(Credit: Apple)
Like a Hollywood movie studio trying to bring back an ailing superhero franchise, Apple today killed off one of its products by resurrecting it with something else that promises to fix many of the original's shortcomings. At the same time the company acknowledged that MobileMe has been a dud. Can iCloud put the bad memories of MobileMe in the past? Apple sure hopes so. iCloud, in case you missed it, is Apple's new cloud sync service. It succeeds MobileMe, the $99-a-year service Apple introduced three years ago, which will close down on June 30, 2012. iCloud syncs files, apps, app data, and media across iOS devices, Macs, and PCs. It also syncs your music across devices, though it won't do that for video content.
The service systematically goes after the criticisms people had with MobileMe. Is $99 a year too hard to swallow? Now it's free. Only works with some apps? Now it works with many more, and iOS and Mac developers can tap into it too.
When introducing iCloud earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the idea behind the service came out of necessity. The PC's long been the hub for digital media, yet over the years people were capturing and viewing that media on portable devices, Jobs said. That meant getting data from computers to devices, and vice versa required ferrying it over. With different device makers using their own systems for making this happen, chaos ensued. More importantly it was placing all the responsibility on hardware that would be changing every few years, forcing users to move things once again.
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