A patent has emerged which shows how Apple could address the buffering lag time that is a frequent bane to streaming media users. In the patent, Apple describes storing just small segments of media files locally on a user's device. These segments would be the beginning of a song, for example, and would begin to play immediately while the device buffers the rest of the song from the cloud servers. Using this method there would be no lag time between when a user taps on a song to play it on his iPhone and when the song actually begins to play.
Current cloud services often feature a noticeable lag time between when a user selects a song and whe
