The glaring feature of Apple's much-vaunted iCloud announcement? It doesn't have much to do with the cloud. At least, not in the usual Google sense of doing everything via the browser with no local storage or apps.

In Apple's world, apps still need to reign supreme, or it risks falling well behind its more cloud-aware rivals, so iCloud is all about enhancing the apps experience by using the cloud for a vast array of synchronization and content management functions.
This makes perfect sense for Apple, even if the hijacking of the “cloud” term may ruffle feathers among those who really do seek the triumph of the browser, with all the content and services accessed remotely from devices that are increasingly stripped-down – Google's Chromebooks are, in their purest form, little more than browser appliances with a layer of Linux underneath Chrome.
But in the real world, commercial Chromebooks, and other web gadgets, will have to compromise with the realities of unreliable wireless connections and users’ deep attachment to having their content “close by”.
Like network computers and netbooks before them, Chromebooks are sure to get fatter, stealthily slipping in local storage and even a second OS. This is the world Apple knows, and it has taken a good stab at modernizing its offering to take account of cloud behavior, while in fact delivering a largely localized apps environment.
This puts even more distance between Apple's world view and that of Google and the pure web players – though of course, there will be room for both.
Apple may be talking of the post-PC world – and by allowing iOS devices, finally, to communicate directly with the cloud, it is hastening the irrelevance of the PC or Mac. But it is replacing the PC with a tablet or phone – still a device with hefty local processing and a deeply personal relationship with its owner.
Like Microsoft, it cannot break free of its “fat client” roots and really follow Google and Oracle into the realms of the disposable, commoditised, thin appliance.
So iCloud saw Apple extending its traditional strengths in the integrated hardware/software experience, towards the cloud, but not right into it. A critical difference is that it does not yet regard the browser as a strong applications delivery system, rather than just a dynamic content delivery system.
Google, by contrast, is betting on the browser taking on the former role before too long – it knows this will come most slowly to small screens, hence its downloadable apps strategy for Android and iPhone, but it thinks larger-screened tablets and notebooks are ready to flip in the near future (hence its lack of enthusiasm for native apps for Honeycomb or iPad).
-------Still winning the UI war
For Apple, which does support web apps in App Store, the day when these are the dominant approach will be a difficult one, condemning it to play on a level HTML5 playing field with everyone else. By contrast, in mobile native apps, its user experience remains second-to-none.
Nevertheless, it can now count itself a cloud player rather than a rather surprising no-show. In particular, it will now distribute OS X online via the Mac App Store, support over-the-air updates for iOS 5, allow for iTunes music to be streamed and synced on any iOS device, and has rebranded the substandard MobileMe and made it free.
iCloud offers a wide range of capabilities, such as automatic synchronising of iTunes, calendar and contacts data between devices, and one-click pushing of the same content to any new Apple device that is registered to the user account.
Importantly, in comparison with Amazon Cloud Drive or Google Music, Apple has signed deals with major music labels, so that customers do not have to upload their songs to the web. Instead, a premium feature, Music Match, priced at $24.99 a year, mirrors their existing collection with the iTunes store and allows existing iTunes tracks to be streamed from the cloud.
But unlike true cloud aficionados, Apple is not creating web-based access to these services. Instead, it is enabling the core SDK for developers to build in access, keeping the cloud as an almost invisible back end for local apps.
APIs will let developers integrate their own apps with Apple's cloud so that they can be synched across multiple devices too, but it is not clear how far they will be able to build apps in iCloud itself, which could see services that compete with Apple's own.
To highlight the shortcomings of the Apple definition of “cloud”, we can look at iTunes. Here, the music library stays on the device – nothing is stored in, or streamed from the cloud, which only houses song identification software and iTunes purchase histories. These are used to match a customer’s iTunes songs with tracks on the full iTunes catalog (also not in the cloud), to support iTunes Match. The key benefits for users will be in simplified content management and the ability to span all their iOS devices seamlessly.
Music got the headlines (though video streaming is missing), but iCloud also includes nearly every other Apple service, such as document sharing and synchronization between PCs and iOS, online storage, calendar and contacts platform, multidevice application downloads, and instant automatic photo sharing.
The half-hearted approach to the cloud is not a bad thing – it may well provide a more usable and comprehensible system for Apple lovers than many more “pure” implementations, though it does preclude the chief end user benefit of the cloud, the ability to access one's data and files from any browser on any machine.
For instance, the document sharing service does demote the PC, but it does not create a true cloud offering like Google Docs, in which a cloud engine handles document creation, editing and collaboration.
--------In Apple’s version
In Apple's version, documents created in iWork are synchronized over the air, but they still open natively. iCloud keeps a master copy and any changes made to a file are instantly updated and synchronized to other users, but the real work is being done on the device itself.
This will be a very familiar experience, and less susceptible to poor wireless connectivity than many services – and of course it keeps users investing in larger numbers of more powerful iOS products, rather than trading down to a simple appliance like a Chromebook.
Apple may be making increasing amounts of revenue from content sharing and apps, but it still needs to sell heavy duty hardware, and so has to have a very different agenda from that of Google (encourage everyone to do more web activity via cheap gadgets, in order to drive its adverts and services), or Amazon (ditto to drive content purchasing).
As the analysts at ConnectedPlanet neatly put it: “Google views the cloud as the central repository of apps, content and service intelligence into which device or browser can tap; Apple sees the cloud as more of way station between the devices it sells and the software it and its close partners have developed, to the exclusion of all others.”
That will provide many useful services for those with multiple Apple devices, but does little to push the boundaries of its services to appeal to new users and those who have so far been unconverted to the charms of iOS.
But iCloud will have a strong impact nonetheless, because the Apple community is so vocal. CEO Steve Jobs pleased the crowd at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco by returning from sickness leave to address the event and unveil the platform.
“iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices,” he explained. “It automatically uploads it, stores it, and pushes it … now, when I buy a song on one of my devices it automatically downloads to all of my devices without having to sync or do anything at all. We're making it free, and we're very excited about it.”
If Jobs' address lacked some of its usual dramatic impact, that was not because of his health problems but because iCloud had been so thoroughly dissected in advance – and, in some respects, pipped to the post by Google’s and Amazon's cloud storage moves.
Indeed, Jobs showed some rare humility when he admitted that Apple's first, and hugely limited, mobile cloud offering, MobileMe, had “not been our finest hour”. That service will now be moved into iCloud.
(Source: The Register)