Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off today in San Francisco today. A week ago, Apple revealed that CEO Steve Jobs would be appearing at the event (obviously significant given his medical leave of absence from the company, though he also appeared for the last major Apple product launch as well).
The keynote, at which Jobs will speak, is scheduled for 1:00 PM Eastern (10:00 AM Pacific) today, where Apple’s (presumably) magical new offerings will be unveiled. The company said in an announcement last week, “At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.”
While the new versions of Microsoft’s flagship operating systems are major points of interest, much attention will be paid to iCloud, which should reinforce Apple’s place as a leader in music offerings, and will almost certainly one-up rival Google’s recent unveiling of Google Music, which so far doesn’t even include music purchasing. Apple, on the other hand, has managed to secure deals with the four major record labels.
Apple already has a huge advantage in the digital music space with iTunes – an advantage that only grows with the increasing popularity of its iPhones and iPads. Adding a cloud service with music storage can only help.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that we can also probably expect Jobs to rattle of some stats related to Apple’s products, as he often does in his keynotes. On Friday, we linked to a WWDC 2011 Keynote Bingo, created by Krazybig, which provides a little game for the event.
We’ll cover Apple’s news as it comes out.