Frequent Apple prognosticator John Gruber of Daring Fireball has chimed in with his last-minute thoughts on WWDC 2011 in the hours leading up to the big event. While he admits that he doesn’t know much about what will be announced, there are a few interesting tidbits on things he’s heard from others.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber penned a lengthy “WWDC 2011 Prelude” on Sunday night, which outlines some of his thoughts on what we might expect from today’s big event, which kicks off in San Francisco at 10am PST. As usual, MacLife.com will be liveblogging the event as well as offering up-to-the-minute coverage of everything as it comes from CEO Steve Jobs’ lips, so stay tuned.
While Gruber admits he doesn’t know much about what Apple will announce today, he does offer this bit of “fourth-hand information” about iCloud: “Don’t think of iCloud as the new MobileMe; think of iCloud as the new iTunes.”
That’s probably not surprising considering it’s been widely reported that the four major music labels have all signed deals with Apple for a new cloud-based initiative which is likely to be part of iCloud. But does the cryptic message infer that iTunes itself may be heading to the cloud and away from a standalone application?
“Let’s just think about the ways that iCloud might be a major, dare I say game-changing, step away from USB tethering between iOS devices and iTunes running on your Mac/PC,” Gruber theorizes. “Consider just the new out-of-box experience. Rather than ‘Take this out, plug it into your Mac or PC (after first making sure your Mac/PC is running the latest version of iTunes), wait for it to sync before you actually play with it’, you might get something like ‘Take this out, turn it on, sign into your iTunes account, and start playing with it.’”
Needless to say, Google Android users already enjoy a similar experience with their devices, and it’s one that iOS could certainly benefit from. For now, it’s all just idle chatter through the internet pipes, but we’ll know soon enough what Apple has in store as the WWDC 2011 keynote unfolds.
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(Image courtesy of MacRumors)
