The apps in the Mac App Store are set to receive some solid enhancements including push notifications, sandboxing and delta updates.

For enhanced security, apps will have a built-in sandbox mode whilst developers will have the ability to send “delta updates”, which are effectively ‘patch based’ updates, meaning the entire app will not have to re-downloaded with every update.Apps will also be able to send push notifications to users and just like iOS apps, can also have in-app purchases.

Phil Schiller also touted that the Mac App Store has become the number one retailer for PC software, overtaking even Best Buy.

Macs Outgrowing The PC Industry


Starting the WWDC keynote is a discusion about Lion, and Phil Schiller has started out by throwing out some sales numbers surrounding the Mac platform. As of today there are 54 million active Mac users and Macs are defying the trend of the rest of the PC industry.

In terms of year-over-year numbers, Mac sales grew by 28% whilst the PC market actually shrank by 1%. Phil Schiller touted that the Mac is “outgrowing the PC industry”. Notebooks are the big success for Apple with 73% of all Mac sales coming from the MacBook range, whilst 27% are desktop Macs.

“Think Of iCloud As The New iTunes”→

“Think Of iCloud As The New iTunes”

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in a post where he details some of the iCloud features he has “heard” from sources (but doesn’t state as a fact) and other personal wishes about iOS 5, doesn’t describe iCloud as a new music service or “cloud services offering” – rather, he says he’s heard iCloud is something more on the lines of a full replacement for iTunes:

The italicized sentence that follows is fourth-hand information, at best, and also the sort of thing that many of you might have already guessed based merely on your own hunches and hopes. But here goes:

Don’t think of iCloud as the new MobileMe; think of iCloud as the new iTunes.

Instead of simply overhauling MobileMe with a new name, new UI, new functionalities and call it iCloud, Gruber pictures a scenario (again, based on unconfirmed sources) where iCloud becomes the de-facto standard to sync all kinds of media and information to an iOS device:

But in short let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC. Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather than “Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it”, you might get something like “Take this out, turn it on, sign into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.

There’s been a lot of speculation around iCloud, iOS 5 and the rumored Time Capsule refresh in the past couple of days. Whilst many had initially pegged iCloud as a standalone music service with streaming features, others later claimed iCloud would be a rebranding of the existing MobileMe service, accommodating options previously reserved to me.com subscribers and new features like music, movie and TV show storage and streaming. A new option surfaced in the iTunes Store earlier this week suggested iOS devices would soon get the possibility to receive automatic app updates, and indeed over-the-air sync of applications and media has long been rumored as a major functionality coming to iOS.

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Video: Steve Jobs Discusses Remote Computing in 1997

Here’s an interesting video from WWDC 1997 brought to our attention by our friend Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger: at the conference’s keynote, as you can see from the video around the 13 minute mark, Steve Jobs starts talking about the “connected” world he lives in where, thanks to networking hardware at NeXT, Apple and Pixar, he’s able to take all his files and folders, his entire “home directory” wherever he goes thanks to what we call the “cloud” nowadays. By storing his personal data in the cloud, on the server, Steve says he doesn’t have to care about data loss and backups anymore – he can simply change computers and, thanks to the speed and RAM capacity of the servers,  have the Home folder quickly coming down from the server in seconds. He says this was already happening in 1990 at NeXT.

Let me describe the world I live in. About eight years ago 1 we had high-speed networking connected to our NeXT hardware. Because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data — our “home directory” we called them — off of our local machines and put them on a server. The software made that completely transparent…a professional could be hired to back up that server every night.

In the last seven years, do you know how many times I lost any personal data? Zero. Do you how many times I’ve backed up my computer? Zero.

I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.

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The MacStories Team: What We Want from WWDC 2011

WWDC 2011 starts in two days, and all of us have our own hopes to be crushed, wishes to be granted, and features to drool over once we finally see Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud in action. We’ve all got something we want most out of the upcoming announcements, whether it be iOS compatibility with AirDrop, or seamless iOS updates through iOS 5, and we’ve decided to publish our wants from Apple’s big three for your viewing pleasure. In return, we expect you guys to tell us in the comments what you want to see on Monday. In the meantime, we’ll get the ball rolling! Read more

Disney Won’t Be Part Of iCloud Launch

Amidst the rumors leading up to Apple’s iCloud and iOS 5 announcements scheduled for Monday, June 6, at the WWDC keynote, Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said in an interview at All Things Digital’s D9 conference that the company won’t be part of Apple’s iCloud “launch” next week. Whilst it’s still unclear whether iCloud will be publicly available on Monday, or be announced as a closed beta for developers, Iger showed his appreciation for “digital lockers in the sky” that will allow users to store content in one place and access it anywhere at any time.

Kara: Are you part of the Apple iCloud launch next Monday?

Iger: No. But on lockers and clouds in general:

Ability to have your content online, accessible all in one place, that’s a better user experience. Believe that impediments to people buying things include storage: You don’t have room on your hard drive to store all this stuff, and you don’t want to throw it out.

(From Wired’s Steven Levy): Cloud makes more sense if you can move your stuff to different platforms, and different devices. Are you demanding that?

A: We haven’t made any deals yet. But we’re definitely focused on interoperability. We need to demand that.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder in Walt Disney, and the company was among the first ones to support the iPod video when it first came out. iCloud was rumored to include movies and TV shows alongside songs from iTunes by the official launch, though recent rumors and reports have focused on the music aspect of the service, failing to provide additional details on video and other media content Apple will distribute on its new platform.

Video interview is available here.

Rumor: New Time Capsule To Run iOS, A4/A5 CPU

A series of reports surfaced earlier this week suggested stock for AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme stations and Time Capsule units was running low at several Apple retail locations in the United States, with a separate source confirming to us that Apple Stores in Canada have seen similar shortages for Express and Extreme devices. Speculation arose quickly claiming that Apple could release new versions next week, during WWDC, with an announcement likely set for Monday’s keynote. Amidst the rumors, many pointed at the Time Capsule receiving an important update to enable advanced caching functionalities for software updates – the Time Capsule would recognize known devices on a network, check for software updates available, download them in the background, and later seed them to all devices in a few seconds without having to wait for a download process. Others also speculated this caching feature would allow users to store portions of iCloud media locally to avoid streaming delays and pauses between songs or movies.

In a separate report, Ars Technica briefly mentions [via MacRumors] the new Time Capsule could run the A4 or A5 chip alongside iOS – perhaps a modified version much like the second-generation Apple TV.

The source didn’t mention any new functionality for Apple’s AirPort Extreme base station, but it is possible to connect an external USB drive to those devices, which then function similarly to a Time Capsule. It seems likely that Apple could enable updated AirPort Extremes to do similar caching when an external drive is connected.

Our own source tells Ars that the revised hardware is believed to be built around Apple’s own A4 or A5 processor, and will run iOS much like the most recent Apple TV model.

A Time Capsule running iOS and capable of caching content for other devices would certainly open to the possibility of iPhones and iPads connected to iCloud but also deeply tied to the local network to increase streaming speed (thanks to cache) and overall quality (higher-quality songs could be cached locally as snippets so iOS devices wouldn’t take long to fetch the remaining portions).

Speculation also suggests an iOS-based Time Capsule could be used for a much broader set of functionalities such as serving content to Apple TVs or enabling additional options in Lion’s AirDrop – though it also needs to be considered that, by making these possible features exclusive to the Time Capsule (and, say, not a server app running on a Mac), users would be forced to purchase a $299 device (current Time Capsule 1 TB) to enjoy all the potential of iCloud and iOS 5.

Apple Paying Record Companies Up To $150 Million For iCloud

According to The New York Post, Apple will hand over between $100 and $150 million in advance payments to the four major record labels as part of its iCloud deal with them. Each of the four, which includes Sony Music, EMI, Warner Music and Universal, were offered between $25 million and $50 million as incentives to get on board with Apple. The exact figures will ultimately depend on how many tracks consumers end up storing on Apple’s iCloud offering.

Yesterday we reported on the expected initial cost of iCloud, which is rumoured, to be free for the first year and $25 a year after that. The New York Post also notes that Apple will take a 30% cut of fees, the music publishers receiving 12% and the rest to going towards record labels and artists.

We also reported yesterday that Apple had finalised its iCloud deals with Universal Music, which was the hold out record company.  The New York Post also notes that the size of the advance payments was the major stumbling block for Google, which had apparently been negotiating with the music companies before launching its cloud music offering last month. The official iCloud announcement will come on Monday at the WWDC keynote.

[Via The New York Post]

 

iCloud Detailed: Initially Free with iTunes Purchase, $25 a Year Subscription

The Los Angeles Times details the undisclosed features of iCloud, which has been reported by Apple to be a significant staple in Monday’s WWDC keynote. The LA Times reports that iCloud will initially be offered free with a purchase from the iTunes Store, meaning a digital download may fetch you free online storage or perhaps a free subscription, similar to Amazon’s current offering where they offer free cloud storage for a year with an album purchase (many took advantage of Lady Gaga’s $.99 album for this additional deal). Users will want to build their libraries relatively quickly, and the subscription is said to be available at as little as $25 per year. CNet previously suggested that the service wouldn’t be free, but could be around $20 a year. This looks like it’ll be a little of both as Apple introduces users to the service.

The LA Times says Apple initially plans to allow consumers to store their data on Apple’s servers, and would like to offer much more than music in the realm of movies, television, and and other digital content through iCloud’s publishing platform. Whether that storage involves uploading your own media or having iTunes scan your library is currently unknown, but we’re hoping for the latter.

The agreements, finalized this week, call for Apple to share 30% of any revenue from iCloud’s music service with record labels, as well as 12% with music publishers holding the songwriting rights. Apple is expected to keep the remaining 58%, said people knowledgeable with the terms.

The report comes when Apple’s network devices are reported to be ready for an upgrade, perhaps providing some form of iCloud caching for media playback. Apple just sealed the deal with Universal Music Group, and now with iCloud details leaking (as well as iCloud branding), it’ll be hard to keep the Lion in its cage over the weekend.

[via Los Angeles Times]