I just finished reading an editorial put out by ZDNet where the author expresses his opinion that Apple’s new “iCloud” announcement marks Apple’s attempt at making the PC take a back-seat to doing things over the Internet, without regard to which platform is used to make the connection. With the PC vs. Mac vs. Linux battles getting a little bit “stale” in recent years, he argues that Apple is looking to the “Cloud” as a way to remain relevant in the future. Certainly, there are other clues that with OS X, at least, we’ve reached some sort of “turning point” in Apple’s road map of releases. (All of the OS X versions have been named after big cats, and the Lion is really the last of those names left to use.)
What I find interesting about Apple’s approach with iCloud though is the fact that they’ve emphasized they’re not trying to function as your “hard drive in the sky”, storing all of your data for you. That’s in pretty stark contrast to other cloud computing models from companies like Google or Amazon, who have constructed systems that encourage you to do and store everything on their servers instead of on your own machines. Apple seems to be aiming for more of a “central point of data synchronization in the sky” for all of your (Apple branded, at least) devices. This will require that they do hang onto a copy of your data, at least for a certain length of time, to ensure copies make it to all of your devices. But ultimately, it sounds like other than providing storage of your email (which they’ve always offered), they’re still encouraging you to keep local copies of both your data and your applications to actually use day-to-day. They just want to be a “middle man” that ensures that content is replicated for you if you move from device A to device B.
To me, this says that Apple is still focused on selling you their hardware, and while this can add more usefulness and power to mobile devices running iOS, it doesn’t really add up to phasing out the personal computer. Basically, if you buy a Windows or a Linux-based PC instead of a Mac with OS X, you don’t get in on any of this iCloud syncing goodness. You’re “stuck” using other cloud computing models, like Microsoft’s version where they want you to rent applications and use them inside a web browser session.
With all of the convergence seen with features, is OS X Lion borrowing from iOS? I don’t read that as a sign they plan on phasing out OS X at all. After all, iOS is based on a stripped down and heavily modified OS X in the first place! I think it’s just a trend we’re seeing across the board of trying to unify the user interfaces. Now that smartphones and iOS based devices like the iPad have enabled many “stragglers” to come into the computer age and participate in using email, the web, and digital purchasing of music and video — it makes sense to build a “bridge” so they can use full-blown computers without having to learn a whole different way of interacting with them. (Microsoft seems to think the same thing, because Windows 8 is shaping up to look an awful lot like Windows Mobile.)
OS X Lion might be the last version of OS X to retain all of the traditional UI features of earlier versions. With all of the mouse/trackpad gestures they’ve been adding, it seems like moving forward. We might even see new machines built around a major new OS X revision where the UI is worked within 3-dimensions or with detection of your hand/arm movements in front of a screen. I can’t help but think that some folks at Apple are wishing they held the patents Microsoft has on their Kinect for the XBox 360, since it seems like an increasingly good match for OS X at this point. Whatever the case, I think it’s safe to say that the personal computer, the iOS mobile device (or phone), and Apple’s vision of the “Cloud” are meant to co-exist.
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