Apple planning on offering Mac OS X Lion at "aggressive" price point; will offer some free iCloud services to Lion users?

According to a report from AppleInsider, Apple will be offering Mac OS X Lion users some features of its forthcoming iCloud service free of charge. It's not clear what services of iCloud will be included in this tier that won't cost anything to use, but you can expect it to be very basic. The program would most likely be more of a trial program to show off some of the features of iCloud than an actual service.

People familiar with Apple's plans indicated to AppleInsider that at least one of those secrets is expected to be that at least some of the services included in iCloud will be offered for free to Mac users who make the upgrade to Lion. iCloud is expected to replace the company's existing MobileMe service, which offers e-mail and remote file storage, along with syncing of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events, at a price tag of $99 per year.

That price tag may remain for users who do not make the upgrade to Lion, or for Windows users. But it is expected that the cloud services will become free to Mac users who run the latest version of Mac OS X.

One thing that you can definitely expect the free service of iCloud NOT to include is music streaming. Apple has reportedly been working with the four major music labels to allow users of iCloud to stream music from the Web to supported devices, but since the deal will come at a fairly large price for Apple, the company will likely make iCloud paid to make up for it.

Next, another source claims that Apple will be offering its upcoming Mac OS X Lion operating system at an “aggressive” price point to attract users to upgrade from Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple has traditionally offered new versions of Mac OS X at a $129 price point. This was the case until Mac OS X Snow Leopard hit in 2009. To give more users the ability to upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard, Apple made the price of Snow Leopard $29. It's unclear whether Mac OS X Lion will match Snow Leopard's price of $29, which would seem odd because Lion is a much bigger upgrade than Snow Leopard was, or if it will just be below the normal $129 price.

Apple will be holding its annual Worldwide Developers Conference next week and at the company's opening keynote, more details about iCloud and Mac OS X Lion will be provided.