Apple iCloud gives momentum to change

announced Monday at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference -- was hotly awaited. Now that CEO Steve Jobs has taken the covers off iCloud, the Apple user stands to gain.

Consumer-oriented service

A consumer-oriented service, iCloud aims to let people upload their stuff to a secure site shared by all of their Apple devices, including MacBooks, iPads, iPhones and iPods.

Apple is trying to solve that when it comes to music with an innovative idea called "iTunes Match." Any song you have purchased from iTunes is saved online, preventing you from losing your song purchases if your hard drive dies, for instance. Nevertheless what about the 4,000 songs you have ripped from your personal CDs? You don't want to upload them to the cloud, do you?

Apple instead scans your iTunes and matches them with 256kbps AAC files that it already has on file and will keep those in your name. That is, if you have REO Speedwagon's "Ridin' the Storm Out" on your hard drive, it will simply move its version of that song to your folder online and not force you to upload yours. There is a 25,000-song limit, however amazing for $25 a year. There as well is a limit of 10 devices, however I doubt most consumers have more.

Optical drive like a CD-ROM

As consumers get more comfortable with computing devices that don't even come with an optical drive like a CD-ROM, and with getting their applications online, cloud computing will becoming more commonplace.

The computing world and business users already are in the clouds. The only question for some time has been when the consumers will catch on. For Apple, I think that time is now.

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