Apple Looks to a New Computing Era

Remember the floppy disk? I’m willing to bet Steve Jobs does. I’m also willing to bet he remembers when he killed it.

It was 1998, to be precise, and the murder weapon was the new iMac, a computer that was missing the then-standard internal floppy drive.

Last month Mr. Jobs rang the final death knell for another piece of technology: optical discs like DVDs and CDs.

For this execution, his weapon of choice is the new MacBook Air, with a little extra help from the iTunes store, of course.

During the unveiling of the new MacBook Air line, Mr. Jobs said these computers were next-generation laptops. This was reiterated in thecommercials for the computers, in which a voiceover calls them “the next generation of Macbooks.”

Left, Paul Sakuma/APThe 1984 version of the Mac included a built-in floppy drive.

In other words, don’t expect a DVD slot in your next Mac laptop, or your next desktop computer for that matter.

Apple hopes to replace those discs with a fluffy white iCloud, where software, music, video and your own personal content fly around in the air like happy seagulls at the beach.

Apple has a lot at stake with its move to this new era of computing.

The disastrous launch of MobileMe, which offers online storage and syncing between devices, was one of the company’s biggest flops of the past few years. Although the service works relatively well now, it’s still very expensive, priced at $100 a year, and the iDisk storage software is much slower than third-party products like ZumoCast andBox.net.

To add to the pressure, Apple is also up against Google, a company that has essentially grown up in the cloud and built a number of successful services for this next era of software.

None of this is news to Steve Jobs. Last week a report noted that a $1 billion, 500,000-square-foot data center that the company has been working on for years is getting ready to open for business. And Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, recently said that the data center would open “any day now.”

When the North Carolina center is ready, people can expect any number of cloud-based interactions to appear on their Mac computers.

Photos and music could begin to flow between computers without the need of pesky wires, and you could even imagine a time when your computer’s operating system isn’t just a desktop, but a cloudtop, where any kind of file saved to your machine is automatically beamed into space, accessible on iPads, iPhones and other Apple devices.

But the company isn’t in a rush to switch everyone and everything to the cloud just yet. Apple wants to get it right this time around, and customers will likely see these changes happen slowly.

One thing is for sure: get ready to stuff those old DVDs and CDs in a box with your video tapes and floppy disks.