Apple’s .com beta Website is now live, kicking off Cupertino’s Great Cloud Push of 2011.
At this time, the Website is only accessible to a few—typing your Apple ID into the login page, for example, will return a notice reading “The .com Beta is only available to developers.” According to the blog Apple Insider, there have been some successful attempts to login, resulting in a glimpse of some revamped (and cloud-optimized) productivity apps.
The final version of will ship along with iOS 5 sometime this fall. As part of the service, Apple will offer 5GB of storage for free, with an additional 10GB for $20 per year, 20GB for $40 per year, and 50GB for $100 per year.
Apple clearly plans on leveraging its substantial market presence in hardware, software and media to make a success, and push back against similar offerings from Google and Amazon.com. The latter two have something of a head start in the consumer-cloud category: Amazon’s Cloud Drive lets users store documents and music within the cloud, while Google has expanded its cloud offerings beyond productivity to music, courtesy of the recently released Music Beta.
The emerging paradigm will also help Apple more fully embrace its ethos of a “post-PC” world, in which mobile devices such as the iPhone take precedence in users’ lives over the traditional PC. Already, the company has taken some baby steps toward this mobile-centric paradigm. Its new Mac OS X “Lion” incorporates features, such as an app store, originally developed for its iOS mobile operating system. And its thin-and-light MacBook Air has replaced the white MacBook as Apple’s entry-level laptop.
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