To say that Apple has changed your life on more than one occasion wouldn’t be an overstatement. Think about it: Just a decade ago, the company that Steve Jobs built was getting ready to release its first-generation iPod to the world. That iPod has become the standard in MP3 players across the world—and has changed the way you buy and listen to all of your music.

Then came the iPhone. Though it took years of development and thousands of rumors for you to finally get your hands on one, the iPhone changed the way you communicate with your friends and family. Not only did it allow you to combine the bulky cell phone and iPod that you were carrying around everywhere, it also allowed you to download apps from Apple’s App Store and, eventually, became the go-to device for things like Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.

Most recently, the iPad came into existence and, while it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it’ll be remembered for most at this point, it’s a device that changed the ways millions of schools, businesses, and regular people live their lives. In five years, expect everyone to have some sort of tablet computer in their back pocket at almost all times—which will be a direct reflection of how useful the iPad has become in today’s society.

And now, Apple is getting ready to release information about their latest invention called iCloud—and it might just be the latest Apple product to change the way you do things in your life.

Details are still limited—this is Apple after all all, a company that’s notoriously stingy with details—but come next week at the Worldwide Developer Conference, Jobs will announce iCloud officially and reveal exactly what it is in detail. But as of right now, all signs point to iCloud being used to help you virtually store your music collection. And thanks to deals that Apple has already struck with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI—as well as a pending deal with Universal Music Group—plus a brand-new, state-of-the-art $1 billion data center in North Carolina, you should expect this to be a big deal.

So, how exactly will it work? Well, for starters, it sounds like iCloud will be a subscription service, meaning you’ll have to add one more recurring payment to your credit card every month. However, this won’t be like all those other subscriptions that you never use. Instead, iCloud will (hopefully!) allow you to access all of the music files that you have on any Mac OS X or iOS device. That means if you’ve got a Mac, an iPhone, an iPod Touch, and an iPad, you can stream your music through any of the four devices over an active WiFi or mobile network connection—without having to be on the device that you downloaded the the music on.

Essentially, it’ll put your entire music collection right at your fingertips no matter where you are and it’ll eliminate the need to sync your music to your iPhone, iPod, and iPad every time you get a new song—seamlessly. So you can empty that drawer full of USB cords you’ve got laying around directly into the trash now.

Of course, this is all speculation right now. As we said, Apple is notoriously stingy with details, so there could be way more to this than we think. In fact, we fully expect the cloud to handle more than just music. Apple also has to prove that they can keep this cloud service affordable enough to make it worth the price to the average consumer. But if we know Apple like we think we do, we fully expect next week’s announcement to be a big deal. And we expect it to change our lives.

Hey, they’ve done it over and over and over again in the past. So, why not dream big? Here’s to hoping that iCloud sends us directly to Cloud 9.

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