Apple Plays Catch-up at the June Keynote

Steve Jobs returned to the Apple stage yet again to deliver June’s version of the Apple keynote address, where they unveiled plenty of new updates and toys for Mac evangelists everywhere to fawn over. The big two, OS X Lion 10.7 for Apple computers and iOS 5 for Apple smartphones, will undoubtedly be assessed and reassessed on end before they are finally launched to the public sometime later this year. The other announcements, although not quite as grand as these two, should still be regarded as giant leaps forward for the technology giant.

iCloud

Sure, iTunes 10.3 has a few minor tweaks in the format and layout, but the big change is the beta version of the Cloud network on which all of your songs can be stored. An introductory five gigabytes of storage space will be given for free to all iTunes users just to give them a tasty taste of what the full, $25 a year service has to offer. Perhaps one of the best parts about signing up for the full service is the ability to upload all of your music to it, not just what you have downloaded from iTunes. While it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, Apple is notorious for being very protective of their own hard and software while being very slow to accept files, programs, and apps that have come from sources outside the direct control of Apple.

Along with an unlimited amount of storage space for not only your existing and future music downloads, but also for pictures, files, and anything else you would normally want to store on a hard drive. And the iCloud gives users the ability to wirelessly synch all of their devices, including the iPhone 4, to one central playlist.

This technology perfectly complements Apple’s style of attempting to simplify devices for users, and was timed well with the roll out of iOS 5. All of this is both good and bad for Apple. Good in that many others are already at this place and so Apple should be there also. Bad because for one of the first times in recent memory, Jobs and Apple are playing catch-up instead of being innovative market leaders.

Which begs the question: Is Apple losing its edge? Certainly the way it is losing market share in the mobile phone industry seems to point that way. But will the most recent innovations in the iCloud help it to regain the dominance that it saw back in 2009? It will be interesting to keep a look out for the next couple of Apple announcements to better understand their thought process for innovation moving forward.