In a press release today Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) announced that CEO Steve Jobs will appear that the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday June 6. Over the years Apple has used the conference to give developers a first hand look at upcoming software and hardware releases. At last years WWDC Jobs announced the iPhone 4 along with FaceTime for Apple products. At this year’s WWDC Apple cover Lion- the newest update to the OS X operation system, the new operating system of its portable devices like the iPhone and iPad- iOS 5, and Apple’s often rumored cloud based music and data service – iCloud. Out of all of the announcement for next week’s WWDC Cloud is easily the most anticipated with many industry professionals curious as to what exactly Apple may have up its sleeve to best both Google and Amazon’s recently launched cloud music services.
The current standing rumor is that iCloud will allow users to access a complete online duplicate of their iTunes music (and possibly video) library for streaming playback. This would obviously be a huge selling point for Apple among people that feel limited with the current selection of iPhone, iPad, and iPod storage. In theory by relying on iCloud for content storage Apple could then begin to sell devices with less physical memory and instead introduce a line of more affordable entry-level iPhones and iPods. Google’s Android, of which there are an abundance of relatively inexpensive phones, has been steadily chipping away at Apple’s market share and iClould could be the boon the Apple needs to get back on top. Possibly attributed to the news of Steve Job expected appearance at the conference in addtion to a formal announcement of iCloud shares of Apple rose 10 points (3.09%) today to close at $347.83 USD.
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There’s been some speculation that the next version of the iPhone will be announced at this year’s WWDC as well, but many believe that if there is such an announcement that it will only be an incremental upgrade of the iPhone akin to the iPhone 3GS over the iPhone 3 versus a complete redesign like the iPhone 4.
Check out more about OSX Lion here
Via Apple Press Release