Posted on Wednesday, June 01 2011 @ 22:55 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Apple Insider
heard Mac owners who run the upcoming Mac OS X "Lion" will also receive some of the company's iCloud services for free:
Apple uncharacteristically preannounced iCloud in a press released issued on Tuesday, revealing that Chief Executive Steve Jobs will introduce the product alongside Mac OS X 10.7 and iOS 5 at the keynote to kick off the Worldwide Developers Conference next week. The company may have been willing to let the cat out of the bag early because of a plethora of surprises it has planned for next week.
People familiar with Apple's plans indicated to AppleInsider that at least one of those secrets is expected to be that at least some of the services included in iCloud will be offered for free to Mac users who make the upgrade to Lion. iCloud is expected to replace the company's existing MobileMe service, which offers e-mail and remote file storage, along with syncing of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events, at a price tag of $99 per year.
That price tag may remain for users who do not make the upgrade to Lion, or for Windows users. But it is expected that the cloud services will become free to Mac users who run the latest version of Mac OS X.
