And just like that, Apple stops trying to win on the web.

Obviously last night's announcements during the Stevenote at WWDC left me giddy.

When the next version of OS X is released in July, it'll cost $29.99 and only be available via digital download. Apple's commoditizing the desktop/laptop not by diminishing its value, but by 'demoting it to just another device'. Bold and ballsy.

iOS 5, coming in the fall, is a strange bag of candy. The new Notifications should finally fix what has long been a sore knee for the iPhone faithful. Wireless syncing, OTA delta updates and limited background auto-downloading helpt iOS catch up to Android and Windows 7 in a few technical areas. I'm definitely going to enjoy the new camera features.

The odd thing, though, is the Twitter integration. System-level. This means there are two system-level accounts available on iOS: Apple ID and Twitter. None of the other supported account types, such as Exchange, Gmail or Yahoo, are supported in this way. It's very odd that Apple should hop on one particular bandwagon.

I recall seeing that OS X Lion supported Web Accounts, where you can enter your credentials for Google or Yahoo or Facebook and use those in relevant apps, such as Mail and Contacts. I'd have thought that this kind of system-wide architecture, supporting a number of large web companies, would be the way to go for iOS. Maybe that's coming. Maybe Facebook just played hardball and Apple dropped them like MobileMe, who knows.

Speaking of which...

MobileMe was a $99-a-year suite of web services that replaced the ailing .Mac suite before it, and while the web apps for Mail, Calendar and Contacts were very slick (and I mean very slick) the whole thing just wasn't worth it. MobileMe offered web galleries for photos, but initially you couldn't view these on your iPhone (and later you needed a special app to do so) and you could only upload photos from your iPhone via e-mail, five at a time.

Steve publicly flushed MobileMe on stage with a biting quip when he introduced iCloud, a new broad-reaching service free for iOS users. This offers live syncing of mail, calendars, even photos, across iOS devices, Macs and PCs. I'm salivating with anticipation, I'm not ashamed to admit.

MobileMe will continue to operate for 12 months and then be shut down, and Steve more or less gave the impression that iCloud is his company's answer to it. But this means something very crucial:

Apple is giving up on web apps.

Without MobileMe, there are no online photo galleries, no web mail, no online calendars. Apple feels that if you have your iPhone in your pocket, you're all set, and that other services do a better job of pleasing the masses than they could do themselves.

Apple knows well and good the value and power of the web, and its importance. They know well and good that not everyone can install iCloud on their work machine, and that if you're on the street and your phone gets nicked, you'd be pretty fucked as an iCloud customer -- you wouldn't be able to walk into an Internet café and look up a phone number from your address book. You need an iCloud capable device with your credentials.

So it seems they're just surrendering. Let Flickr take care of photos on the web. Let Twitter be the social network. Let Apple be Apple.