Here’s an added incentive to upgrade to Apple’s soon-to-be-released Mac OS X ‘Lion’: free iCloud services.
The Cupertino, Calif. company will announce next week users who upgrade will get some iCloud services normally priced $99 for free, according to a Wednesday report.
However, don’t bet on the free service including music streaming. Apple likely will want to pass onto users the expense of paying the music industry for rights to store tunes on iCloud. One potential middle-ground will be Apple offering a free trial period, according to another report.
Apple could sweeten the deal by offering a low-cost pricetag for Mac OS X 10.7. Execs of the tech giant are “pushing for an aggressive price point on Lion — an approach the company already employed with great success when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard launched in 2009,” writes AppleInsider, citing a source with “an unproven track record.”
To provide the low-cost software, Apple may require purchases be made through its Mac App Store. There is precedence for such a move, with the company offering photo software Aperture for $79.99 – $120 less than the boxed version.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference is expected to kick-off June 6 with CEO Steve Jobs delivering a keynote speech announcing iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and perhaps a new iPhone.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
17 responses to “Apple May Give iCloud Away For Free With Lion”
If MM (the email, contacts, calendar part) doesn’t go free (and isn’t improved substantially), a lot of people will hit the doors for Google. Unfortunately for Apple, they let the “MM is going free soon” rumor take hold. Most people are expecting that.
Do you mean hit the doors for google as in switch to android?
If so, why would they, you can use yahoo mail and calendar or even gmail and i presume it’s calendar, works great, don’t know of gmail push out mail to the phone but yahoo do.
I do agree though, it should go free.
“To provide the low-cost software, Apple may require purchases be made through its Mac App Store”
I really, really don’t want this. If I need to reinstall my OS how am I going to do it, install SL and then upgrade? Perhaps you don’t have bandwidth caps where you are. Sadly some of us do.
something tells me that it may eventually endup being for free to everyone
The ONLY way that I’ll upgrade my OS via the App Store is if I can create a restore DVD/USB stick. I would think that is a no-brainer. We’ve gotta have some way to restore our machines in the case of a hard drive failure.
My guess is that MobileMe/iCloud will be tiered. How much you pay depends on what tiers you want, up to the whole $99 a year
So like contacts/calendar syncing and a low storage email (say 2GB) might be like $10.
Add say $20 more for the whole media cloud gig.
Add X more for idisk and basic iweb support with like 5GB of space
Y more for advanced iweb support (HTML5, blogger like features etc)
Z more for bigger storage etc. Add of it ad free of course
And if something is free with Lion it’s probably that $10 part which would be free for the first year.
Something similar for the family plans which hopefully now would allow you to have multiple idisks and websites linked to different users (instead of the current which is the main person gets 20gb for whatever and the ‘children’ get only syncing and email)
You’re smart guy right. Smart enough to know how to create a partition, install the software, toss in your apps, run updates and clone it. That’s what the geeks will do
the general public, which is often PC switchers, will have no issue with breaking out that restore disk that came with the computer etc. And most of them don’t have to worry about caps because they barely use their bandwidth as is.
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I do hope iCloud/MobileMe actually becomes a bit more competitive. Up until now, they fell far behind the performance/feature curve… with many alternatives being faster, more feature rich, and much MUCH cheaper. I have my fingers crossed!
Wow, the game has changed with the announcement that Adobe is no longer supporting development for FLASH for mobile devices or TV…it is focusing on youtube html5 player and Adobe AIR apps instead….the news got around the game development community quickly. I think the market penetration of mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone, and iTouch from Apple being a merket leader who doesn’t support FLASH made a true impression on developers whose clients pages were losing views by this audience. Comsider Apple’s leadership history introducing CD ROM’s fiirst in computers, dropping the beige look of computers, introucing the iMAc, iTunes, Quicktime, and Jobs support of Blu Ray at Disney helped set standards in many industries…