With today’s announcement Apple has further re-enforced the notion that we are living in a “Post PC” era. The Mac is slowly becoming a “dumb terminal” for the iPad and iPhone. Some notes I took from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
MobileMe has been re-branded as iCloud (iTunes in the Cloud) and offers the following for FREE:
- Email, Calendar, Address Book, Photo etc sync via cloud
- Everything will back up to the cloud daily, including purchased music, apps, books, your camera roll, device settings and app data.
- Streaming any iTunes content you purchased to any iOS device you own.
- For $24.95 you can stream your entire iTunes music library, even stuff you bought elsewhere, to any iOS device. iTunes does not upload your music to the cloud. It simply uploads a database list of what items you have.
- Everyone gets 5 gigabytes of memory; this is NOT counting purchased apps, music or books, and not counting Photostream either. iCloud is available today for developers, and a beta version is available today for everyone else as well. The final version will be shipping with iOS 5 in the fall.
- Automatically uploads documents from iWork — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — stores them in the cloud and then pushes them to all your relevant devices.
iOS 5
- Wi-Fi sync with iTunes. No cable needed.
- Purchase app on one iOS device and have it installed over the air to other iOS device you own
- Photostream
- Photos you take will automatically sync to all devices, including your Mac.
- Automatically uploads documents from iWork — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — stores them in the cloud and then pushes them to all your relevant devices.
- Twitter integrated directly into the OS. Yay, a step forward for social media.
Mac OS X – Lion
- Will be sold exclusively through the Mac App Store (sorry Tiger and Leopard users. Time to upgrade).
- Mail and Address Book has been redesigned with a look and feel like Mail on iPad.AutoSave
- OS X will remember will save your app state and remember where you were in an app even if you reboot. Just like on the iPad.