All this speculation about iCloud being Apple's answer to the Amazon Cloud Drive / Cloud Player is missing the forest for the trees. If iCloud is about iTunes, why isn't it being announced in September with the iPod family updates, instead of at WWDC?
The logical answer is that it's not a consumer service, but a developer-focused service. iCloud will no doubt be the platform for the Lala-derived service unveiled in September, but the platform is the big deal here: Think Amazon Web Services, but built specifically for integrating with iOS and MacOS, complete with a new Core Data Cloud API that makes adding sync to any app barely more challenging than writing for Core Data in the first place. And the basic tier (more than enough unless you're a top-100 app) is included in the $99/year membership.
Do they really have the infrastructure? Which other datacenters besides the NC one have they been building? (I think AWS has many more datacenters, both in the US and outside).
That's a really good question. The reported buildout is likely well short of AWS, but I simply cannot believe Apple would make an investment at that scale just to store millions of redundant copies of music files!
The logical answer is that it's not a consumer service, but a developer-focused service. iCloud will no doubt be the platform for the Lala-derived service unveiled in September, but the platform is the big deal here: Think Amazon Web Services, but built specifically for integrating with iOS and MacOS, complete with a new Core Data Cloud API that makes adding sync to any app barely more challenging than writing for Core Data in the first place. And the basic tier (more than enough unless you're a top-100 app) is included in the $99/year membership.
That would be a game-changer.