Apple Officially Enters Clouds

Officially, at least, Steve Jobs beat Apple into the clouds by a week. But looking at it from a different angle it shows how his presence lives on.

This week’s the company’s servers were catching up as it replaced its Mobileme with iCloud. So many users were making the switch that some met delays.

In reality, Mobileme was a cloud-based product. Amazon, Google, Netflix and others also have been effectively offering storage space and streaming for some time.

Apple released IOS5 on Wednesday to replace its paid Mobileme  mail and other offerings on the iPhone, iPad and Macs. And its basic service will be free via iTunes.

The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that by the end of the year consumers will be able to pay to watch movies, making it a competitor of Netflix and Ultraviolet. They will have a choice of renting the films for a specific period or paying a higher price and downloading them as a purchase.