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It’s long been known that Apple is building a giant datacenter in North Carolina. While no one outside of 1 Infinite Loop is 100% sure what Apple plans to do with the giant storage center, it hasn’t stopped journalists and Mac fanatics from guessing.

Most recently, Nick Bilton writing in the NYTimes:

Apple hopes to replace those discs with a fluffy white iCloud, where software, music, video and your own personal content fly around in the air like happy seagulls at the beach. … Photos and music could begin to flow between computers without the need of pesky wires, and you could even imagine a time when your computer’s operating system isn’t just a desktop, but a cloudtop, where any kind of file saved to your machine is automatically beamed into space, accessible on iPads, iPhones and other Apple devices.

The switch to smaller SSD drives certainly makes the premise of storing all your music, television shows and movie purchases on Apple’s remote servers rather than your personal hard drive a more reasonable premise. When I made the transition from a 512GB standard hard drive to a 240GB SSD, part of the transition was purging a ton of data. A lot of unnecessary media was discarded. Other stuff was pushed off to Amazon S3. Having a limited amount of storage on your local hard drive requires keeping only the essential media cached offline.

In this world of nearly ubiquitous 3G and WiFi connections, it’s not too much of an inconvenience. You’re only as far away from your bits as your your connection is slow.

Apple’s long had iTools/.Mac/MobileMe, but it has never been anything to be blown away by. I don’t mind forking over my $100 a year for the service, but beyond the seamless sync of my calendar and contact information to my iPhone, I don’t really use anything else.

MobileMe sync? Unreliable at best. All the best applications are switching to using Dropbox to sync your data between multiple machines and iOS devices.

iDisk? Again, Dropbox drinks its milkshake.

MobileMe’s Web apps? They are certainly well designed and compelling user experiences, but unlike Google where their services are designed entirely to work in the cloud, Apple has iCal, Address Book and Mail on each Mac and iPhone it ships. There’s very few reasons for me to login to the Me.com site to fetch my email or check my calendar.

If Apple’s North Carolina data center is used as nothing more than another hub for storing your MobileMe data and iTunes purchases, I’ll consider it a letdown. In this 3 screen world, having your data wherever you go is becoming almost essential. Using Dropbox, ZSync or a variety of proprietary solutions is well intentioned, but it’s something Apple should really cover on their end.

I’m hoping for an official suite of APIs and services that sync and store the application data all your iPhone and Mac apps to the cloud. Anytime you create a new blog post in MarsEdit, it automatically saves the data to the cloud. On your iPhone and beat another level of Angry Birds? It saves those changes to the cloud.

Whenever you purchase a new Mac or iPhone, you’ll just sign in with your Apple ID and start pulling the data in automatically from Apple’s cloud services. Google already offers a portion of this idea for their Android platform. Whenever you purchase a new Android phone, all your data is restored as soon as you sign in with your Google ID.

If you’re got an application that runs on both the Mac and iOS it seems plausible that Apple could provide a way to sync data between the two¹. Right now ZSync provides a nice workaround for the problem, but it requires both the iPhone and Mac to be on the same local network. Why can’t Apple handle storing that data on their servers?

I’m sure someone inside Apple has brought up ideas like this before. While I’m hopeful that we’ll see something like it someday, I don’t expect it to be anything in the near term. As storage prices continue to drop and Apple’s fancy new data center continues to grow, I’m confident that millions of Mac and iPhone developers could find creative and useful ways to make use of all that disk space.