Back to the Mac: Apple confirms WWDC event

Apple [AAPL] has announced the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2011, its annual glimpse into the future of the Mac and iOS platforms. The event takes place in June, and as I predicted will see renewed focus on the Mac. Meanwhile this week's news agenda sees emerging focus on iTunes, with 7digital beating Apple to offer 24-bit downloads in the USA and a flurry of speculation concerning the April launch of a new music locker service through MobileMe.

Return of the Mac

The Mac is far from dead, this year's WWDC will see a much stronger focus on the platform, which many industry observers felt was under-represented at last year's show. For example, the Apple Developer's Awards this year will also highlight Mac applications, which were not represented within last year's awards.

That Mac focus will not translate into a surfeit of hardware-related announcements. The focus this year really will be on Lion and the future of the iOS platform, no hardware announcements are expected.

However, Apple is using the event to continue its attempt to ensure the Mac App Store becomes the de facto main way in which to purchase Mac applications. "This year’s Apple Design Awards will be awarded to developers whose iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps are currently on the App Store," the company warns.

WWDC takes place between June 6 and June 10, once again at San Francisco's Moscone West.

UPDATE: WWDC tickets sold out within 12 hours of being made available. This event grows bigger each year.

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Despite Betrand Serlet's recent resignation, Lion is prowling among beta-testing developers and the usual flurry of NDA-breaking Apple rumor-mongers and the release of iOS 5 reportedly now pegged for late summer (presumably in order to help boost Christmas-shopping-focused marketing activities), the event seems will be of critical importance to developers and end users.

Apple's Lion eats the iOS food

The five-day conference will see Apple unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS, the company said.

"At this year's conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss."

Apple is promising over 100 technical sessions with over 1,000 Apple engineers in attendance.  As per usual, engineers will be on hand to test developers code, and to help developers attending the event use newly-introduced development tricks and OS features. Tickets cost $1,599.

Radiohead buys British in iTunes skirmish

In a related item, iTunes remains in focus this week. The service underpins the success of Apple's entire iDevice empire, helping drive wild success for the company's iPad and iPhone -- but there are signs competitors are becoming wilier in their attempts to unseat the Apple media advantage.

While the focus increasingly moves to Apps as the media lock-in to tie iDevice owners to Apple's platform, we continue to hear rumors Apple is in talks with major labels to offer 24-bit music downloads through iTunes. News this morning is that upstart UK digital music service, 7digital, has announced an exclusive international deal to offer Radiohead's latest album in 24-bit audio.

Under the new international deal, announced today, 7digital beats all the US-based services -- Apple, Amazon, Google -- to offer the album, 'The King Of Limbs', in the high-quality 24-bit FLAC HD format.

What's good about FLAC HD? Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is an open source audio compression format. Audio encoded in FLAC HD is of much better quality -- DJs can play tracks digitized in this format and even the most critical of audiences are unable to determine any difference between it and the same track played back from a CD.

Prices are close to those charged by competing services for the lower-quality alternative, for example in the UK you pay £8.99 for the HD release, or £6.99 for the lower-quality iTunes version -- but you also get an iTunes/iPod-compatible version as part of the higher-quality purchase.

Advantage, Android

There's an intrinsic format advantage to devices outside of Apple's empire to the FLAC HD move: Apple's devices don't support the format, but devices from key competitors already do, for example Sony's PSP, the Samsung Galaxy range and BlackBerry devices.

This doesn't mean Apple owners will be locked out of Radiohead's latest digital party. This digital release also includes an AAC 320k (ie. still higher-quality than an iTunes purchase) version of the album.

On strength of a statement from 7digital, I'm suspecting we're seeing the evolution of a new digital music battleground as competitors aim to extend the digital music ecosystem beyond iTunes.

"7digital will be releasing more FLAC downloads in future ," the company said in a press statement supplied to me, "the overall aim is to pioneer the move to a higher quality digital format, ahead of competing digital music services, and encourage the music industry to adopt new, higher quality formats," it added.

This plainly suggests that the music industry is -- at last -- looking to a move to offer better-than-CD quality downloads.

A la carte to fall apart?

Apple meanwhile is expected to introduce music-focused enhancements to MobileMe next month, when it is expected to introduce a $20/year 'music locker' service.

But as media and a user's entire computing experience becomes ever less dependent on the desktop PC paradigm, does online music retail have a clear future as the line between access and ownership seems set to blur? I anticipate we'll some  suggestions as to answers to that question at WWDC this year.

Will you be going to WWDC this year? What do you look forward to from the event? And have Apps now superseded the value of music in iTunes to underpin Apple's iDevice empire? Let me know in comments below. I'd also be most happy if you began following me on Twitter so I can let you know just as soon as I post new reports here first on Computerworld.