How to Follow Along With Apple’s Big Announcements at WWDC
Apple and its suits (or turtlenecks?) make a big point out of keeping far away from any of the years’ big tech trade shows or conferences, saving everything they’ve been working on for special press conferences and the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That means we have a lot to watch for at 2011’s WWDC, which kicks off today in San Francisco with a 10 a.m. (1 p.m. ET) keynote address from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Jobs, who is technically still on medical leave, is expected to announce Apple’s new iCloud service, a new product that, we think, will allow subscribers to buy music from and store music on the cloud and then stream it to all compatible Mac and iOS devices. (Apple just finished construction on a $1 billion data center in North Carolina to hold the files.) At some point during the conference, we’re also expecting Apple to announce the details of the iOS 5 update coming soon to portable devices and preview the Mac OS X Lion software, which is intended to make using an Apple laptop more like using an iPad.
There’s a lot to watch for and, if you’d like to hear about Apple’s new products and developments from Jobs and the rest of his team, you can stream the event live at Engadget, where Tim Stevens, the site’s new editor-in-chief, will help you decipher all of the techno jargon. A straight video feed — without commentary — is available at UStream.