12-12-2012, 03:58 PM
iCloud: The Future of Apple’s Ecosystem
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With the launch of iCloud, Apple is fundamentally challenging the old concepts of computing and “file”, changing the way people interact with computers and devices.
iCloud as a service presents itself as a very straightforward idea: iCloud stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices. iCloud works with the apps you use every day on your Mac, iPhone or iPad, so you don’t have to worry about syncing your music, photos, documents, contacts and calendars again. iCloud is the evolution of MobileMe, rebuilt from the ground up and re-engineered to take advantage of persistent connections and the concept of “push”, rather than visible, sometimes manual sync. iCloud is not just a big hard disk in the sky, as Steve Jobs joked at WWDC ’11: iCloud is an invisible service that’s just there, and is now allowing Apple to virtually connect more than 200 million iOS devices.
It just works.
iCloud gives you access to all your music, photos, documents and more without you having to think about file transfers via USB or a manual wireless sync. iCloud is a set of online services that ultimately wants to eliminate the need of a central repository — the digital hub — from where users were forced to start moving content onto other devices, like iPods and iPhones. Ten years ago, when Steve Jobs unveiled the digital hub strategy, the Mac was placed front and center in a plan that would see the desktop computer become the starting point and the destination of our content. The Mac was the hub to centralize media (music, photos, home movies), sync it manually to other devices and peripherals, but it also was the aggregator of new content coming from the iTunes Store, external devices (disks, drives, camcorders) and the Internet. As Steve Jobs noted at WWDC in June, this strategy worked almost flawlessly for almost 10 years: the computer was the “real” machine dispensing content and data; the devices were just external tools meant to receive content.
But eventually, something triggered a deep change in Apple’s digital hub strategy that forced the company to ultimately rethink how users want to buy, download, create and consume content on all their devices. This shift in direction started with the original iPhone in 2007, and was later reaffirmed by the iPad in 2010: these devices aren’t just simple peripherals for passive content consumption. Apple’s new mobile devices — best exemplified by the iOS family — are connected devices with constant access to the Internet, and thus the iTunes Store. Whereas classic iPods wouldn’t be able to connect to the Internet and provide a familiar interface for the iTunes Store — Apple’s storefront for all kinds of content — iOS devices come with iTunes built in as an app, Safari pre-installed and an advanced operating system that, in its latest iteration, bets heavily on powerful features such as Notification Center, PC Free setup, and AirPlay. Apple may still call non-iOS mobile devices “iPods” but, in fact, the motivator and the strength of Apple’s mobile lineup is iOS.
The problem Apple had to face in the past four years is that for millions of people iPhones and iPads have become substitutes to the PC. Over a third of iTunes Store content is now purchased on iOS devices, Apple’s Eddy Cue said at the Let’s talk iPhone media event last week. What started and was celebrated as the hub of the digital revolution became a burden for Apple as millions of customers began using iOS devices as their main devices. Apple was once again faced with a challenge: if people no longer want to use the hub and accept the trade-offs required to manage our digital lifestyle, where’s the new hub? And how will content be distributed in the ecosystem if there’s no visible hub to start with?
The answer is iCloud, and its roots go deep into Apple’s ecosystem. Starting today, there is no hub. Well, technically, there is one and is called iCloud and it lives off a huge data center Apple built in Maiden, North Carolina, but the user doesn’t need to know any of this except the name iCloud and the password required to use it. There is no hub in that there is no old concept of digital hub anymore: there is your music, photos, documents, settings, apps. How they magically appear on all your devices is secondary.
This clip from WWDC ’11 is all you need to understand the fundamental change behind iCloud. You can find Apple’s keynote video on YouTube, but here’s the gist: the PC has been demoted to just a device. What was once the most powerful machine we’d turn to in order to discover, download and move content around is now on the same level of other devices in our lives. The Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod — they’re all “just” devices now. Mobile interfaces to a much bigger ecosystem that, thanks to the Internet, makes everything available at our fingertips. The Mac is not gone: it’s got a new role.
The content, if you think about it, has always been there in the cloud. We were downloading songs from Apple’s servers back in 2003 just as I’m pulling an app and TV show from Apple’s data center today. What changes with iCloud is the way we think of how we access content, or rather “don’t have to think”: in the first digital era, the PC was the middle man between the content and the physical device in our pockets. In Apple’s new cloud era that the iPhone pioneered and iCloud is settling upon, there is no middle man as the Internet sends whatever we want straight to our pockets. The content doesn’t need to be shown where to go anymore — iCloud is always the destination.