I love Apple events. I particularly love the build-up to them, when everyone gets over-excited and confuses what they think will be announced with what they want to be announced, rumours and theories with common knowledge "fact", and wild speculation with informed and reasoned theories.

The big thing that has got the nerds excited about today's announcement is "iCloud." What does it mean? Nobody knows, although the most compelling theory I have seen involves upgrades to Time Capsule, turning it from a backup drive and wireless router into something closer to a home server.

But that isn't as much fun as the wild speculation and technology dream wish-lists…

"Cloud Computing" is a term that means different things to different people. On one level, it is the idea of moving the role of a server from computer that sits in your office/basement to another one that sits in a data centre somewhere – putting it all "out on the internet" (ie. "in the cloud.")

On another level, it is computing as a service; not just having a machine that sits somewhere else, but a virtual machine that runs as a service, within a distributed computer system. In other words, instead of having a computer that sits somewhere out there ("in the cloud"), you have a share of a massive network of computers. If you want more computing power, then the cloud service can simply assign more power to your particular account. Instead of adding extra hardware (ie. adding another physical computer), the power comes at a software level.

Now, if I want to do some computing work with my Mac, then I'm limited by the power of the Mac I've bought. Very occasionally, I might be doing some work with video editing, or compiling some software; that will – maybe – use my computers' processing power to its limit. But for the vast majority of the time, the vast majority of my computers' power is sitting idle. If I'm using an iPad or iPhone, then I'm more likely to be hitting the limits of the machine; power efficiency is more important than available power for a mobile/portable device.

But lets say that, instead of using my laptops' processing power when I wanted to do something intensive (like editing video), I had access to a massive data centre. Instead of my available "power" being what is sitting idle on my laptop, it was the idle power on, say, 100 idle laptops. The real limit – the bottleneck that limits everything else – becomes the speed of my internet connection.

Suppose I film something on my iPhone, and want to apply some special effects that require more power than the iPhone has. Say that, instead of copying the video to my Mac, I upload it to a cloud service. And that service lets me do all the clever things that iMovie on my Mac can do. Suddenly, I could use my iPhone, or iPad, or Mac, to control the cloud service when I need to.

iMovie (or Final Cut) wouldn't need to wait around for video processing to be completed. It would just be a case of waiting for the processed, lower resolution video to stream from the server.

Once my recorded tracks had been uploaded by GarageBand, any audio processing could be virtually instantaneous- and I could stream the processed audio from the server.

I wouldn't have to worry about only having 8/16/32Gb of storage space on my iPhone if I could access my 400Gb or so of music, videos, photos and other files from the cloud service. (Technically, if iTunes could recognise what music is in my library, it wouldn't have to upload it all; there is no point in uploading 7.7Mb of "I am the resurrection", for example, if iTunes knows that I own an album called "The Stone Roses" by the Stone Roses, that it has all 11 tracks, and that its 48.7 minutes long. Especially if iTunes also has a receipt for that purchase.)

I wouldn't have to worry about backups, because my valuable files would all be sitting on a server instead of on a fragile hard drive.

What would it mean for Apple? Well, all of a sudden there is a massive value in having a complete ecosystem of mobile, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. If they were all tied to the same underlying system, I could be not just running an iPhone App called "iMovie", but running a service called iMovie with all the power and functionality of the Mac app of the same name.

The device in my pocket wouldn't be a slave to my Mac – the one that holds all my music and video, downloads new podcasts as soon as they are available, and has to be physically wired up to my phone to move files back and forth.

The job that Dropbox does for me right now wouldn't just be on I a single folder on my computer; it would be across all my documents, pictures, videos etc. etc. Immediately accessible from any of my devices with an internet connection.

I don't think that this is what is coming this week. (Except maybe the iTunes stuff.) But this idea could potentially be big enough to warrant building a whole new computing platform around; call it OS11 or OSXi, for example, and bridge Mac OSX with iOS (not dissimilar to what Windows 8 looks like its aiming to do for "PC" and tablets.)

But like I said; I think the wild speculation and technology wish lists are a bit more interesting than informed and reasoned theories…