On Monday, Steve Jobs introduced iCloud to the Apple developers at WWDC, and we’ve been absorbing what it means ever since. John Biggs and I devote this entire episode of Fly or Die to iCloud, explaining what it is, why it’s important, and where it falls short. Watch the video above.
At it’s heart, iCloud demotes your computer as your digital hub and moves that hub online. This is not just for your music or photos, but potentially for all apps. And that is one of the biggest shifts for apps that run on iOS since it got started.
If you look at any given app, some push the boundaries more than others. Adding Photo Stream to iPhoto means you can snap a picture on your iPhone and it automatically appears on your MacBook without cables. That’s pretty awesome. The iTunes cloud features aren’t nearly as exciting—it’s basically just a music locker that syncs to all your devices, but there’s no streaming. You still have to download the music to each device. Compared to Google Music or Amazon Cloud, it’s a little bit better, but not amazingly superior.
The bigger point, however, is that Apple making it possible for apps to store, sync, and serve your essential data from teh cloud. And as I, Cringely puts it:
Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer.
If Apple can make iCloud fly, it could change everything.