[mortenjorck]

The headline does feel a bit baiting, but if it suckered me, it was worth it. This is a very interesting article about the next five years in computing.

What I'd disagree with is the idea that Apple is trying to transition into a cloud provider with a merely incidental hardware business. I think that's a misunderstanding of Apple's priorities as well as an overestimation of Apple's tendencies to follow fashion.

Apple will stay a hardware company. They will go cloud, but here's the thing: Apple's cloud will be federated. Five years from now you'll buy an iPad and instead of a Mac, its home will be a port-less little monolith of aluminum and rubber that functions as your own little slice of cloud. Even as LTE picks up, a local server will always be ahead with the latest wi-fi revision and no network congestion, and no shared processor load, and this will be Apple's selling point for why their model is better for media use. And, most importantly for Apple's survival, why they can sell you a new one in two years' time.

[Terretta]

> "Apple's cloud will be federated"

In a sense, it already is.

A friend's Macbook Air SSD died. We plugged her Time Machine to a Mac Mini, restored into a new account, and she had "her" computer. Had been a day or two since her last backup, but MobileMe brought her latest appointments, contacts, and bookmarks back down from the ".Mac" cloud.

She missed having the portable Air, so walked into a BestBuy, got an iPad, logged into MobileMe, and was immediately checking her half dozen email accounts along with, again, all her bookmarks, appointments, and contacts, because those settings were stored in the cloud. Plugged it to the account on the Mac Mini, and now had her 5GB of photos and 20GB of music.

Three weeks later, Apple gave her a fixed Macbook Air. At boot it asked if she owned another Mac, and she plugged in her Time Machine drive. Slightly less than 9 minutes later, a reboot, and "her" Mac was back, again with every app and tweak. MobileMe sync ran, and by the time she opened her iCal, it was up to date.

The hardware essentially didn't matter. "Her" settings, "her" data, were accessible to her across phone, tablet, other person's computer, and a replacement for her own computer, all with zero I.T. effort.

Best part -- she didn't even notice this was remarkable. She just logged into the Macbook Air and started doing email, right at home, without a second thought.

As for that little monolith? Maybe it's already here -- Time Capsule is an Airport Extreme with built in dual channel 802.11a/b/g/n and another guest WiFi DMZ, includes TimeMachine wireless backup, offers a USB printer hub, and gives remote access that also syncs to MobileMe (which stores documents and personalization in the cloud).

[cstross]

I am expecting, sooner rather than later, that Time Capsule will acquire the ability to do OTA backup of iPad/iPhone. Either that, or that there'll be a second-generation Apple TV that is basically a combined Apple TV and Time Capsule -- streaming media to all your iDevices, feeding video out directly to your TV, and acting as a backup hub and wireless router. The "home hub" with cloud backup is clearly not that far off Apple's current road map ...

[smikhanov]

Not a purely hardware company: Apple is already calling itself "Mobile Device Company". They already work hard to start making devices that fit best to the described future of computing.