Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2011 keynote yesterday drew a packed house and some pretty cool announcements from Apple. Apple took their opportunity to shoot the competition by also laying out some Apple statistics.
There are now 54 million Mac users globally and the Mac has outgrown the PC industry every quarter for the last 5 years. "Kick ass" was the message used. 73% of Macs are notebooks and Apple does have a flair for keeping users happy. Apple's iOS holds 44% of the mobility slice, the company claimed. iTunes customers have downloaded 15 billion songs. iBook customers have downloaded 130 million books thus far and the App Store has over 425,000 apps boasting 14 billion downloads. Maybe Apple should put an online neon digital counter of each category of what's been downloaded or sold like McDonalds did long ago.
Apple software will move into the App Store, no more discs, boxes or trips to the store. The Lion OS packs over 250 new features. The most significant change is the multi-touch gestures. Apple is humanizing its OS and making the touchpad interactive, and users won’t need to use scroll bars, but gestures instead. Apple's mobile iOS5 sports 200 new features with notifications on the iPhone and iPad changing from disruptive to non-invasive.
The iCloud service provides effortless access to just about everything on all your devices. iCloud stores your content so it's always accessible from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. You get instant access to your music, apps, latest photos, and more. iCloud keeps your email, contacts, and calendars up to date across all your devices. When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. Your purchased music, apps, and books, as well as your Photo Stream, don't count against your free storage. That leaves your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data. Apple emailed MobileMe customers yesterday and posted notices on their RSS feeds:
Available this fall, iCloud is free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users."
What does this mean for you as a MobileMe member?
When you sign up for iCloud, you’ll be able to keep your MobileMe email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.
What does this mean for you as a MobileMe member?
When you sign up for iCloud, you’ll be able to keep your MobileMe email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.
What Apple hasn't discussed is iWeb, and Apple discussion board customers are already worried that they will need to move their websites off of MobileMe. Apple did discuss improvements to iChat but they don't seem to really unify the experience. Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more, and I’ve been using this to huddle all my IM accounts into one place on my Mac desktop. For PC users, you may want Pidgin (very cool). Then, I still use Google Chat for video chats with my PC buddies.
What remains in question is voice; and even still is Apple ever going to get serious about UC?
What's interesting is a post over at MobileCrunch: Apple Wants To Be Its Own Carrier; MVNO Patent Application Extended. Apple as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) could mean a lot of things. Will Apple one day enter into call control of communications between i-devices in their data center? Some may laugh it off but the same folks that did in the past about iTunes, iBooks and the iPad aren’t laughing anymore. Maybe the next PBX is simply an i-device.
Is iCloud just a unifying experience for Apple users with a consumer focus, or will it be a tool to reach into the enterprise? Whatever iCloud turns out to be, there are over 200 million active i-devices and iCloud is Apple's golden arches hopeful for a sustaining future.
