Apple iCloud officially unveiled

Apple CEO Steve Jobs formally announced the launch of the iCloud yesterday, marking an important step in the cloud computing industry.

As reported on PC Site last week, yesterday saw the official presentation of the Apple iCloud in San Francisco. The service will be available in autumn, but last week it was announced that Jobs would talk the audience through some of the features of the iCloud this week.

The iCloud will let users access content from a variety of devices, without the need to store that content on a physical hard drive. This means that content such as photos, documents, email contacts and personal calendars will be ‘synced’ across devices such as a user’s smartphone, laptop and home computer. Users can also buy content from Apple’s online stores (such as iTunes or the app store), which will then automatically be downloaded onto the user’s other devices.

The iCloud will also have an impact on the way people store and listen to their music. iTunes in the Cloud is a service that lets users who buy their music via iTunes store the songs on all their devices. This means that there won’t be a need to transfer music from device to device via hard drives or cables. Those who have music collections that aren’t saved in iTunes can use Apple’s new iTunes Match function. iTunes Match scans users’ libraries, and finds the corresponding music on iTunes and add them to the users’ cloud library.

Storing non-iTunes music will cost $24.99 (£15.21) a year.

This represents an important step towards making cloud computing mass-compatible. A lot of people still like having their data saved on their own hard drive, but come autumn a lot of users and businesses are likely to switch over to the cloud, which will save their content on huge external servers in Apple’s data centres– reducing costs and environmental impact.