This week Apple pushed out more major updates than it has ever done before at a single time. On Wednesday, iCloud went live, and to support it Mac OS X 10.7.2 was released along with iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Then users were asked to switch their MobileMe accounts to iCloud, or establish a new free iCloud account. New versions of iTunes and iPhoto were sent yesterday as well to support iCloud and iOS 5. There were also new versions of Aperture and Xcode. A new update to Lion’s restore feature was also there, seemingly to support the new “Find My Mac” feature.
iOS 5 included much more than just iCloud support, of course. New features and standard apps were introduced for recent models of iOS devices. The new Reminders and Newsstand apps were added, as well as updates for the Music app (formerly the iPod app), Messages, Maps and Safari. In addition, Apple added more optional apps that you can download from the app store: Cards, Find My Friends and Airport Utility.
The rollouts of these updates came with plenty of issues for those eager to upgrade. iOS 5 updates were hampered by errors reportedly as Apple servers struggled to verify the download. iCloud conversions took several tries as well. Download speeds for all updates seemed to slow to a crawl at times. iCloud email still seems to suffer from server problems even this morning.
The release of iOS 5 and iCloud comes just before Friday’s arrival of the iPhone 4S. With the 4S we’ll see the addition of Sprint as a supporting network in the U.S. and new features for the iPhone such as Siri, the speech-based assistant.
Apple Rolls Out iOS 5, iCloud, Updates
Comments: 2 Responses to “Apple Rolls Out iOS 5, iCloud, Updates”
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Users of the personal hotspot might panic, for after upgrading there is no sign of said app. Goto Networks personal hotspot and turn it back on.
O2 incidentally still do not understand what hotspot is and failed to help.
Apple is missing Steve Jobs already. He would have made sure that the Mac OS X updates went out before the iOS ones so the servers would not get hammered all in the same day. There was no reason we couldn't get iTunes a few days before. It took me quite a while to update my 4 Macs, iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone. The switch to iCloud was easier than I expected, however. Even though I had to retry it a few times it was pretty seemless. I hope my apps that use my MobileMe iDisk will get upgrades before June 2012. It was nice that the migration did not break those deprecated features immediately. I predict my Time Capsule will be able to turn into a home iCloud manageable from the newly released Airport Utility App. It would have really helped in this upgrade scenario as it could have pre-downloaded my updates and my 4 iMacs could have received them at the same time. This would offload the Apple Servers and my Internet data service.