At that price, it might almost be cheaper to buy a couple of backup drives, mail one to the opposite coast, and call it good.
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Apple Adds New 2TB iCloud Storage Tier for $19.99 Per Month
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You can do this today using iCloud Photo Sharing. No need to actually share the albums with another person and no charge from Apple for the storage.
$2.99 for 200GB is less than 10¢ a day - how much closer to free do you want to get
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expa...5449&sr=1-5&keywords=4+tb+external+hard+drive
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While Apple could kick a user in the dick every time your phone got a call and people would still support them.
lol have fun when that drive eventually fails - this is where redundancy on a massive server scale comes into play.
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The storage tiers don't make any sense—especially this new one. Each tier has increasing bang for your buck except for the new one. It's lame to have tiers at $0.99/mo and $2.99/mo and then jump all the way up to $9.99/mo. That's a big jump for many people, and hardly anyone needs that much space.
Anyone who has had an iPhone for a few years and takes photos and an occasional video will go beyond 200GB. At this rate, especially with things like 4K video, people are going to be forced into ever-higher tiers with no easy way to manage their library so that only part of it is stored in the cloud. You might say that's good for business. I say it's user-hostile to hold them captive like that without an easy alternative, especially when your service (iCloud) isn't exactly known for being a premium offering. And yet they charge premium pricing compared to premium services like Dropbox. I have a 110Mbps internet connection and I can't even get my 4K videos to stream from iCloud most of the time though indefinite buffering or playing 1-2 seconds at a time and then buffering for 20-30 seconds, which means I can't even watch what I record after my iPhone dumps it to the cloud. Why is there no optimization in the stream? I don't have trouble streaming 4K content on my rMBP when doing tests.
Apple had a long way to go with iCloud and they aren't doing themselves any favors by being user hostile. All I get is a message saying that I'm running out of space and give us more money. It should be easy to delineate what is stored in the cloud vs. locally on something like a Mac. Or even let larger devices like a 256GB iPad Pro store most things and only keep the last year in the cloud synced to the iPhone. They also don't provide a way for a family to share storage. If that were the case then I'd be less upset. They let us share everything else. It should be like a shared pool of usage.
Amazon cloud. $59.99 unlimited everything for the whole family. Never going back to Apple and their ridiculous cloud offerings.
That's not what Apple and Tim Cook has said and wants investors to focus on.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-services-q3-2016-7
Tim Cook: Apple's services business will be 'the size of a Fortune 100 company by next year'
Apple CEO Tim Cook tells CNBC that by this time next year, the company's services business — which includes Apple Music, the App Store, and iCloud — will be "the size of a Fortune 100 company by next year."
Cook was on the air to celebrate Apple's solid third quarter, beating Wall Street expectations on both earnings and revenue.
As for services specifically, Apple reported revenue of $5.976 billion, down slightly from $5.991 billion the quarter before, but up 19% from the same period in 2015.
Apple also boasts in a press release that this quarter saw Apple's highest App Store revenue ever, seeing 37% growth from last quarter, though it doesn't disclose specifics.
And while there's been some skepticism about the very hardware-focused Apple suddenly finding a groove in cloud-based services, Cook is apparently optimistic about the segment's future earnings potential. Apple is reporting that each Apple customer is spending more on apps and services than ever before.
In related news, Apple sold 40.4 million iPhones last quarter, ahead of expectations. Even with that high number, iPhone sales are down 14.9% from the same time last year, a trend that has analysts a little worried. That's why Apple is investing so much in its services business: If you can't sell more iPhones and iPads, then the logical next step is trying to make more money off the customers you already have.
So the challenge for Apple going forward is for Cook to put his money where his mouth is and keep showing some real growth in the services business.
With Apple supposedly moving from AWS to Google's servers, maybe I can call this a "Google Tax"?
I'll stick with Amazon's Cloud. Yes, it's $60 per year but it's unlimited. Yes, it's $60 per year unless you shop around - I got a free year as a bonus when I bought AppleCare at a steep discount for a 2012 Mini Server and another year stacked during Amazon's 1-day $5 sale around Black Friday, so 2 years of UL file storage for $5 (I was going to buy AC for my Mini anyway and I had a free year of Prime too) pretty much can't be beat IMHO.
With Office 365 Home's 5TB for my 5 accounts and bonus space on Dropbox I won't be paying for more than my paltry 5GB of iCloud. Apple, there's better alternatives out there, so try again...
I'll stick with Amazon's Cloud. Yes, it's $60 per year but it's unlimited. Yes, it's $60 per year unless you shop around - I got a free year as a bonus when I bought AppleCare at a steep discount for a 2012 Mini Server and another year stacked during Amazon's 1-day $5 sale around Black Friday, so 2 years of UL file storage for $5 (I was going to buy AC for my Mini anyway and I had a free year of Prime too) pretty much can't be beat IMHO.
With Office 365 Home's 5TB for my 5 accounts and bonus space on Dropbox I won't be paying for more than my paltry 5GB of iCloud. Apple, there's better alternatives out there, so try again...
I don't agree with Apple still having the 5GB free tier, but $0.99/mo for literally ten times as much per month is a great deal I think.
They're being stingy, but you're also being stingy. It's just a buck a month, or a lunch meal per year.
They're being stingy, but you're also being stingy. It's just a buck a month, or a lunch meal per year.
You should start your own cloud storage business and offer 200GB of storage for less than $3/month.
This is why I have to do iTunes backups of my phone and iPad, and backup photos to OneDrive, where I have 30GB for free. 5GB is ridiculous!
Outrageously high prices... let's compare.
FileFactory.com gives you UNLIMITED STORAGE... for LIFE.. for $299
I currently have 45 TB of data stored... raw photos and video back-up files. Yes, you read that right.. 45 terrabytes.
So you want to tell me Apple can't do the same type of deal that a company 1/1000 of its size can?
FileFactory.com gives you UNLIMITED STORAGE... for LIFE.. for $299
I currently have 45 TB of data stored... raw photos and video back-up files. Yes, you read that right.. 45 terrabytes.
So you want to tell me Apple can't do the same type of deal that a company 1/1000 of its size can?
I pay $2.99 for the 200GB tier. I think it's a fair price, and is a convenient storage solution for some of my stuff. But, my concern embracing iCloud Drive fully is the fact that my local Mac storage is fully encrypted. Anything I store on iCloud can easily be handed over to anyone who gains access to my Apple ID, which transfers over the internet all the time. My Mac's login password and FileVault key is only in my head.
That said, with tiers as high as 2TB, why not allow Mac users to do full scale Time Machine backups of their entire system to iCloud now if they are willing to pay for the space and deal with the lengthy initial backup? Perhaps iCloud can't handle the sparsebundle setup of Time Machine?
That said, with tiers as high as 2TB, why not allow Mac users to do full scale Time Machine backups of their entire system to iCloud now if they are willing to pay for the space and deal with the lengthy initial backup? Perhaps iCloud can't handle the sparsebundle setup of Time Machine?
There is a way to share iCloud files with non-icloud users. Mail Drop allows you to email files up to 5GB in size using iCloud.
Not exactly like Dropbox but in practical terms, it gets the job done effectively.
You do realize that (generally) catering to users such as yourself with plans likes this has proven to not be sustainable, correct? Admittedly, the price for unlimited storage (I wonder if they offer SLAs on rates for ingress/egress, though. Really sucks if it takes you a month to bring that 45TB back down, and you had better pray our ISP has no caps) is somewhat higher than I have seen. But Microsoft, Code42, Box, DropBox . . . and others have all had to reprice or drop drop unlimited plans altogether because of people (perhaps rightly) taking advantage of problematic marketing . . .
Apple clearly has no intention in going into that kind of business, and I do not blame them. A lot of things can legitimately be argued, but 1) large amounts of storage for free in perpetuity, or 2) absolutely gargantuan amounts of storage for some one-time base price without throttle limits are things that just do not compute over time.