Jobs to PC: ‘You’re Busted!’ And Other Notes From The OS Wars | Epicenter | Wired.com: The most telling feature in this transformation is the revelation (greeted with huge applause from the developers in the crowd) that Apple was untethering the iOS devices from the PC. In my Wired article, I had joked that Apple envisioned the day when the main use for your PC is syncing with your iPad. But now Jobs has topped that. Beginning with iOS 5 users won’t need a PC to set up, synch, or update their iPads or iPhones. Jobs even said that he was “demoting” the PC to “just another device.” Talk about a comedown. It’s like busting Jack Welch to a middle manager!
Chapter three is the new iCloud. In this initial rev, iCloud is focused less on full-scale “cloud computing” (moving the performance of the apps themselves to the Web) than on synching a number of devices with one’s personal corpus of data — which resides in Apple’s data center. Apple, he claimed, would achieve success in this model where others have failed. (The most striking example is Microsoft’s Live Mesh system, which you probably never heard of. In that light, a lot of iCloud’s concepts look straight outta Redmond.) Why will Apple triumph? Because, says Mr. Jobs, “it just works.”