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Here come the complaints that Google and Microsoft offer more storage for less money, from those that don't understand that Google and Microsoft use the data you store to index and sell you ads based on your data. Apple doesn't index your data in the same way so it's far from apples to apples. It's far more profitable for Google to give you free storage space and then data mine it than charge for it.

Google does not mine our Google Drive data, especially not for marketing. Source here. Of course, I cannot say how defiant they can be once a government agency asks them to part with user data.
 
Perhaps the biggest reason for the jump in iCloud space is a new desktop syncing feature coming to macOS Sierra. In the new operating system, all files stored on the desktop or in the Documents folder of a Mac are automatically uploaded to iCloud to make them available across a wide range of devices

Soooo many people are going to get "burned" by this automatic feature until they figure it out. iCloud jammed full. Hopefully this feature will be optional to turn on.

Now everyone is going to have to think twice whether they really want to save something to the Desktop or Documents folder. ... At every save.... Let's see... Do I have enough iCloud storage for this??? Do I want this document stored on the www?

The Desktop & Documents folder now are going to need to be approached with caution.

I foresee a lot of folder aliases being moved to the desktop now with Sierra
 
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Darn, I was hoping they'd upgrade the free tier at the event.

Apple should really give you storage depending on your devices. Have a 64 GB iPhone? You have 64 GB of storage. Have a 256 GB MBP too? You have 330 GB.

Not a bad idea, but at some point things end up costing money.

Would this 'free' storage be for YOUR life? Free for the life of the device? Free just during the original warranty period? What happens when one of those devices dies and you replace it? Do you lose your original allotment? If so, what happens to your stored data?

Sadly, the notion of paying a monthly fee for something accomplishes a few key objectives:
  • it keeps you cognizant that you are utilizing a finite resource
  • it makes you aware how much of that resource you are consuming
  • it encourages you to be frugal with that resource, storing what you need and deleting what you don't
  • it allows YOU, the customer, to determine your needs
That said, I can see a scenario where you get an iCloud credit when you buy a new device.
 
Soooo many people are going to get "burned" by this automatic feature until they figure it out. iCloud jammed full. Hopefully this feature will be optional to turn on.

Now everyone is going to have to think twice whether they really want to save something to the Desktop or Documents folder. ... At every save.... Let's see... Do I have enough iCloud storage for this??? Do I want this document stored on the www?

The Desktop & Documents folder now are going to need to be approached with caution.

I foresee a lot of folder aliases being moved to the desktop now with Sierra
From what I see online, this feature has to be turned on. Is that not the case?
How to Enable iCloud Drive Desktop and Documents in macOS Sierra
 
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I'm still trying to decide between OneDrive and Dropbox for my main storage, but I'm just now starting to test the waters with iCloud Drive for basic things. So far, it's worked fine.

2TB and no selective sync...hmmm
 
Great news! I'd love to see Apple extend macOS's optimized storage feature to include the user's entire Home folder then I would be able to take advantage of these higher tiers.

Edit: On second thought, I guess an optimized stored Home Folder in iCloud might be redundant because of local Photo and iTunes libraries in the Photos and Music folders. I'll just have to remember to move stuff over to the Documents folder that I want up in iCloud.
 
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Just two thoughts on this:

1. I don't know about you folks, but receiving - every month - an email with a reminder that my icloud plan will be renewed for yet another month and a few days later the email with the invoice is just plain annoying. It's 24 mails a year... have an annual subscription.

2. It's about value for money: more space for the same money or cheaper for the same volume, both options are welcome. However, if you compare one service to another, take also the quality (security, reliability, continuity, up-/download speed, sharing features, ohter features ...) into account. I've tried google drive, onedrive, iCloud and Dropbox. In my experience, Dropbox is the king, the real leader. Nothing comes close to it. Second rated would be iCloud (home advantage): Even though it is the least evolved in terms of features, it didn't give me issues. It's slower in comparison to Dropbox and that's why I use iCloud mainly for photos app and back-up while my files are in Dropbox). Onedrive is a mess, specially with naming issues (special characters, punctuation, ...), synching and it crashed on my MBP (El capitan). Google drive on my MBP would crash as well continuously.
 
I really don't mind the pricing, it seems fair, and $12/year for 50GB is nothing. I used to pay over $100/year for .Mac with 10GB. But I do wish they would bump the free tier, 5GB is not enough for anyone with more than one device. I would also prefer an annual option.

Apple could also charge 1 dollar month for security updates or for browsing the App store…

The point is, backup is a service I expect to be included in the product, the same way I expect there are no virus in the apps I download from the App store.

Apple should recognise that their brand is about making great products, that just works.

Being pestered with iCloud popups and risk losing your photos, because they wanna make 12 lousy bucks selling something that you can get for free elsewhere. Come on.
 
Would be nice if they dropped prices on lower tiers. Or allow families to share a large data bucket.
I agree completely. Considering the fact that a family is likely to have multiple shared photo streams as well, it would be efficient.

$2.99 for 200GB is less than 10¢ a day - how much closer to free do you want to get ;)
And 200GB is about 0.42cents per hour, or 0.00012cents per second. Also, it's $299 per century. I don't get how breaking it down into different time periods makes it any easier to pay. I think the point is that storage is cheap, icloud doesn't really offer any huge value-add features, and thus it should be priced competitively, which would be far less than $3/month for 200GB.

I would pay for a new car, if and only the manufacturer paid my tax, insurance, petrol, and MOTs.
ZipCar? or, GM has a competitor called Maven that seems to be growing. That seems to meet your criteria.
 
Roll the cost into the price of the phone if need be (I would argue that the cost of the devices already justifies this 'free' service and their profit margins appear to support that notion).

As they run out of new shinies/killer features to add to their phones, this could be an interesting new selling point that I would actually care about (the current experience of iCloud constantly pestering me to upgrade my storage on both my phone and computer is having the opposite effect of making me want to leave).

Huh! Giving $540 of services for free (over 2 years)! What kind of margins do you think they make on a phone. 90%?
Not only that, 2T * 1 B users is 1 million Petabyte of storage. I'm pretty sure they don't have it, and in fact, no company has that much storage anywhere.

Even a measly 50G would still be 25000 Petabyte.

And well, you also have to give all those people actual access to this massive amount of storage, build it and put it somewhere.

None of those things are as trivial as you make it seem.

When you offer a service free, you really have to think what it actually brings to the person buying the phone.
If only 10% really use it, well everyone is subsidizing these people.
 
I really wish they would offer a 500GB plan for $4.99. I'm on the 200GB plan right now and have about 60GB available. My usage is growing very slowly and it'll probably take another year or so to hit the 200GB mark. So you can imagine how wasteful it would feel to have to jump to a $10 a month 1TB plan!

My main usage of iCloud is the Photo library. It's a great way to keep my photos in sync across all devices. I really don't use it heavily for anything else. Device backups sure, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to photos+videos.

In fact I'd be more tempted to simply remove less-often-viewed videos from my library (and just keep them in a folder on my Mac) than upgrade to the 1TB plan when it goes over 200GB.
Can you enable iCloud photos without having it back up the camera roll?

I wouldn't mind having a seamless way to sync compressed photos across my devices, but I don't want my camera roll and videos automatically backed up to iCloud all the time. I take a lot of reference photos that I only keep for a short time, I would like to pick and choose what gets added to my library.
 
Gee, thanks, Apple. You've reminded me how ludicrous it is that I have given you almost $1,600 for two iOS devices that have a combined storage capacity of 144 GB. If I want to back those two devices up to iCloud, I must pay you $36 every year for a paltry 200 GB of cloud storage.
 
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Huh! Giving $540 of services for free (over 2 years)!

It costs them a fraction of that amount. You can buy a terabyte for $25 and I'm sure Apple can get an even better deal if they buy many petabytes.

Even a measly 50G would still be 25000 Petabyte.

Apple has manufactured several hundred millions phones with more than 50 GB, so why shouldn't they be able to put the same amount on their servers?
 
It would be nice if Apple would include a one year subscription with a device purchase (not a measly 5GB)... so that if I'm always buying different apple devices each year I would always have a free subscription.
The problem is the hordes of users who would lose data and then start complaining when the one year free subscription is over.
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Funny to see people that believe if you have multiple devices you should get more storage.

Having multiple devices likely means you use your devices more which results in more space taken up but how it is Apple's fault that you use your device more or less than someone else and why should they owe you anything because you're a heavy user?

I'm interested to know how those that claim Apple should give more storage PER DEVICE rather than per Apple ID, justify the reasoning?

Well, you get 5GB free storage per Apple ID. And you can have more than one. It _does_ make more sense to have not free storage per Apple ID, but free storage per device that you purchased new. Possibly depending on purchase price, so someone buying an iPad Pro gets more than someone buying an iPad Mini.
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Are we sure their servers can handle it? /s
Whether they _can_? No. Whether they should be able to? Yes.
 
Huh! Giving $540 of services for free (over 2 years)! What kind of margins do you think they make on a phone. 90%?

Where do you get the $540 over two years figure? If I buy a 128 GB iPhone (which I did), Apple could roll the $36/year cost of 200 GB of iCloud storage into the cost of the phone so at least it's not as much of a slap in the face as their current system is. That's $72 over two years...nowhere near the $540 figure that you mentioned.
 
If iCloud Photo Library worked reliably with large photo collections this would be the great news for me. I had a 0.8TB library and it was nothing short of a disaster. I had 7GB of unremovable thumbnails on my phone, the syncs didn't work properly and my laptop filled until it crashed. Google Photos uses 1GB for everything. I have to use the awful Lightroom and other cloud sync services for my RAWs.
 
And Apple, please don't say it would cost you too much. You are currently severely overcharging for memory, and with compression, redundancy and how cheap hard disk space is today ($25 / terabyte) there is really no excuse, if creating great products was Apple's primary objective.

Anything that takes lots of space (video, photos, audio) is already compressed, so compression isn't going to help.

Redundancy? Redundancy means making multiple redundant copies, so that's not going to help

$25 per terabyte? Not if you want the data to be _safe_. A single hard drive _will_ fail eventually. Systems that store one TB of data _and make 100% sure it doesn't get lost_ cost an awful lot more than $25 per terabyte.
 
I signed up to comment on this very article: my fiancé and I subscribe to the 200GB plan, but these plans should really be as close to free as possible. If they want us to use the cloud, why not make cloud storage as easily accessible as their phones and make it stupid cheap?
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I'd jump onboard a family share 2TB plan.

Maybe you don't live in a climate where this is necessary, or the expense is otherwise trivial to you, but do you know what it costs to keep your living place cool with air conditioning during the summer?

Cloud storage exists somewhere, and that is essentially in gigantic warehouses full of server rooms that have servers stacked over each other. Servers like the computer or laptop in your house give off heat and when they're working hard they give off even more heat, just like your computer. Then you have a load of them stacked over each other, bunches of stacks in a room. This takes a lot of energy to keep cool.

Then you have to pay the people who service them, and they get paid a nice penny, because think about how frustrating it is when Google, or facebook, or icloud, or any other major online service you use goes down. The people who fix that are very talented at doing this as quickly as possible. Plus, all of that data doesn't just exist once. It has to be backed up so if a server gets taken offline, or crashes, your info is also safe elsewhere to be accessed without having the terrifying conversation with support about why your info is suddenly "lost."

I use icloud a lot, I just don't have an issue paying the current tier prices.
 
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