Apple Announces iCloud and iWork For iOS 201
iONiUM writes "Through a press release ahead of WWDC, Apple has revealed that it will be releasing its own cloud service to rival Google and Amazon's. In addition, they will unveil the new iOS, and the latest desktop OS."
Apple also announced the release of the iWork suite for iOS devices.
Looking forward to Lion (Score:5, Insightful)
Autosave, Version and Resume are major improvements, and long overdue for desktop OSes.
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I have seen all of them on other OSes
No, you haven't. Not desktop OSs at any rate.
Autosave: I don't know a single OS that has it. Programs, sure, but not OSs.
Versions: Aside from some snapshotting filesystems, I am unaware of any OS which has this either, although snapshots are similar enough. VSS is also similar, but much cruder. This is significantly more than having RCS (or similar) installed.
Resume: The only consumer OS I'm aware of with this is iOS. I assume there must be some mainframe systems which have something similar.
just not dressed up to look as pretty...
They aren't mer
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First of all, I strongly doubt that Apple has written an OS that adds autosave or resume to every running application. If they did, I will be impressed; more likely, applications must use specific OS hooks to get these features.
Why? Autosave is something you could implement today for any given OS X application using AppleScript. All you need is to do is write a 3 linear script that calls the "Save" hook every couple of minutes. Of course that isn't all that desirable, since the user should be able to control when the original gets overwritten. But as soon as you have a versioning file system, that concern no longer exists. Just automatically send call the save function of all applications every couple of minutes. For resume, you j
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Well, we are getting into semantics here, but on OS X, "application" != "program". An application is everything packaged into a ".app" directory. By and in large the described method will work for these applications. The method will not work for all "programs", i.e. stuff started on the command line etc.
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The point is that this feature is not an Apple original, it has been done before.
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And why should Apple give a shit about X11 or terminal apps?
X11 on OSX needs to die anyway.
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First of all, I strongly doubt that Apple has written an OS that adds autosave or resume to every running application. If they did, I will be impressed; more likely, applications must use specific OS hooks to get these features.
Just every Cocoa application that is recompiled for 10.7. You don't have to do anything to take advantage of it, it's part of the OS. However, you can disable it if it doesn't make sense for your program.
Resume was in KDE3, and to the best of my knowledge KDE4 supports it; all KDE programs benefited from it, and even a few non-KDE programs. Considering how broad KDE was, KDE/GNU/Linux should qualify as an "operating system." You may disagree, but then the argument boils down to "what constitutes an OS?"
No, it doesn't. You can't handwave away the differences by playing word games. It doesn't matter if you want to call it an OS or a Desktop Environment (hmm... I wonder what the two letters after "K" originally stood for?), the point is simple:
1. KDE does not have the same resume feature that Lion has. Not e
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They are implemented in such a way that every. single. person. who uses a computer can make use of them.
You simultaneously underestimate and overestimate the human race, which is a bit odd.
You overestimate them in that you've actually (with emphasis) said that every person who uses a computer can use this -- trivially false. Aside from people who cannot practically justify having a Mac (and thus cannot run the OS, let alone use it), there are the people who learn this stuff by rote, who will refuse to learn a new interface, no matter how shiny, if there is any possible way they can hang on to their old interf
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They are implemented in such a way that every. single. person. who uses a computer can make use of them.
You simultaneously underestimate and overestimate the human race, which is a bit odd.
You overestimate them in that you've actually (with emphasis) said that every person who uses a computer can use this -- trivially false. Aside from people who cannot practically justify having a Mac (and thus cannot run the OS, let alone use it), there are the people who learn this stuff by rote, who will refuse to learn a new interface, no matter how shiny, if there is any possible way they can hang on to their old interface and habits.
I'm not sure what you are reading, but I'm stating that these features are implemented in such a way that anyone can use them. Your first "point" is just plain stupid. Of course you have to have a computer that runs Lion to use features of Lion. I find it impossible to believe you actually think I meant that even people on Windows, or without a computer at all, can use these features.
Your second point shows no understanding of how these features work. Two of them require no alteration in interaction whatsoe
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You have? Name one.
You may have seen applications that implemented the features in question -- but that's a very different thing then an OS (including desktop environments, like Gnome or KDE) providing it as a part of their API/frameworks for everything to make use of, in a consistent way across all of their apps.
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Let's see.
Resume? Where? If you're going to point at Hibernate, that's not resume as far as I'm aware. Resume is a per-application thing (though surely you can restart all) -- its less about dumping RAM to disk then letting each app suspend/restore its state automatically: its more like the iOS suspend/resume / fast application restart/switching then anything else.
Cuz, if I load up my Kubuntu and start messing around, and I can't find a single application that sports any kind of state resuming besides the c
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As I said, versioning in the filesystem itself was a feature of ITS before Apple was even incorporated as a company. Theoretically you could
Re:Looking forward to Lion (Score:5, Informative)
Now, if Apple has written an operating system that enables autosave and resume for any application, even X11 applications, I will be very impressed.
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It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.
And Resume isn't just restarting the same apps you had open when you restart your computer. This is apps not even having to "restart" in the first place. Their entire state is saved, s
Re:Looking forward to Lion (Score:4, Funny)
So...they reinvented hibernate?
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So...they reinvented hibernate?
No, just one that works :p
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No, Hibernate (which already exists in OS X) is a full memory dump to disk. This is serializing the objects in individual running programs. In terms of restarting the computer, it's almost exactly like restoring from hibernate, but without the long delay in shutting down and a similarly long delay in booting.
This also means that whenever you quit a program, when you start it again, it will be just as you left off. This can dramatically speed up application launching, as well as making it appear to the user
Re:Looking forward to Lion (Score:4, Informative)
It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.
Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.
Their entire state is saved, so restarting a program just reloads the memory
Can you cite a source here? That is a very complex thing for an OS to do, on the level of a live kernel upgrade (i.e. upgrading a kernel without having to reboot). If this is what the OS is doing, and if the OS is doing it without requiring the application to make any special system calls to enable that functionality, it would be impressive.
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It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.
Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.
Linux distros install all sorts of apps that aren't part of the particular desktop environment of choice and put them into the default menus, and aside from the cases where a program starts with an oddly-placed K or G, it's not generally clear whether an app is native to the current environment or not.
I do agree that it's similar (and I tried to make this point in my original post), but it's not comparable in terms of impact to the user. The main reason for this is that in Linux, "choice" permeates every pa
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Hi. I would be very interested if you had any more informative source about Resume. This is kind of functionality I've thought about for some time and I'd be very happy to read how Apple does it "under the hood". Unfortunately the link you provided contained mainly market speech with no technical details.
It's rather easy to serialize program onto the disk (or whatever). All you need to have is well defined interface with Serialize(some stream) and Deserialize(some stream) kinds of methods. Application does
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The technical details are, as far as I know, still under NDA. However, it's the same as what iOS does, so you could look into that if you are interested.
All Cocoa apps are collections of objects. For this feature, the OS just serializes them and writes them to disk. This has been done for parts of programs since Nextstep (primarily, the UI). Also, you can serialize and deserialize your own objects from within a Cocoa app. The Resume feature is just the OS itself serializing and deserializing the entire prog
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I have tested Lion and it's only for Cocoa applications, not X11 or shell scripts just like KDE's feature only works for QT apps. For their Cocoa apps it's very simple to do, just change the underlying framework that handle the memory allocations and window drawings.
And it's not really a hibernate feature either. Hibernate takes a snapshot of all the system's memory and puts in on the hard drive. Lion actually restarts the kernel fresh as well as most other core services (such as background services) howeve
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Except for regular hibernation mode.
Re:Looking forward to Lion (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, versioning has been around forever. But autosave, and preserving system state through a restart? I've seen both done on a per-application basis, but not systemwide.
Then I guess you missed Lisa 7/7 (also the world's first integrated office application(s)). That lighted power switch on the front of the Lisa? If it was running the LisaOS (instead of MacOS), pressing that button performed a system save and shutdown, and pressing it again did a restart and reboot. This two-part video here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com] shows just how advanced the Lisa was. In fact, that (and the hideous price) was (were) the two main reasons the Lisas became landfill, instead of a household name. And there's no denying that it paved the way for the desktop/windowing metaphor.
BTW, notice that even in the first incarnation of the Lisa OS, it allowed for heirachical folders. That feature didn't appear in Windows until Windows 95. Amazing.
Designed starting in 1978. Released in 1983. I think they won.
And before someone starts all that bullshit about "Apple stole Xerox PARC's work", let me say this: 1) Apple PAID Xerox for to use their work [obamapacman.com]. And 2) Without the improvements (not the least of which was pulldown menus!) that some very talented engineers made, that preliminary GUI work [catb.org] would not have become really useable, let alone nearly ubiquitious.
VMS ROLLOUT/ROLLIN may have been even earlier (Score:2)
I don't recall the exact dates, but it was around 1982 that these utilities were created. ROLLOUT saved the entire VMS system state to disk and ROLLIN brought it back, not only restoring any long-running batch jobs and so on but also dropping the boot time down from 5-10 minutes to less than 30 seconds.
Although it was easy to get ahold of ROLLIN/ROLLOUT if you wanted them Digital would never condone their use. The reason for that was simple: It depended on disk state not changing whlie the system was dow
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It's best of both worlds approach. Most computers merely go to hibernate, when instructed by the user and not automatically upon need, just fine.
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Wondering if this is on/because of zfs or some other filesystem change from HFS+.
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Autosave, Version and Resume are major improvements, and long overdue for desktop OSes.
Do not want. Do not need.
When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a huge Apple fan, but even I think this stuff with the "i" branding is just stupid and faintly embarrassing. Every Apple product has a fraeking "i" before it's otherwise utterly unimaginative name? "iCloud" - FFS.
Re:When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:4, Funny)
I would prefer everything be named with a version number, an animal name, and an adjective. That way when I look for software some people will list compatibility by the version number, some by the animal name, and some by adjective.
If the adjective starts with the same letter as the animal name and an acronym is appended to the version number that is doubly awesome. Also if the OS would take pains to hide some or all of the descriptors...like that too.
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Surely you meant to write "Cloud Live"?
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To be fair... (Score:2)
Is "iCloud" any less stupid than just "cloud"?
Plenty of Cloud going around these days from all quarters, not just Apple.
To the Cloud!
Re:When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a huge Apple fan, but even I think this stuff with the "i" branding is just stupid and faintly embarrassing. Every Apple product has a fraeking "i" before it's otherwise utterly unimaginative name? "iCloud" - FFS.
Well, they used to start everything with "Mac", but too many people would be saying "there can be only one" if they called it MacCloud.
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Well, they used to start everything with "Mac", but too many people would be saying "there can be only one" if they called it MacCloud.
Dennis Weaver would be proud that you remember him.
Re:When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:4, Funny)
I am Juan MacCloud from the clan MacCloud. I am El Hilandero... There can be only Juan.
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Even at +5 this comment is underrated.
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Soon, the non-geeks will believe that Apple invented cloud computing.
Re:When will there be too many "i"s? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Never heard of a product. Hear that it's named "iSomething".
Realize, due to naming convention, it's probably an Apple product.
React accordingly: the faithful swoon, the haters hate. It's a well-known, stable, and easy-to-apply branding technique. Should McDonald's do away with the golden arches because it's faintly embarrassing and played out?
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Better than having a freaking water buffalo in front of everything.
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Here's part of the press release: "CUPERTINO, Calif.--Sept. 16, 1997--At its first regularly scheduled meeting last week, Apple's new Board of Directors formalized the role of Steve Jobs by naming him interim Chief Executive Officer of the Company until a new CEO is named.
"At this meeting, the Board of Directors also met with its exe
iDon't know... (Score:2)
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Apple used the name in their press release [apple.com]. It's not speculation.
Let me be the first to foresee... (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to foresee... (Score:5, Funny)
"iCloud... When it is down, that is actually a feature."
When it's down, it's called iFog.
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You are accessing it wrong.
A guy can dream (Score:3)
My biggest hope is that they'll finally announce their back to school sale and it will be a free iPad instead of an iPod this time around, as to one up Microsoft with the free Xbox360.
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Is that all ? (Score:3)
Given how Apple likes to actually announce stuff at their shindigs, either they are priming us for a relatively empty one, or they have big news that will overshadow all that. Apart from them taking over Sony, I don't see what could be THAT big, though.
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</sarcasm>
Bigger stuff ? (Score:2)
Bringing back the XServe ? No one expects it to happen, so that'd be pretty big.
They're about due for refresh on both the Mini and MacPro, so they might have something else there. I'd personally be happy with an i5 or i7 Mini ... or a smaller chassis for the MacPro and redundant power, so we have something that's not crap for using as a server.
MacOS X Server (Score:3)
I doubt we'll see the XServe (or similar) back. But the announcement did mention that, basically, MacOS X Lion is the server version of MacOS X. It doesn't explicitly say so, but this must mean that there is no longer a separate server version of MacOS. Which is good news, because the server tools were already pretty decent (but too expensive) when I last used them, two versions ago.
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Given how Apple likes to actually announce stuff at their shindigs, either they are priming us for a relatively empty one, or they have big news that will overshadow all that. Apart from them taking over Sony, I don't see what could be THAT big, though.
Um... They outlined exactly what they are going to show off.
iOS 5
iCloud
Lion
These are all big, newsworthy things. The only thing that can be disappointing is if none of these will be available during June.
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Relatively empty one? I doubt it -- because for the first time that I can remember, they also made a point to reach out to reporters of the non-tech-blog sort and suggest they would be interested in attending.
But, they've also been saying pretty firmly there won't be any new hardware released at WWDC, which is unusual. (Not unprecedented, but unusual). I think the extremely unusual (and I think unprecedented, but I don't feel like fact-checking) announcement of some of the stuff that will be there -- and th
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You are delusional. MS actually lets you install and watch whatever you want on their OS. Nokia actually encourages you to root your N900 and try out OSes. Comcast actually lets you download pretty much anything... and so on. All of those being taken over by Apple would be a catastrophe ! One bad Apple is enough.
damn narcisists! (Score:2)
selfish bastards.
i-Caramba! (eom) (Score:2)
What has Apple actually revealed? (Score:3)
But at the same time we still have no idea just now big iCloud will be. Could it be more than just music (I reckon yes). Will it be a replacement for MobileMe (fair chance). Might it include some iWork comparability (I wouldn't put it past them).
These are questions which were being asked last year, last month, and last week - and following this announcement today they are still questions we don't know the answers to.
iWork for iOS (summary clarification) (Score:4, Informative)
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I already tried it and it works fine, but I'm a bit stumped at why the hell I'd want to create a presentation on an iPhone??? It's already a bit of a kludge on the iPad.
The biggest new feature in Keynote is that you can connect an Keynote Remote to it now. That means you can remote control your iPad from your iPhone in presentations! Even better, the reverse also works, you can remote control your iPhone that's hooked to a beamer via an iPad (or another iPhone/iPod touch). WHY????
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I wouldn't exactly call it "universal" if I have to re-purchase Numbers for my iPhone when I already bought it on my Mac.
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What are the odds that this iCloud service isn't run OSX server at it's core?
Well, some is OS X. But certainly not all.
Hint: It ain't HP or Dell [datacenterknowledge.com], neither. Nor is it running a "free" (as in beer) Linux distro [9to5mac.com]; so no snarky comments about OS X Server. Those to Linuces are know for their superior load-balancing software, and I would imagine that's what they are being used for.
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If it works who cares? There are a lot of people who need OS X servers, but OS X servers aren't really meant for data centers. They're more for SOHO and on-site 50-100 OS X user situations where people want the the netboot, sharing and workgroup features to "just work." None of these applies to the iCloud backend. There's eating your own dogfood, but what if you all you have are cats?
Except for some awkward lurches in the first half of the decade, I've never seen Apple make the claim that OS X was a mas
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Considering it looks and feels a lot like BSD at its core and it is free for Apple, probably not as low as you think.
Re:What are the odds (Score:5, Interesting)
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And Solaris.
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Actually, MobileMe mail service is running on the Oracle Communications Suite formerly known as iPlanet/Java Messaging Server:
Mac Web Server:Apache/1.3.33 (Darwin)
Solaris or Linux IMAP Server: OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN BINARY UNSELECT SORT CATENATE URLAUTH LANGUAGE ESEARCH ESORT THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES CONDSTORE ENABLE CONTEXT=SEARCH CONTEXT=SORT WITHIN SASL-IR SEARCHRES XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO X-SUN-SORT ANNOTATE-EXPERIMENT-1 X-UNAUT
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Oh, wait, that's Bruce Wayne...
Anyhow, I suspect Hank Scorpio is a better boss as far as supervillians go
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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They just wanted to get the free t-shirt,
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I believe that if everyone had the resources Steve has, then that mortality rate would be very different.
What special resources might that be, anyway; that he lives in the USA where chemotherapy centers are plentiful and treatment is highly successful compared to other countries?
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"I don't know Karate, But I know C'-razy!"
-- James Brown
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That also means it could be running NT 4 though. Wouldn't that be a lark?
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[citation needed]
I thought this rumor was about Gates...
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It is getting a bit worn out.
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Only in the eyes of brain-damaged nerds who base their opinions of Apple on something other than reality. A special species of nerd uniquely attracted to Slashdot.
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Apple still ends up paying the developers more than the competition.
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It would actually be iCaramba!
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"People who like something I don't like? Must call them 'fanbois'!"
Anyway, Apple isn't going to be showing off any new physical products next week (maybe updated Airs and/or other computers, but nothing that will generate lines). iOS, iCloud, and Lion will be online offerings (Lion will also be available in physical form, but it's not like people are going to need a sleeping bag to get a copy). iPhone 5 isn't likely to be shown, and is definitely not part of the "advance warning" Apple gave out today.
For th
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You do not need pretty GUIs on corporate servers like you do on corporate desktops.
Windows gained its foothold on the server because it looked like the desktop and would run [most of] the same applications.
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Was the rock you slept under comfortable? Apple licensed the use of the iOS name form Cisco years ago.