So who wants to take a crack at breaking down all of Apple's new announcements? In no particular order:

iOS 5

- looks like they broadly borrowed from Android's notification system

- no more need for a computer; everything can sync to the cloud (but only the iCloud)

- integrated Twitter (perhaps a precursor to a future iOS 6 Intent system like Android has had forever)

- integrated support for offline "reading later", basically a clone of Instapaper; notably includes stripping out of advertisements and such, which will honk off many web site providers


OS X 10.6 (Lion)

- only available as $29.99 download from the online store (but once purchased can be applied to all of the Macs on the same account; unclear whether there's any sort of enterprise license)

- Time Machine even when you're not connected to your backup drive (hourly snapshots)

- souped up virtual window management (all kinds of ways of seeing lots of apps or a single full-screen app)

- lots more gesture support (to the point that you now really want an Apple Trackpad, and it kills me that they don't sell a USB version)


iCloud

- $25/year for a service reminiscent of my.mp3.com's Beam-It service (sued out of existence in 1999 or thereabouts), where it recognizes all of the tunes you've got locally and then offers them to you online on any of your devices. What it doesn't give you is access to anything you haven't paid for. This is impressive.

- 5GB of free storage for cloud sync of damn near anything: pictures, address book, and a free <[email protected]> email service

- no apparent way to set up your own "cloud" server; you have to use Apple's service (even if I'd really much rather use Google)


I didn't watch any of the videos. This is all just my synopsis of Apple's web site. What gets me is Apple seems to be tying their devices closely to iCloud. Heaven forbid there should be standards about these sorts of things, such that I could use my own server or a Google server as my sync location. (Or maybe it's secretly in there...). What impresses me is that Apple has resurrected the Beam-it service from 1999. I wonder if they did the security better than the original service.