Steve Jobs is back on stage now, to unveil the last part of iCloud that makes it truly magical. We all know what to expect here, but Steve Jobs spells it out: “iTunes in the cloud.”
“You know, it’s the same old story. I buy something on my iPhone, and it’s not on my other devices. I grab my iPod and it ain’t there,” says Jobs.
They’re aiming to change that with iCloud. For songs you’ve already bought — like apps, or iBooks — there’s now a purchased button to allow you to easily re-
download to your device, no additional charge.
Buy a new track? It automatically pushes to all of your device. Steve says this is an industry first.
It all happens at 256K AAC, and supports up to 10 devices for free.
So this is what iCloud is. It isn’t streaming music at all. It just syncs any iTunes purchased track automatically across 10 iOS devices. Wow. That is outrageously disappointing. Does Steve have something up his sleeve still though?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
11 responses to “Steve Jobs: We’re Bringing iTunes To The Cloud [WWDC 2011]”
This is awesome. I cannot wait to start using it. Nice job Jobs.
I don’t see why this is disappointing at all. Â Streaming a song is about the same as downloading it, except with the latter you can play it multiple times and affect your bandwidth only once (unless you download over wifi). Â This is way better than streaming a whole music collection – none of the annoying pauses between tracks that are a regular feature of using Pandora when out & about.
I’m also sure that Apple is counting on device storage increasing a lot.
I don’t see why this is disappointing at all. Â Streaming a song is about the same as downloading it, except with the latter you can play it multiple times and affect your bandwidth only once (unless you download over wifi). Â This is way better than streaming a whole music collection – none of the annoying pauses between tracks that are a regular feature of using Pandora when out & about.
I’m also sure that Apple is counting on device storage increasing a lot.
everyone forgets that using your iphones internet while out and about isnt free. And unless that changes, everyone will have used theyre monthly allowance within a week. at most
what about movies and tv shows? Are they going on the cloud too? At the moment I backup on 1T hard drive and it is quite annoying
I don’t get why it’s disappointing. What’s the streaming use case that having songs seamlessly synced to all devices doesn’t cover? Is it just wanting access to more music than can fit on the device?