There is a theme coming from Cupertino, which was made slightly more apparent yesterday when they removed storage from the Apple TV … the master plan.

Apple are clearly going for the “your family has one master computer, and you sync lots of (smaller/lower cost) devices with it” distribution model … all of these devices are available from Apple. iPads are replacing laptops (for some), and people have long bought into the iPod revolution to play there digital media on the move. The AppleTV is a bit different as you can stream rented content from Apple to it, but the only way to get your own content on it, is to stream it from another device. This would ether be from your computer, or an iOS device which you have already synced with your computer.

Although “the cloud” is clearly the future, it isn’t yet ready for prime time. Until everyone in their normal every day lives has access to a (constant) high speed internet connection, the cloud is merely a pipe dream in terms of using it for all of your data driven tasks.

Don’t get me wrong, the clouds time will come, but in the next 5 years ? … I’m not so sure.

At the moment client applications (native applications that sync with a server and then cache the data for offline use), are the correct implementation for the the moment. As far as streaming movies go, Apple knows that all AppleTVs will live in a home, and therefore (hopefully) have the bandwidth required to play HD footage.

Although people will disagree, the master plan is probably the right choice for the start of this decade, but the cloud’s time will come.