Apple on Tuesday confirmed it's going to the cloud and that splashy pitchman Steve Jobs will deliver the details.
The company said CEO Jobs and other executives will discuss a new service for storing and retrieving media online, called iCloud, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco.
Uncertainty over the appearance of Jobs, who is on medical leave, has been a near-sideshow of speculation leading into Apple events.
Ahead of the cloud launch, Apple has been setting up a huge data center in North Carolina to prepare, says Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty.
"This may be the most powerful data center ever, outside of government," Doherty says. "It will be able to handle millions of streams per minute without any network hiccups."
Apple's move to the cloud follows recent entries by Google and Amazon, with music services that let users upload songs they own to servers that in turn let them pull them down from various devices.
Both Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Drive don't work with the iPhone, and iCloud most assuredly will.
Doherty says iCloud will take your iTunes music collection and make it accessible from anywhere. "It's another reason for consumers to stay with iTunes," he says.
That Apple chose to announce iCloud on Tuesday, and not next week at the conference, is all about "setting expectations" that a new iPhone won't be revealed as well, says Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
"The real message is: Don't expect to see the iPhone 5 next week," he says.
Apple has introduced a new version of its iPhone at the last three WWDCs.
Munster thinks the launch of a new iPhone is being pushed to September, mostly because of parts shortages.
Doherty adds that the delay is directly tied to Apple wireless partner AT&T and its much-publicized network issues.
"AT&T is spending a lot of money advertising the new strength of its network, with new towers," he says. "Being ready for the new, faster network seems to be the idea."
Apple also said it would show off an update to its computer and mobile operating systems, Lion and iOS 5.
