Apple: iCloud continues growing, now over 125M users

21202updated 06:35 pm EDT, Tue April 24, 2012 Mobile Me service nearing its end

Apple's high sales of iOS devices, along with continuing Mac growth, continues to push the free iCloud service to remarkable levels of membership, with CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealing during the March quarter analyst conference call that iCloud had reached 125 million users. The service appears to have added 25M users in the two months since CEO Tim Cook mentioned a 100M member figure during an analyst talk in February, and 40M members since the year began.The figures and the dates of their announcement suggest a slow decline in the average number of new signups per week (down to about 3.5M per week from the 5M per week average between January and February), but has already reached almost half as many subscribers as even its main competitor GMail, which is estimated to have around 260M users, in about six months. The iCloud service, which was introduced in October of last year, offers free IMAP e-mail and a set of syncing and other services, including storage and the recent introduction of limited hosting (for Photo Journals made with iPhoto for iOS).

Cook has called iCloud "a strategy for the next decade" and echoed former CEO Steve Jobs in saying that it had become the central "hub" of the digital lifestyle, replacing much of the desktop computer's role in that paradigm. The syncing services, which are much improved over the previous Mobile Me service, have "solved a lot of problems people were having" and "made

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