Apple Defeats Lawsuit Related to iCloud's Measly 5GB of Free Storage

[Martin Bland]

iCloud is never meant to be free.

The initial 5GB is an engineering shortcut to provide the minimum amount of space to ensure that iCloud itself, and iCloud apps can function, and store minimal configuration without needing special handling in software for the special case of having iCloud enabled with 0 storage.

As much as people love to gripe about iCloud storage cost. It’s cheaper than AWS’ S3. It’s a very good deal.

 

[turbineseaplane]

iCloud is never meant to be free.

The initial 5GB is an engineering shortcut to provide the minimum amount of space to ensure that iCloud itself, and iCloud apps can function, and store minimal configuration without needing special handling in software for the special case of having iCloud enabled with 0 storage.

As much as people love to gripe about iCloud storage cost. It’s cheaper than AWS’ S3. That’s quite amazing.

Ehh.. That isn't really how it's marketed when you read this copy from the Apple website

They do a lot of talk about features and then mention the 5GB for free ... and the upgrading for "even more storage" and how it all fits together in this text (below) really is crafted to give off the impression that iCloud is built in (monopoly) and you're "good to go!" ("keeps your photos, videos, notes, and more safe, automatically backed up...") as is.

They rather carefully construct the vibe to make one feel like "needing more storage" is for others or power users ...when it's basically needed by everyone -- especially if you take photos, which is just about the #1 use case of all iPhones

 

[JohnC1959]

One thing most don’t understand about the backups is that they are completely unnecessary if you understand how your iCloud storage works. Mainly, they back up their iPhones because they don’t want to lose their notes, reminders, or mail and such. But this is all synced to the apps and technically backed up without needing to purchase massive storage to create a backup. You can restore your phone and all your notes, pictures, and whatever else, just syncs back to your phone, completely negating the need to create a backup that takes a huge amount of iCloud space.

Your phone can have way more than that. First off are photos. They can be auto synced to the cloud IF you have enough storage purchased. Then there is all the data associated with the many third party apps which could be a lot. Also you may have many other files (sometimes large) in your files that were downloaded, etc..

 

[I7guy]

This ^^ absolutely

That would solve the problem totally by actually introducing competition and options

That’s not competition. That’s providing services off of someone else’s dime. People don’t understand what competition really is.

 

[Martin Bland]

Ehh.. That isn't really how it's marketed when you read this copy from the Apple website

They do a lot of talk about features and then mention the 5GB for free ... and the upgrading for "even more storage" and how it all fits together in this text (below) really is crafted to give off the impression that iCloud is built in (monopoly) and you're "good to go!" ("keeps your photos, videos, notes, and more safe, automatically backed up...") as is.

They rather carefully construct the vibe to make one feel like "needing more storage" is for others or power users ...when it's basically needed by everyone -- especially if you take photos, which is just about the #1 use case of all iPhones


View attachment 2459547

It’s marketing…

 

[JippaLippa]

Times changed, and just like with ram, 5GB is not enough.

I bought my mother a mac mini and 5GB isn't really enough to keep her photos of the nephews.

That said I can't ask a 65+ year old woman to deal with managing an icloud subscription.

Who needs the storage will still pay, even if apple bumped the basic level to 10 or 15GB.

 

[JohnC1959]

Ehh.. That isn't really how it's marketed when you read this copy from the Apple website

They do a lot of talk about features and then mention the 5GB for free ... and the upgrading for "even more storage" and how it all fits together in this text (below) really is crafted to give off the impression that iCloud is built in (monopoly) and you're "good to go!" ("keeps your photos, videos, notes, and more safe, automatically backed up...") as is.

They rather carefully construct the vibe to make one feel like "needing more storage" is for others or power users ...when it's basically needed by everyone -- especially if you take photos, which is just about the #1 use case of all iPhones


View attachment 2459547

Yes the statement you showed can be misconstrued by some but only by those that have no idea how much data they have or really understand how much 5GB is. Such people will be confused by all sorts of advertising such as the various tiers of service provided by their ISP.

 

[PeterKeller]

Why can't they charge us for what we use and not have storage tiers?

 

[Schnegg]

Ok, so it‘s only figuratively criminal.

 

[JohnC1959]

Why can't they charge us for what we use and not have storage tiers?

Interesting idea. The main issue I can see (which people may be ok with) is that every time you sync/backup, etc. you may get a notice demanding more money which you may not be ready for. Or your monthly bill keeps changing and that may not fit your budget

 

[baryon]

I think what sucks is that Photos insists on uploading all your photos and videos to the cloud, despite the fact that you just need it to send over the new ones and you could easily just store the rest locally. This is what My Photo Stream was supposed to do, but they made is suck so bad (it just didn't sync new photos for several days) to force you to use iCloud.

I think having the lowest tier of iCloud be so cheap is good, but they do kind of force you to use it. Factor in that you're probably already subscribed to Google Drive too, because the two don't have the same features, and then maybe MyAirBridge and Adobe Creative ******** Cloud, and whatever other integrated cloud service everything tends to come with nowadays, and you're paying quite a lot monthly just for cloud services.

It sucks that you can't just have one cloud storage service that you can connect to all sorts of services, but I know it's not just about storage, it's also about the features like syncing and app connectivity. Well it's a bit of a mess.

 

[frou]

The purpose of this really cheap service ($0.99 / month) is to get you psychologically over the hump of paying for your first Apple Service. Once you're signed up for one, you're more likely to consider signing up for the others (because you're no longer a "I won't pay for services" person).

 

[I7guy]

The purpose of this really cheap service ($0.99 / month) is to get you psychologically over the hump of paying for your first Apple Service. Once you're signed up for one, you're more likely to consider signing up for the others (because you're no longer a "I won't pay for services" person).

I signed up for Apple TV before adding more iCloud storage.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

This is just how Tim Cook operates these days...Less on customer experience, more on bottom-line.

Either way, it's a bad look for the 5GB free iCloud storage. They obviously thought the 5GB was sufficient in 2012 - with everything growing over the past 12 years (file sizes and what we store), this should have at least increased.

And also, I don't care if it's one penny a month - why nickle & dime customers? Just a bad experience.

Well, if it’s a Tim Cook problem allow me to ask.
Was the policy that was in place during the vast majority of Jobs’s second era better?
Mobile me was $99 a year, no excuses. Even if you wanted to use features like Find My iPhone, it was $99 a year.
And the only synchronization that was available was mail, contacts and calendars.
You could technically upload photos to it, but it was far from an automatic process like the cloud services we have today.
So given that there wasn’t even a free option back then, wouldn’t that also be considered “ nickel and diming”?

 

[bk125]

I think the problem here is that you don't have any other choice than to pay Apple for storage. You can't connect physical storage easily, you can't use google drive or dropbox to make backups of your system data. So they design the hardware so that $1.50 of extra storage costs the user $100, and you can't supply your own microSD card—which forces people to use cloud storage. And then they design the software so that you have no other choice but to use Apple cloud storage—and for proper digital hygiene, you do need to do this, otherwise you could get your phone stolen and lose tens of thousands of photos. They're certainly exploiting their market position to charge users more than they would be able to if they didn't prevent competition in these areas.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

At this point, the days of Apple ever doing anything for the simple good of their customers are gone.

Well, those days never existed in the first place, so yeah.
Even the first Apple I computers were built to repay a financial obligation Jobs had made.

 

[redheeler]

It's absolutely amazing how much whining and complaining (and apparently lawyering) people will do over $1 a month.

And really the only reason they charge that at all is so that people don't abandon accounts with tons of data that Apple has to store forever.

I have the $1 / month iCloud plan because of the ability to use custom email domains (definitely worth the price). I was on the free tier before. I do still think the free tier should be increased to bring it in line with other cloud services, there isn't much justification for not doing so.

There is no expectation that your data is stored forever. Cloud services can and will delete your data, especially if you're on the free tier. Always keep local backups of everything.

 

[AngrofMayfair]

The real crime here is not being able to pay for iCloud extra storage per year instead of per month.

No, the real crime is not offering any option between 200GB and 2TB…
I need around 300GB, I would be happy to pay for 500GB or maybe even 1TB but I will never use anything close to the 2TB I currently pay for

 

[dannys1]

If you need more storage then buy the appropriate level of iPad / iPhone device in the first place. If you have thousands of photos then you have a choice - store them on the device and get one with enough memory... or pay for a cloud storage service such as iCloud.

Or a third option, back them up to another device or drive. You can still sync with a cable (and over wifi!) on a Mac

 

[tranceme]

It is a measly amount, but I'm sure tons of people use their iPhones without subscribing to storage. In fact, I would guess its the vast majority.

Stupid is not always criminal.

Exactly. It's not much and might as well. But, on the flip side, so sick of everything costing monthly. It does add up. It's a principle thing. I know, a bad one...

 

[joshuaiz]

I know this will likely never happen but Apple could offer free cloud Time Machine backups for every device that just work: no config, no need for a separate drive. They could limit to 5TB across devices on the free tier and charge for more if needed.

It would not only keep people in the ecosystem for much longer with a relatively small investment and would also get people to switch.

Ready for "this will never work" or "Apple will never give up this revenue" replies but they used to charge for every operating system and that is a thing of the past...so why not?

 

[dannys1]

No, the real crime is not offering any option between 200GB and 2TB…
I need around 300GB, I would be happy to pay for 500GB or maybe even 1TB but I will never use anything close to the 2TB I currently pay for

True i'm on 2TB and 1TB would be plenty.

 

[Fatboy71]

I’m still on the 5GB plan. It’s pretty easy to stay under the limit if you don’t store your photos there…

I was until recently, but the largest thing iCloud was getting used for with me was my Health data (I don't store photos either on iCloud). So I wasn't willing to delete some of my Health data to free up some room, so I got the 50GB option at 99p per month.

 

[Fatboy71]

It's absolutely amazing how much whining and complaining (and apparently lawyering) people will do over $1 a month.

And the same people wouldn't give a second thought and dropping more than that on a coffee.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

100% agree -- What I don't understand is folks who defend them and haven't updated their takes on all this to reflect the realities of modern Apple under Tim Cook

Other than the name and the marketing -- the company bears very little resemblance to the one so many of us used to love

It's been fully "Wall Street'd" and "Ops-Guy'd"
i.e. Fully Tim "Cooked"

Just 20 years ago, in 2004…
It was $129 for the yearly Mac OS X update, and you were lucky if your three-year-old machine would get them. Today it’s free and they usually support at least seven years worth of machines, sometimes more.
In 2004 you had to purchase each new yearly version of iLife for $99 if you wanted to stay up-to-date. These days not only are all those apps included, but if you purchased a Mac 11 years ago you are still entitled to updates of those apps from the App Store.
In 2004, FinalCut Pro was over $1000, and again you had to purchase that again every single time there was a new version if you wanted to stay up-to-date. These days, even if you purchased FinalCut Pro 13 years ago the day it released, you are still getting updates to this day. Including the recent release of FinalCut Pro 11, that was completely free to all existing customers.
In 2004, apple‘s closest equivalent to today’s iCloud, .Mac, was $99.95 a year with absolutely no free option. No free 5 GB, nothing. That’s $160 a year in today’s money, certainly more expensive than a dollar a month.

And by the way, 20 years ago, Apple products were known to be expensive as well.
There were plenty of cheap $100 $200 MP3 players on the market.
The top of the line iPod from the time was $499 ($833.86 in today’s money) for 40 GB and $599 ($1,000.97) in today’s money for 60 GB. These are iPhone 16 Pro prices.

Absolutely no idea where this myth came from where Apple under Steve Jobs was this charitable company that gave everything away for free, but it’s absolutely not true.
These days you can buy a $300 iPad and it’ll get all of its software updates for free, it’ll come with both iLife and iWork for free, it’s about a third of the price an iPod would’ve been 20 years ago, and it comes with a cloud service for free.
As someone who has been an Apple customer since the Jobs era, the value you get even with their cheapest products today absolutely smashes the value of what they had to offer 20 years ago.