It’s probably a forgone conclusion at this point, but Apple’s working on a cloud service. We don’t know the extent of it, but rumors have suggested that it will focus on music and media lockers that will let users stream their content from the web to their devices, both local and mobile.
Today CNET is reporting that an “industry insider” has spilled the beans—Apple plans on charging for their cloud offering. Shocking.
Take this moment and gasp, because it’s the only time we’re going to let you act all surprised. Someone wiser than I once told me at a very young age that you don’t get anything for free. Some years later, during my first-ever lecture in college, my professor stood up at the front of the class and blurted out that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It was pretty obvious to me at that point that no matter what, you’re paying for a service. Whether it’s directly through your wallet, or by a company selling your information to advertisers, you pay to use a product. It’s not that Apple couldn’t give away cloud services for free. They could. But, that’s not the Apple way. They would rather charge their customers for the luxury of the service, instead of selling their customers to advertisers.
According to the CNET article, it’s being speculated that the charge could be somewhere in the $25.00 per year range—that would translate to a little over 2 dollars per month. Netflix currently charges $7.00 per month in Canada for HD video content. So, $25.00 per year isn’t exactly all that different when bandwidth is considered.
Would you pay $25.00—$50.00 a year for a cloud based streaming service? I may consider it. That being said, I need to know more about how offline access would work. Anyone who spends much time on the road or without high-bandwidth access would certainly be out of luck with this new offering if it was streaming only.
Cross coast road trips may be a lot quieter for this next generation if we move to a streaming only model.
Article Via Macstories
