Apple iCloud: will the cloud finally go mainstream? What Apple has brought, however, is its gift for simplicity. To use iCloud all you need to do is turn it on. Microsoft's solution is a little more complicated and spread over more services, though the company does promise "seamless" integration across all devices with Windows 8. Last November, Omar Shahine, Microsoft's group program manager for SkyDrive, wrote: "While mainstream users are only just starting to embrace personal cloud storage, we're seeing more demand as people buy and use more types of devices and need to access content across them." Apple's iCloud not only stores backups, it also syncs your files to all your devices. Take a photo with your iPhone and it will be pushed to the library on your Mac within seconds. Download an app on your iPad and a version will arrive on your iPhone simultaneously. The icing on the cake is iTunes Match, which will sync your music library with Apple's catalogue - even if you didn't buy those songs from Apple. While iCloud is free, iTunes Match charges £21.99 a year to store up to 25,000 songs. In addition to the back-up, you can re-download the songs as high quality files. Amazon and Google launched music storage services last year, though neither is available in Britain yet. The crucial difference is that Apple scans your library and simply notes which of the songs you own within its catalogue. Songs need to be manually uploaded only if they are not in the iTunes catalogue. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said earlier this week: "I see it as a fundamental shift, recognizing that people had numerous devices, and they wanted the bulk of their content in the cloud, and easily accessible from all of the devices. I think we're seeing the response from that, and with 85 million customers in just three months, it is just not a product. It is a strategy for the next decade. This 'fundamental shift' is the end of the "digital hub" vision that Apple pursued for a decade from 2001. That assumed that your computer was the centre of your digital life where everything would be stored and with which every device, such as your camera and your iPod, would sync. Now, with so many different devices - smartphones, tablets, cameras, MP3 players, portable games consoles, set-top boxes and more - all capable of creating, storing and sharing content, the digital hub model no longer works. Enter the cloud. Apple doesn't want you to worry about where your files are. Just trust that they will be where they should be when you need them. While that rankles with savvy computer users, who like to retain control of these things themselves, it's the ideal pitch for mainstream users, for whom keeping these things in sync was always a chore. There were MP3 players before the iPod, touchscreen phones before the iPhone and tablet computers before the iPad. Likewise, there were cloud services before iCloud. Apple's pitch is to do what it always does: simplify the process, make it easy to use and sell it in a way that is easy to understand. If they get it right then 2012 will be the year that the cloud goes mainstream.