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“>>>-•Keeps libraries synched among 10 devices (Mac, Windows PC, iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) “

LOL, iTunes struggles enough even trying to find albums artwork for the stuff I already have. Now I’m supposed to expect them to “upgrade” all these songs that it can’t seem to identify to 256kb? Sure.

“Cool. You’ve got room for 1/5 as many tracks as iCloud, and once the introductory deal expires, you’ll get to pay $20 for that space next year.”

Yeah, we’ll see, won’t we? And anyone that can’t seem to fit enough music in 20GB, which doesn’t even count stuff from Amazon, has serious issues. And no worries, I’m sure Google will be close by with their own, considering Google has already had seamless syncing between phone and PC’s for quite sometime now. It’s not a big feat to add music to the list.

“Never fails, Apple-bashers don’t get (or pretend not to get) that Apple has done something really new.”

Nope, sorry...maybe if iFans weren’t making utter fools of themselves every time Apple releases some incremental update to something as being godlike, you wouldn’t get the reaction that you get. I swear, IFans are on the same level as Obama worshipers sometimes.

“that Apple has done something really new” Statements like that are exactly what I’m talking about. Storing, streaming, and being able to download music from a cloud drive is NOT a new idea, but listening you iFans, you would think that a life-changing event just occurred.

“The RIAA isn’t in business to be liked. If Amazon and Google (and I’m not clear on which of those constitutes “the #1 market of smartphones there is”) are distributing music without paying royalties, they aren’t going to play nice.”

That would be Google, which now has 36.4% (and growing) of smartphones running its O/S. And don’t you worry about Google...I’m sure they can afford it.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/06/hgfjhg.jpg

That would be Google, which now has 36.4% (and growing) of smartphones running its O/S. And don’t you worry about Google...I’m sure they can afford it.

Google's problem is not a lack of cash, it's a lack of trust, and the fact that the labels and publishers won't sign any agreements with them to ALLOW them to stream content to Android devices. That's a big problem... And Amazon has a similar problem. Apple on the other hand has just inked contracts with all of the big labels and publishers outlining how they will be paid and protected. Apple established trust through years of keeping agreements and DRM in iTunes.

That's an interesting chart, F1re, it has some real problems between it's first and second sections that other analysts have questioned.

All of the Android growth shown in the first section seems to be at the expense of losses to RIM and Microsoft phones... But the second section shows that the ONLY maker of phones with significant market growth in the same period was APPLE(!) . . . and the big three leading Android phone makers, Samsung, LG, and Motorola showed significant market loss or, in the case of LG, only anemic growth! There's a data disconnect occurring! So what and where are the Android phones that are causing that amazing growth during that period??? What unknown maker builds them? The only analisys that makes sense is that these companies are canabalizing their own markets of feature phones and that they are counting lesser feature phones that run Android. Later statistics show Android is stalling now that the iPhone4 is available in more markets. In fact the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3Gs are the #1 and #2 best selling handsets in the world, not any of the hundreds of the Android models.

And anyone that can’t seem to fit enough music in 20GB, which doesn’t even count stuff from Amazon, has serious issues.

My iTunes library (music alone) is 31GB. Just the jazz is 5GB, and Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday add up to a gig.

Storing, streaming, and being able to download music from a cloud drive is NOT a new idea, but listening you iFans, you would think that a life-changing event just occurred.

How many times do I have to explain that iCloud is not streaming? Give me a ballpark figure here.

This is the crux of the Apple-bashing, reducing Apple's products to the sum of their parts. The iPod is just an expensive walkman. The iPhone is just a pretty Treo.

iCloud isn't just "downloading from a cloud drive." It's every song I own anywhere I am. Up to about 100GB of them, completely legit. Most of them get a bump in quality without my having to rip dozens if not hundreds of CDs again. For two bucks a month.

You don’t have much music, do you?
My CD collection is not unusually large for 30 years accumulation - and takes up some 46GB averaging ~128kbps bit rates. Most got correct album art & track list info from iTunes/Gracenote. I plan to re-rip them all to lossless, which will increase total size several times.

Thanks to Apple writing some large checks, I don’t have to upload dozens of gigabytes of audio, I just shell out $25/yr (meh) and it will match & sync most of that in minutes WITHOUT having to upload or occupy significant storage. So ... I buy a CD (as I prefer to), pop it in the PC, and wander off - without any further effort than insertion, the music appears on my iPad.

Thanks to Amazon and Google touting “upload your music!” _without_ writing some big checks to music publishers, that “match and sync” feature will not be available except for what you buy from them.

Maybe not life-changing (or maybe it is; iPad made a notable shift in mine), but it’s sure a far more advanced implementation of “cloud” technology than anyone else. You deride it as “a cloud drive is not a new idea” - you miss the point: it’s not implemented as a “drive”, because the paradigm of “drive” has been eliminated and everything just seems “right there”. This IS a big deal, even if you insist it isn’t. Apple got their $0.3T market cap precisely because of attention to such nuances.

How well Google will do remains to be seen. Android is fighting proliferation of versions and a dearth of paid apps. They might pull it together, or not. Apple has. Google may have an OS running on 34% of smartphones, but what percentage of that matters? (to wit: what percentage of Android users wouldn’t notice a difference if it was running anything else, or practically no serious OS at all?)