Apple floats to the top with iCloud service

Apple's new iCloud product will "demote the PC" and help keep iTunes as the most popular music platform, say commentators.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the iCloud on Tuesday, saying it would let users move their "digital life" from PC hard drives to remote data centres in the "cloud".

The service will allow users to listen to any song they have ever bought from the Apple iTunes store via the internet on up to 10 devices, including iPhones, iPads and PCs.

The Apple impresario also announced "iTunes Match", a US$25-a-year ($30) service starting this northern autumn that will scan users' devices and hard drives for music not acquired from iTunes, store it and allow them to access it anywhere.

The service acknowledges a well-known fact - that most music on Apple devices was ripped or swapped.

Apple reached a deal that gives recording companies more than 70 per cent of the new fees, providing them with some economic payback.

Where Apple is able to identify and match songs from its 18 million-song database, it will transfer them into the user's iCloud, a storage area housed on servers in its US$1 billion data centre.


Where songs can't be identified - say of bootlegged concert recordings - users can manually upload them to the cloud and gain the same access.

Jobs called it "an industry-leading offer" compared with song-uploading storage services recently introduced by Amazon.com and Google.

The move sees Jobs take another step towards sidelining the personal computer industry he pioneered when he helped popularise home computers.

"We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch," Jobs said.

Former Apple engineer Steve Perlman and chief executive of game company OnLive, said the PC will be the most "visible casualty of the cloud revolution".

An important piece of Apple's effort to dislodge the PC is eliminating the need for customers to plug their devices into a computer for updates. Devices will synchronise wirelessly, so a picture that's taken with an iPhone will become immediately available to view on an iPad or iMac.

Apple is trying to parlay the success of the iPhone and iPad into the leading role in the "post-PC" era.

Ovum analyst Mark Little said iCloud could help Apple stay ahead of other companies providing cloud-based music services.

"Apple could at last be creating a cloud platform as a base from which to defend iTunes' dominant position," Little said.

"[iCloud] compares well with Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google's rather lazy Beta for Music, which force users to upload their music collections all over again. Apple does appear to be setting iCloud up to be more user friendly than [other] offerings," he said.

In racing to the cloud, Apple is competing with online retailer Amazon.com and Google's Android software, which runs on smartphones and tablet computers.

Android accounted for 36 per cent of smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2011, compared with 17 per cent for iPhone.

SKY SURFING

* iCloud will allow Apple users to access and listen to their iTunes music library from up to 10 devices, such as an iPhone, iPad or PC.

* Songs can be accessed remotely via the internet and do not need to be stored individually on each device.

* For a fee, users are allowed to store non-iTunes music in the library, even if it is pirated.

* Amazon and Google offer rival services.

- additional reporting AP