At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2011, Steve Jobs introduced iCloud, a free service that stored users' music, photos, documents and apps online and pushed them automatically to every Apple device they owned. It replaced MobileMe, a paid service that Jobs openly admitted had disappointed. The keynote, his last as Apple's chief, marked the company's shift away from the computer as the center of digital life and toward the cloud.
Jobs had been on medical leave since January 2011, and his appearance on the stage at Moscone West drew particular attention. He looked thin but spoke with familiar command, sharing the keynote with colleagues who presented Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 before he returned to unveil iCloud himself. A decade earlier he had cast the Mac as the "digital hub" of people's lives. Now he reversed that idea: Apple, he said, would "demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device," like an iPhone or iPad, and move the hub into the cloud.
The service was built to fix a real annoyance. Keeping a phone, tablet and computer in step meant plugging them in and syncing by cable. iCloud promised to do it silently over the internet, with 5 gigabytes of free storage and features such as Photo Stream and automatic backup. Jobs was candid about the predecessor it replaced. MobileMe, which cost $99 a year, had launched badly in 2008, and he conceded it was "not our finest hour." To show Apple's commitment, he displayed an image of the company's enormous new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, and summed up the pitch with a phrase he had long favored: "It just works."
iCloud launched that October alongside iOS 5 and gathered tens of millions of users within months, becoming the connective tissue of Apple's ecosystem. Jobs did not live to see much of it. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died on October 5, only days before the service he had introduced went live.