iTunes 11’s Mysterious Cloud Icon

Matthew Panzarino:

Just to the right of the button almost anyone who is signed into iTunes will see a small cloud icon appear. Clicking on it does nothing, there is no tooltip and it sometimes animates in various ways. This has led to confusion about its purpose. When I saw it I felt I knew right away what it was, but thought I’d do a little testing to make sure my hypothesis was correct.

If you’re wondering what the cloud icon is, it’s actually very simple: It means that some part of your library is in Apple’s cloud.

It’s not quite that simple, though. Read through to the end for the update.

★ Monday, 10 December 2012