Yep, the rumour sheet can now be taken off. Apple has just confirmed via a short press statement that the company has indeed been working on a cloud service (as everyone expected) and will unveil the service at the Monday, June 6 keynote address at WWDC. It is still unclear exactly how much the cloud service, named as iCloud officially in the press release, will cost users, however it has been rumoured that Apple might add cloud music into the existing MobileMe service which costs US$99 per year.
According to many reports, the iCloud service will allow users to play their music collection through the internet without having to download the necessary music files. This will be allowed by the major music labels, three out of four of which have signed deals with Apple to allow the service to go ahead, and partly facilitated by Apple’s sizable music collection needed for the iTunes Store. iCloud will also apparently be able to scan a user’s digital library and quickly upload all files to their servers, with the service replacing low-quality tracks with high-quality Apple copies.
The iCloud service will be detailed alongside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and iOS 5 at the address no doubt by Steve Jobs himself. These two operating systems will be the main feature of the keynote, and as iOS 5 was mentioned there is a high change Apple will release the heavily rumoured iPhone 4S at the event as well.
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