Yesterday Apple announced all of the information on the new iCloud service and what it will have to offer you this fall. A huge difference of iCloud’s music capabilities is that you can’t play songs from within a Web browser you can with both Amazon and Google’s offerings. You’ll either need an iOS device or iTunes running on a computer. True, this does include Windows PCs running iTunes, but forget any non-Apple tablets or phones. This lack of Web access is just less flexible. Nor can you stream music from its online storage—the music must be fully downloaded to play.

One point strongly in Apple’s favor, though, is how you get music up to the cloud. With Amazon and Google, you have to wait for the actual data to upload from your computer or device, which can take many days if you have a large music collection. Apple, by contrast, has high-resolution (256 kbps AAC) versions of 18 million tunes already stored on its servers, so once iCloud checks that you own a song, it uses that copy for future downloads. This means no wait for lengthy uploads, and keep in mind that even broadband connections usually have much slower upload speeds than download speeds.