So the question is, What plans does Apple have for the cloud? Given recent history one can easily assume that the company would build more cloud apps that enhance existing services, like iTunes Match and Photostream. But those are small potatoes. The real opportunity for Apple is to offer a series of network services for its developers and millions of iPhone and iPad and Mac owners: network services such as storage, location data, voice command and control, notifications, and messaging.

• Storage. ICloud is already a place to access your photos, songs and contacts remotely from any iOS device or OS X Lion machine. But what about making your desktop files and apps available everywhere too? Take the way Apple is going with its MacBook Air, a huge hit for the company. A logical next step to make even thinner and lighter machines with very little room for storage is to make a cloud-centric MacBook. Imagine opening up your laptop that has little local storage and being able to access any of your documents you have saved, anywhere you are. We know Apple has been sniffing around this area: Steve Jobs offered to acquire Dropbox several years ago, telling its founder, Drew Houston, that it was really “a feature, not a product.” So a cloud-based storage service that perhaps developers could use for their own apps? Doesn’t sound too far out there.
• Location. Apple bought mapping companies PlaceBase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. We also know the company is hiring for mapping-related positions. That sparked speculation that Apple is indeed building its own location-based service. It has some location services in action already, like Find My iPhone and Find My Friends. An interesting step would be if Apple opened up such a service as an API to its developers.
• Voice control. Siri is still in beta, which means it is not even a finished product. What will Apple do with it in years to come? A good bet is it will integrate it into more Apple devices. The future of device interfaces is more nontraditional methods of control, like voice and gestures. In other words, Siri is not an anomaly or a cute, little experiment: It’s the future. A good place to look for clues about how Apple might implement more voice control services is a patent filing Apple made, showing its interest in putting Siri in everything from Macs to cars.

It is true that Apple is not a company that has historically had great success with web-based services. Embracing networked services and the cloud means Apple inherently understands that even hardware companies that extract gazillions of dollars in profit right now can’t go another decade without this. In a way, Apple also has no choice but to pursue this. If it wants to continue to build the post-PC dream, it has to have iCloud and other connected services that connect all of its apps, services and devices.

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The link that leads to iTunes Match in international stores still functions, surprisingly, allowing you to view the relevant sign-up page without issue, as you can see in the screenshot below. But signing up still doesn’t actually provide access to the service.

But even if you followed that link and signed up early like I did, Apple has you covered: The company is reportedly issuing refunds to customers who attempted to get in early. According to reports on Twitter, contacting iTunes Support about an ability to use the service results in a reversal of charges. It’s not clear whether charges will be reimbursed without first contacting Apple directly.

ITunes Match allows users to scan and match their entire music library in order to access it from anywhere on Apple’s servers. It launched in the U.S. to mixed reviews, and it was recently introduced in Brazil, too, alongside the launch of the iTunes Store there. While Apple doesn’t appear quite ready to launch it internationally, it is clearly headed in that direction, since it already has different pricing in place for the service’s annual subscription fees, specific to each market.

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I managed to sign up for iTunes Match using the link, too, though iTunes prompted me to log out and log back in because something had gone wrong. Upon logging back in and trying the link again, the purchase link was replaced with an “Add this computer” option, but that led to the same error message. Nevertheless, I received email confirmation that my iTunes Match subscription had indeed gone through, and others are reporting receiving the same.

Still, attempts to get the service actually matching and uploading my library haven’t yet been successful, which leads me to believe Apple didn’t yet intend to reveal this to the public. The Match sign-up page is also reported to be live in the U.K., Spain and New Zealand, and other international iTunes stores. Pricing varies by location. If you’ve had any luck signing up or have found the link works for you, let us know in the comments.

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Of course, the outage was annoying and inconvenient, and hopefully Apple learned a valuable lesson about managing a large-scale, persistent data service managed from its own server facility, and this will never happen again. But the extent of the outcry as the outage wore on, as well as the attempts on Friday to follow up and try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, show that Siri’s effect on the mobile landscape is not insignificant.

It could be the case that Apple’s servers couldn’t handle the demand that Siri was putting on the system, as some users who contacted Apple support about the problem were told. That would indicate that Apple underestimated the scale of demand for Siri, which suggests the personal assistant is being used a lot. But even if the problem is independent of demand, the fact that the news of Siri’s going down spread as far and as quickly as it did, and elicited so much response from the user community, indicates that it is finding a place in people’s lives. Some of the media attention could be attributed to the fact that people love when a winner like Apple stumbles, but user concern seems genuine.

When Apple first announced the personal assistant software, I admit to thinking that Siri had limited value beyond triggering an initial feeling of novelty that would fade quickly. After using Siri myself, I found that it actually had a lot of real use value, even in countries where it hasn’t yet gained localization features. The indignation of users affected by the outage indicates that I wasn’t the only one who found myself leaning on Siri a lot more heavily than I expected to.

It’s not as widespread, but the outcry about Siri’s downtime reminds me of the web-wide groans that go up every time the Twitter fail whale makes one of its visits or when Tumblr takes a tumble. That’s a minor PR problem for Apple in the short term, but in the larger picture, it’s a very good thing that people miss Siri when she’s not around.

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The increase was pointed out on Monday by Analyst Maynard Um of UBS in a research note.

A chunk of that new investment will, no surprise, go toward its retail operations. The company will spend $900 million on its stores in 2012, up from $614 million this past year.

Apple Stores have been growing rapidly, particularly outside the U.S., and especially in the greater China region. Apple opened 30 new stores in the  most recent quarter alone, to bring the total to 357. CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted on Apple’s earnings call two weeks ago that the company would be opening 40 new stores in 2012, and “75 percent of those will be outside the U.S.” He also noted that Apple would be “replacing” some of the company’s higher-volume stores here in the U.S.

The rest of the $7.1 billion in extra capital expenditures is listed as “other.” From the 10-K:

The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $8.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2012, including approximately $900 million for retail store facilities and approximately $7.1 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.

So some of the money is going to be spent on building the company’s new “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. and equipment for its manufacturers, but IT systems hardware, software and “enhancements” is almost certainly pointing to the company’s ongoing data center project and, by definition, its cloud infrastructure. (See also Horace Dediu’s examination of the data and how capex can be used to foreshadow iOS device volume production.)

Apple is building out a gigantic data center in North Carolina, and perhaps even a solar farm to power it — if reports are correct. That data center will support its cloud operations, and could increase the capacity and eventually lower costs for the maintenance of Apple’s iCloud service. Apple would never be accused of  jumping on the cloud bandwagon early, but spending billions more underlines the fact that the company has much bigger plans for iCloud.

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Amazon introduced Kindle Cloud Reader on Wednesday, an HTML5-based web application that runs in mobile Safari on the iPad, Safari on the Mac and PC, and Chrome on the Mac and other desktop operating systems. Amazon has promised support for additional browsers and platforms soon, but the fact that the iPad is in the launch group of devices makes clear Amazon’s main goal with this endeavor, which is to provide its customers with a full Kindle experience on the Apple tablet, including access to the integrated Kindle Store.

So how does it work? Once you navigate to http://read.amazon.com in your iPad’s Safari browser, you’ll be greeted with an invitation to sign in with your Amazon/Kindle account. Signing in will bring you to a screen featuring your library of Kindle book purchases, as well as a prompt directing you to allow Safari to increase the size of the database permitted for the site. This is used for the offline cache Cloud Reader maintains for reading without an active internet connection. Kindle Cloud Reader lets you tap and hold books from your library to download them to local storage for offline reading, and also stores books you are currently reading offline automatically, so that your reading won’t be interrupted if you lose connection.

Actually reading books in Cloud Reader is a pleasure, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell that you aren’t using a native app, especially if you place a shortcut to the web app on your iPad’s home screen, which launched the reader in a chrome-less, full-screen browser. You can change the font size and color of your books in Cloud Reader, and also view highlights, notes and bookmarks you’ve made on other devices. You can’t make new notes or highlights using the web app, but you can add new bookmarks just by tapping the upper right-hand corner of any page, even offline. It also works in both landscape and portrait orientations, as does the integrated store.

Some of the frills of the native app are missing, like page turn animations, access to Kindle periodicals, and the ability to search through a book for keywords. You also can’t look up terms in the dictionary the way you can in the full-fledged native Kindle app. But if you use those extra features sparingly, and go through books quickly, then Cloud Reader’s built-in bookstore might make up for those omissions.

The Kindle Store included in Cloud Reader makes browsing for books on your iPad a pleasure. You get a scrollable selection of recommendations at the top of the interface, and a list of best sellers and category navigation below that. You can search the store at any point, and navigate back and forward as you browse. The individual book listings actually provide you with more info at-a-glance in a more sensibly organized way than on the Kindle Store in the desktop browser, and you can try a sample of any book in the Amazon e-book library, which loads up right in the standard Cloud Reader reading interface. Unfortunately, it doesn’t remember where you were when you switch to your library; jumping back to the store brings you to the front page.

In the end, Kindle Cloud reader works, and works well, but purely for e-reading purposes, it doesn’t really match up to its native app counterpart. That said, the ability to shop for books and read them immediately might outweigh the disadvantages for some. For me, Kindle Cloud Reader will remain on my home screen, but I won’t be using it primarily for reading; I’ll be using it to buy. The iPad-optimized Kindle Store is a pleasure to shop, and thanks to iOS multitasking, I can pretty easily switch back and forth between the native and web-based Kindle apps. Even if I don’t use Cloud Reader as a native app replacement, it does prove one thing: Keeping integrated e-book stores out of native apps benefits no one but Apple.

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As you can see in the video, the iCloud apps (running in the latest version of Safari on OS X Lion) look a lot like the redesigned Address Book and Calendar apps from Lion, as does the Mail app from screenshots I’ve seen. Apple’s decision to go for a unified look and feel between the web-based iCloud presence, Mac apps and iOS software is a great idea for encouraging adoption of cloud services among users new to the concept. One experience, no matter where you access from, really helps the learning curve and should help alleviate any concerns about privacy and security of access.

One other really nice feature about the iCloud.com beta: it appears to remember where you are when last you left off, even if you last logged in from a different computer, and delivers you right back to that same spot the next time you log in. It’s sort of like having Lion’s Auto Resume feature on the web.

Apple has definitely stepped up its game compared to MobileMe. Do you see yourself using iCloud on the web when it becomes available to the general public this September?

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Truth as used here has an inside technical meaning — the master or “truth” database in a distributed data system is the authoritative record for resolving conflicts. The master store in Apple’s existing Sync Services is the “truth database.” Here’s an image from Apple’s public documentation for Sync Services that illustrates the term.

In the existing Mac-centric sync model, the truth database is stored on the computer. Applications that want to interact with Sync Services don’t talk directly to the underlying database itself, but rather communicate through the Sync Engine, part of Mac OS X, which maintains the integrity, or truth, of the authoritative master data.

The other side to the “truth in the cloud” comment is that iCloud is more than just online document storage. Jobs made reference to this on Monday, saying:

Some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky. We think it’s way more than that. iCloud is integrated with your apps, so everything happens automatically. It just works.

After a demonstration of iWork apps saving documents to the cloud, Jobs quickly added that iCloud Storage APIs would also include key value data. If Apple follows some of the existing conventions of Sync Services, developers would not interact directly with the master store, but would rely on system-level services, the APIs, to maintain the integrity of the cloud data. These system services will remove a tremendous burden from developers, making it much simple to integrate iOS apps with iCloud.

Syncing key-value pairs is also more flexible than syncing documents, and perfectly suited for several common uses. For example, to keep track of which levels are unlocked in a game like Angry Birds, the developer could update the key-value pair for each level independently from the others. In this scenario, the key might be the level id (“world-3-2″), and the value would be “locked” or “unlocked” as appropriate. It is simpler to fast sync just the one key-value pair that has changed instead of updating the entire settings file each time. This key-value pair approach also makes it much easier for developers to avoid situations where updating settings on one device would overwrite or erase all the settings on another device.

Some might be skeptical since Sync Services has suffered from a number of issues like mistaken duplication of contacts and calendar events. Jobs poked fun at Apple’s missteps with their previous cloud efforts when he said joked that users might ask “why should I believe them? They’re the ones that brought me MobileMe,” but he continued finished by admitting that while “it wasn’t [Apple's] finest hour,” the company “learned a lot.” Apple will have to put all of that learning to use to build a rock-solid online key-value store that can deal with billions of transactions coming from hundreds of millions of devices. That learning will be especially important when safe-guarding all that customer data in the key-value store.

Key-value stores have gained a lot of recent attention in web development circles because they offer a flexible, and fast, way to access small bits of data like user preferences. Solutions like MongoDB, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, Memcache, Hadoop, MapReduce, Cassandra, Google’s BigTable , and Amazon’s Dynamo are all examples of web-friendly datastores that work with key-value pairs. Derrick Harris, over on our Structure channel, broke down how some of these technologies are being used to power the gear in Apple’s new data center, and highlighted a job listing which called for experience with key-value store technologies like Hadoop, Memcache and Cassandra.

iCloud is not just about online document storage, but a whole infrastructure for syncing data and preferences with an online key-value store — a new Sync Services built around the idea of keeping the truth database in the cloud instead of on a computer. The cloud is the new center of the Apple universe, in other words.

A ‘key’ difference (again, so sorry) between iCloud and other key-value stores is that Apple is focused on providing infrastructure for native iOS and Mac apps while others are working on platforms for web apps that run in the browser. Apple wants to make things “just work” for iOS apps without placing unnecessary burdens on developers as they incorporate iCloud services. This tension between open and fragmented and closed and integrated, which we’ve already seen in the Android and iPhone platforms, is being played out again here. But the fight is a good one for consumers, since it should lead to ever-better apps that test the limits of what we thought we could do with mobile devices.

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Forty-six percent of iTunes users surveyed by The NPD Group for its upcoming “iTunes User Report” expressed interest in signing up for a paid cloud music service, were Apple to offer one. Of course, since Monday, we’ve learned Apple does intend to offer such a service, in the form of iTunes Match. iTunes Match will scan a user’s local iTunes library, and provide access to high quality AAC files of songs found for direct download to any device associated with their iTunes account. Scanned music doesn’t necessarily have to come from the iTunes Store, either, which is a cause for concern for some, and excitement for others.

It’s easy to say that users are interested in iTunes Match because it seems like it could amount to a possible amnesty regarding pirated music, but the details of Apple’s scan-and-match service weren’t known when NPD posed its question. Instead, it seems more likely the motivation stems mainly from the convenience a subscription cloud music service provides, owing to the success of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

NPD entertainment industry analyst thinks the survey is a good indication that Apple chose the right time to launch a fee-based service that provides cloud music access to iTunes users:

It’s notable that even before Apple’s announcement this week, nearly half of iTunes users had some interest in a paid cloud-based music service. As device penetration continues to grow, and as consumers demand easier access to their music from multiple devices, we can expect interest in these services from Apple and others to continue to rise.

That nearly half of iTunes users said they were willing to pay for cloud music access is very promising for Apple, considering how much of a shift it represents from the current way of doing things. It’s even better news for the company that younger iTunes customers appear even more amenable to the idea: 57 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 responded positively to the idea, indicating that there’s a good chance cloud music adoption will grow with time.

The only hurdle might be that NPD’s analysis found that the ideal average price for paid iTunes cloud music service is $17 per year, which is a fair bit shy of the nearly $25 Apple is asking. Also, NPD’s question to iTunes users did include the word “streaming” in its definition of a cloud service. iCloud and iTunes Match don’t provide streaming per se, but they do provide access to your entire library from any device where you have internet access, another condition set by NPD, and, as Cult of Mac points out, streaming just isn’t that useful to most Americans because of bandwidth data caps.

If Apple can sign up anywhere near half of the 160 million iTunes users it had at last official count, iTunes Match will be a considerable success. Are you planning on contributing to that success?

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Google’s app-less cloud for tablets

To Google, the iPad is just a larger display surface for ads. Just looking at what Google has done on the iPhone compared to iPad, there’s a definite commitment gap. Unlike Google’s continued commitment to apps on the iPhone, the company seems content to let the web stand in for iPad-specific options. This strategy is not new; it’s very reminiscent of Oracle’s Acorn and Sun Microsystems’ JavaStation. One of the reasons these solutions failed was because they assumed the browser was a good enough application delivery system, and not just a dynamic content delivery system.  It’s a failure Google is destined to repeat if it isn’t careful.

Apple’s iOS/OS X updates and the iCloud

Apple’s decision to distribute OS X online via the Mac App Store, make the rebranded MobileMe free, and open the cloud even more with enhanced online music services in iTunes, are clear and decisive steps for a company with its sights set on a networked wireless future.  For a company not previously known for a strong cloud presence, Apple has really stepped up its game, especially if you include some of the new enhancements to iOS, including better notification support, single sign-on with Twitter, and the new iMessage service. Like Google, Apple is now heavily invested in the cloud. But Apple isn’t creating web-based access to these services. Instead, it’s enabling the core SDK for developers, and when appropriate, making rich native apps of their own. Making the cloud an invisible backend component of local apps is a great way to get consumer buy-in for a concept that may not be widely understood. It’s definitely easier to understand than the idea of a web app, which is easily confused with a plain old website, and for good reason.

Apple’s blended iOS/OS X app-based approach to the cloud has the benefit of being cross-platform, while avoiding feeling like a “best fit” solution like a web app often can. And while the user interface is distinct for each platform, the code base that developers write to interact with the cloud can be shared across all three. This creates a much deeper experience for the user as they move from platform to platform. It will be interesting to see if Google’s ‘We’ve got a URL for that’ can compete with Apple’s consumer-focused app strategy.

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Reese is a fan of Apple’s products and software, but he isn’t impressed with Apple’s track record when it comes to the cloud specifically. “Historically,” Reese told me in a phone interview, “Apple has gotten the cloud wrong time and time again,” because the company views “the Mac as the center of your device-driven life.” Even though they are more independent than they once were, the iPod, iPhone and iPad are all still essentially satellite devices that depend on the Mac in a few key ways.

In order to make a cloud computing experience work really well, the cloud has to be the center of the universe, according to Reese, and this isn’t the case with MobileMe. As an illustrative example, consider Bookmark syncing through MobileMe. I’m a MobileMe user myself, and I sync bookmarks across my Apple hardware so that if I find an interesting link on my iPhone that doesn’t read well on the small screen, I can bookmark it and check it out on my Mac. Unfortunately, something went wrong with bookmark syncing a while ago, and now my Mac computers regularly ask me to replace the information with that found on the computer. If I do, I’ll lose my iPhone bookmarks, and I can’t treat those as the master copy, because MobileMe requires that I use one of my Macs as the primary source. The Mac is “home,” so to speak, and everything else, including the cloud, is “away.”

Apple has made smart hires recently, bringing on staff with “good, cloudy experience and expertise,” according to Reese, but no matter whom you hire, Reese says, it’s hard to get away from what’s in your DNA as a company. Apple’s Mac-centric approach seems to be one key element of its corporate DNA.

A change in DNA is what Apple has to accomplish to make cloud computing work, says Reese. But big changes are something Apple is particularly good at. Reese cites the example of the iPod touch as a classic example. The iPod touch is a product that obviously threatened to eat into Apple’s existing successful iPod business, but Apple saw that it provided greater future potential down the road, by bringing more customers into the iOS fold. The MacBook Air is another good example, since with its new $999 starting price point, it could easily sway buyers away from the strong-selling MacBook, but the Air is a product designed with the future in mind, thanks to solid state storage and the dropped optical drive.

But in this case, Apple would have to shift the center of its universe away from the Mac and to the cloud, which is arguably a bigger and more daunting change than any other it has made so far, despite declarations that it is now a “mobile device company,” and more recently that we are living in the “post-PC” era (subscription required).

That’s not all it has to do, either. Reese says Apple also “has to reinvent what it is to be cloud.” It can’t just replicate Google’s success with Google Apps, or provide its own similar take on existing models. Apple has to “redefine the space of consumer cloud,” as it has done with previous products (the iPhone for mobile, and the iPod for media players, for example). And if Apple can do that, “they’ll be wildly successful,” Reese asserts.

This won’t be a surprise to Apple, according to Reese. It’s the same challenge it faced when it entered the mobile market with the iPhone, he points out, but this time around, the challengers it is facing are more nimble and less entrenched. Netflix, Amazon and Google are smart enough to be able to match what Apple does quickly, says Reese, whereas iPhone competitors were slow to realize and respond to the shift in landscape.

“One thing I’ve learned is never to bet against Apple,” Reese says, “But if I were to, this is where I’d bet against them.” Despite that, he’s really open to the possibility that Apple will succeed in making iCloud something consumers will get excited about. The prospect of a truly seamless computing experience across Apple devices is indeed a very sexy one. He and I are hoping Apple does for cloud computing Monday what it has already done for mobile devices and personal computing in the past. What do you think about Apple’s chances when it comes to achieving that goal?

For those really interested in the expertise required to build out real computing clouds, check out our Structure 2011 conference this month in San Francisco.

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If accurate, these reports describe a service that would have a weighty advantage over the recently released competitors from Amazon and Google. Both of those require users to upload their collections before making music available in the cloud, although Amazon makes new music purchased through its MP3 store available automatically on the web. Apple’s method would save those with existing music libraries huge amounts of time.

But time isn’t the advantage to Apple’s service. According to BusinessWeek, the scanning process wouldn’t differentiate between music acquired from legitimate and illegitimate sources — meaning even tracks downloaded illegally would be mirrored in the cloud, and even upgraded depending on the track’s quality.

Why would the music industry agree to a service that basically rewards pirates? Because Apple’s service won’t be free, says BusinessWeek. It will likely incur a monthly cost, since the licensing fees Apple would have to pay for the arrangement described above would be enormous. But if labels are getting a chunk of revenue partially derived from pirated music, they’re actually reclaiming some of the original loss on that theft.

But will users pay for cloud access to their entire music collection from PCs, iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices? We asked that exact question of users back in April, when we weren’t sure of what the cloud service would provide. While a majority answered “no,” it wasn’t a landslide; 43.26 percent reported that they would be willing to pay. Amazon’s service carries a fee structure dependent on how much storage space you use (5 GB of storage is free), and while Google’s offering is free, it’s still a beta product and has a hard 20,000 track cap. Even with a subscription model, if Apple’s offering is unlimited and also offers full library mirroring and upgrading, it will be very strong competition.

Labels are reportedly banking on the fact that this deal will cause Amazon and Google to get on board with similar licensing deals, but Apple will benefit from being first out the door, and it could gain significant early lock-in advantage if it offers longer-term subscriptions, like the yearly one it uses for MobileMe.

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Consider the hype machine up and running for WWDC 2011. thanks to an official announcement highlighting Steve Jobs as the keynote speaker on June 7 at 10:00 AM PDT. WWDC 2011 will cover five key technology tracks: Application Frameworks, Internet & Web, Graphics & Media, Developer Tools, and Core OS. However, it’s Steve’s appearance that is the real news.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave since January but remains involved in strategic decisions at Apple, last made a public appearance at the iPad 2 launch event in March. That makes for an interesting comparison of  event importance, especially considering that Jobs has skipped WWDC in the past. Last year, Jobs gave the keynote and launched the iPhone 4, as well as the iOS platform, which was previously named iPhone iOS. However, in 2009 Apple’s Phil Schiller did the keynote, introducing the iPhone 3GS, iPhone OS 3, demoing OS X 10.7, and showing off new MacBooks. Considering that this year’s WWDC will reportedly not have new hardware as the next generation iPhone is widely expected in the fall, what non-hardware announcement could be so important as to bring Steve Jobs to the keynote?

Conventional rumor wisdom suggests the event will feature a relaunch of MobileMe (possibly named iCloud) and that service may be free, or at least include free services. A paid service for online storage and streaming of music is also expected. Of course, OS X Lion will be shown, and almost certainly at least a preview of iOS 5. While these are all important products, do they warrant the presence of Steve Jobs? I’d argue that they don’t, and that could mean some other mysterious product will be announced, or perhaps Jobs is returning to Apple full-time. No matter the outcome, TAB will be reporting the event as it happens.

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The patent, discovered by AppleInsider, describes a hybrid system whereby users can sync a portion of their music locally to their iOS device, with the remainder to be streamed remotely. The advantage would be that the device would have a sort of pre-loaded buffer of each song ready to go, so that playback would be instantaneous when users select a song, while in the background the bulk of the track is streamed from the cloud. It’s a smart approach, and one that bears some similarity to the system described behind HP’s planned music service for its upcoming TouchPad tablet.

Also included in the patent is the suggestion that users can either choose to stream from their own library on a home computer or remote server, or directly from a larger content source, which AppleInsider interprets as Apple’s iTunes music library. If Apple is successful in securing license agreements with music labels, that option could definitely be on the table.

It isn’t clear from the patent whether the partial syncing would be required for cloud music streaming, or just an option that users can enable or disable at their leisure. Certainly, it’s more appealing as an optional setting, since having it disabled would reduce the need to physically tether your iOS device to your computer for syncing.

There has been lots of talk about how Apple might be able to offer a more attractive cloud streaming option than its competitors Google and Amazon, but specific details about what perks it could introduce have been vague and speculative so far. This patent reveals some very specific advantages. Being able to choose from a variety of streaming sources and the ability to start playback instantly with no waiting, regardless of your data connection’s quality, are all noteworthy options not offered by either Amazon or Google.

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Google

Both Google and Amazon have decided that seeking special licensing for cloud music playback isn’t necessary, and that they’re allowed to offer their services without seeking any additional consent or agreements from major record labels. Google has announced that it will take down any music found to be in violation of copyright agreements, in much the same way it does with YouTube content. Amazon, likewise, has taken a similar stance, arguing that they “do not need a license to make Cloud Player available” since saving files to Cloud Drive “is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”

There’s definitely a sound logic to that argument, but even so, Amazon seems to be rushing to smooth things over with its music content partners, according to the Wall Street Journal . Which makes sense, because Amazon also wants to control the sales channel for music, as well as the means of its storage and playback.

While Amazon and Google may be trying to make nice with major labels behind the scenes, the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach hasn’t won them any allies. And, in fact, it could send those content providers rushing into Apple’s arms.

Apple is said to be still in talks with the four major record labels ahead of the launch of its own cloud music service, and in this case, patience may prove to be a virtue. No doubt the labels are reluctant to give up any additional revenue they might be able to garner through cloud-based offerings, but Apple is now in a unique position with regard to negotiating proper licenses, since Google and Amazon have both taken a firm, public stance on the other side of the fence. Simply put, Apple is now the only game in town.

Even if Apple can’t reach a favorable agreement with record labels, it can still easily go the route of Amazon and Google before it and declare cloud music services are well within its existing rights. But while that’s an option, it’s one that Apple shouldn’t have to exercise. Instead, it can use its leverage as the music industry’s biggest current distribution channel, and the reluctance of Amazon and Google to play nice to force an agreement that would see it be able to offer a label-friendly solution which would ultimately probably benefit consumers. That could take the shape of fewer restrictions on how and when music can be access and transferred between devices, and make it possible to purchase a wider variety of music that’s immediately available directly from the cloud.

Apple’s service will look and work better than that of its competitors, at a minimum. And if it can also launch soon (like at WWDC next month) and with the full backing of the four major record labels, it’ll best its rivals in all categories, and continue to dominate mobile music.

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There’s already plenty of speculation out there about what plans Apple might have in store for cloud service offerings. A revamped MobileMe complete with iOS device remote media streaming of your photos and music is one frequently mentioned possibility. Clues that a service called Photo Stream is coming to iOS have already showed up in code from Apple’s mobile operating system, and rumblings that a cloud music storage and remote streaming service is on its way are only getting louder.

Apple also probably won’t take away any of the existing service it already offers. It’s currently in the process of moving all MobileMe Calendar data to remote server storage, and cross-device email, notes and address book syncing also seem like likely candidates for any larger cloud service package from Cupertino. Indeed, AppleInsider is now reporting this is in fact the case.

But what else do you want from a cloud service offering from Apple? Are the existing MobileMe offerings even something you’re interested in? Are mobile bandwidth costs a concern? Should Apple’s cloud plans include a basic free offering, and what extras, if any, would you be willing to pay for?

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