Roundup: Apple WWDC rumors include 'iCloud as the new iTunes'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will take the stage at San Francisco's Moscone West convention center this morning, kicking off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and making only his second official public appearance since taking a second medical leave of absence in January.

Apple has said it will release the next generation of its Mac OS software, Lion, as well as iOS 5, the next gen of its mobile OS, and iCloud — a cloud-based service of sorts that's for now anyone's guess. News of the iPhone 5 — which countless crossed fingers are hoping will be Jobs' notorious "one last thing" — was conspicuously missing from Apple's May 31 press announcement on the event.

Apple's reputation, however, isn't one for under-delivering but for offering what no one knew to expect, and so the pundits have been busy theorizing and pushing mental envelopes.

Industry insider Kevin Fox, who's designed for Yahoo and Google, has no small hopes.

"I get the feeling that the announcements at next week’s Apple WWDC are going to represent the same kind of fundamental shift in Apple’s offering that the iPod did in 2001," he wrote in a June 3 post on his Fury blog.

Among Fox's guesses for what Jobs and Co. have in store are:

- "Seamless remote access to any data kept in your Documents folder, and synchronization across machines";

- "Unification of the App Store to encompass Mac, iPhone, iPod, AppleTV and iPad apps. Ability to make a single purchase for all the environments the app supports; and

- "Universal login using your Apple account: Walk up to any Mac, sign in as a guest using your Apple account credentials and you’ll be brought to the same desktop you get on your personal machine. Files will be downloaded from the cloud (or your home network) on demand, and you’ll have access to all the apps you’ve purchased via the Mac App Store, downloaded and installed on-demand, and removed securely, along with your data, upon logout."

Daring Fireball's John Gruber, who has a strong track record for such things, also expects that iCloud will be far more than a music service, as has been rumored. Neither, he says, will it be just a new Mobile Me.

"Think of iCloud as the new iTunes," Gruber wrote in a June 5 blog post, prefacing his comments with the insistence that all are guesses. Instead of an iPhone or iPod syncing to iTunes on a Mac, they could sync to the cloud.

He added:

“In short 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. 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.”

At Cult of Mac, Leander Kahney, citing an unnamed source, wrote June 5 that iCloud is expected to collaborate with Apple's Time Machine backup service.

"All your files and data — pictures, videos, Word and Excel documents, and so on — will be available anytime, anywhere, on both Mac OS X and iOS devices," Kahney wrote. "The surprising thing is, iCloud won’t be fed through Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina, as you might expect. Instead, the system will be based on Time Capsule, Apple’s wireless router and hard drive backup that’s currently sold in 1TB and 2TB versions."

Make a change on your computer, Kahney added, and the changes will be updated through iCloud and stored in Time Capsule. "iCloud is the 'conduit' through which everything moves," added Kahney's source.

Analyst Ezra Gottheil, who covers Apple for Technology Business Research, also expects more than streaming music.

"The company, for all its success, has few recurrent revenue streams, and if it can offer a compelling subscription service, it will add to growth, profit, and long-term stability," Gottheil told Connected Planet. "I think Apple wants to do more with the Cloud than install iTunes up there. I think there are opportunities around applications built with the forward-facing FaceTime video — videoconferencing, educational applications, gaming and social networking."

Finally, a smaller but no less interesting detail is that the iOS 5 may be more deeply integrated with Twitter. An image posted to TechCrunch — which of course may or may not be real — shows a notification, just below the time, that the user has two Twitter mentions.

Summing up the majority of the rumors swirling about WWDC, TechCrunch's MG Siegler writes, "No clue if it’s actually real or not, but the idea might be right."