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

[Starfia]

“Clearly” is doing a lot of work here…especially for general or basic users who are most likely the ones using the 5GB free tier

Showing you the problem is very different than understanding how and what to do about it while being, understandably, worried about what happens to your data

"Here are the apps using the most storage, from largest to smallest. Review the largest files right here. You can delete them right from here if you like. Or you can buy more storage if you like. Here's a link, right at the top, to learn more about how iCloud works."

How much clearer could it be? How isn't "understanding how and what to do about it" addressed by that?

 

[tranceme]

Fighting this lawsuit probably costed more than just raising the free storage tier

Yeah, bad plan and you're not thinking as a lawyer. if you concede, the next day they file another lawsuit saying the same thing with higher tier. Plus, lawyers for class actions normally don't care about out of the little guys like us. They care about getting paid on the class action damages. So, Apple would pay that...AND have to raise tier or reword their marketing. Either way, raising tier would save them money.

 

[jayducharme]

I've been saying for years that Apple should give 5gb of free storage for each Apple device you purchase. So if you bought a Mac, iPhone and iPad, you'd have 15gb. That seems reasonable to me.

 

[sdm1985]

If Apple gave us other third party back-up options, these current tiers would not exist.

 

[CopyChief]

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.

Right? And in the beginning, iPod touch owners had to pay to get the first round of iPhone OS updates.

 

[hans1972]

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

Some of us don't have a problem with company charging for products and services. I don't expect anything free from anyone including huge companies. I don't want a system where companies are expected to give something away for free.

And we didn't become Apple customers to save money or to get the most hardware or services for the least amount of money.

I have never spent more money on computers, phones and similar products after I become an Apple customer. Yet, I'm extremely satisfied.

 

[hans1972]

Apple has truly perfected gaslighting until federally mandated otherwise.

At this point, the days of Apple ever doing anything for the simple good of their customers are gone. Everything is an entire cash grab of services at this point as hardware sales slow and the lack of a truly innovative product from them since the iPhone remains unseen.

Providng a service for money is a good thing!

What's problematic is demanding or expecting things for free. That's borderline evil.

 

[hans1972]

Conversely, the most valuable company in the world shouldn't be trying to nickel and dime folks out of an extra dollar per month -- most especially given the premium pricing of all their products to begin with.

It flies in the face of how they like to market their brand and be perceived by consumers

No, it absolutely supports how Apple wants to be perceived. Apple doesn't want to be known as a freebie company or a company that gives discounts or have cheap products. They want to be perceived as a company with premium products and services which costs money but it's still worth it.

Being known for having cheap or free products and services can be extremely damaging for a companies revenue and profit.

 

[hans1972]

They also don't obligate to give iMovie/Garageband for free - it's a bout customer experience. If it was a free open market where you could easily pick your cloud provider, people would move to competitors.

And they still aren't able to abandon the Apple ecosystem.

Everything has been bad for almost 15 years, but leaving for Windows and Android seems out of the question.

 

[Siliconguy]

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.

iCloud does not work the way I want so I dumped it years ago. I'd be delighted if Apple deleted whatever data is still there, if any. There did not seem to be a "delete all files in this account, but only on iCloud" button.

 

[Graphate]

I suggest reframing the way these lawsuits are viewed. In the US, we have fewer regulations; in exchange, Americans have a fairly low threshold of bringing grievances into court. It’s a different method of regulating corporate and societal behavior; the “fear of lawsuit” might be better than the “fear of regulation.” And, Americans can sue the world’s largest corporations on equal footing. And finally, very few lawsuits (filed by lawyers) are tossed early because they are frivolous; lawsuits that are tossed early most frequently are tossed because they didn’t meet what most people would describe as a “technicality.”

The problem is there’s no penalty for these frivolous lawsuits. We’re all paying as Apple customers for these scams. The plaintiffs should have to pay Apple‘s lawyer.

There are problems with the pleadings made by plaintiffs, very clearly. But I’m not sure it would be reasonable to describe this lawsuit as frivolous colloquially. And as far as attorneys’ fees go, in practice it’s usually best that each party pays their own way: would you sue a company, for anything, knowing if you lose, you have to pay their lawyers fee? It would be a huge deterrence, and you’d not long be on equal footing.

[…]

Americans really will try their luck in the courts for literally anything - and there are lawyers willing to take their money for it.

This was probably a contingency arrangement, so the lawyers weren’t paid. Also, giving the benefit of the doubt, these lawyers may have just wanted to “find the line” between an antitrust violation and not.

Regardless, if you’re upset about Apple’s pricing scheme for upgrades, it doesn’t change the fact that frivolous lawsuits cost consumers money. Who do you think pays for these lawyers? Do you think it comes out of Tim Cook’s salary? When you buy an iPhone, a portion of that is to pay for lawyers. It’s not just Apple. It’s every corporation out there.

It’s a pretty trivial expense for a lawsuit dismissed this early. And it’s not like these lawsuits, even where the company defeats them quickly based on its TOS, are entirely unproductive. In the very least, companies will think twice before pushing the line further. And everyone benefits from that.

I want Apple to claim for court costs.

Distinguishing attorneys’ fees from court costs… Apple’s court costs are likely below $500.

Yeah, bad plan and you're not thinking as a lawyer. if you concede, the next day they file another lawsuit saying the same thing with higher tier. Plus, lawyers for class actions normally don't care about out of the little guys like us. They care about getting paid on the class action damages. So, Apple would pay that...AND have to raise tier or reword their marketing. Either way, raising tier would save them money.

A class action lawsuit isn’t perfect, but there aren’t many other tools available that enable a person to sue for small injuries. It’s the injuries in the aggregate that add up to big injuries. And although the attorneys general bring similar lawsuits, and they both stop bad actors, state actions usually just pay the treasury.

 

[russell_314]

There are problems with the pleadings made by plaintiffs, very clearly. But I’m not sure it would be reasonable to describe this lawsuit as frivolous colloquially. And as far as attorneys’ fees go, in practice it’s usually best that each party pays their own way: would you sue a company, for anything, knowing if you lose, you have to pay their lawyers fee? It would be a huge deterrence, and you’d not long be on equal footing.

It was a frivolous lawsuit, thinking you should get a certain amount of free cloud storage. It’s not difficult to win a lawsuit against the company because you don’t even need a unanimous jury. You just need to convince the majority of them and so many people hate big corporations they will just award the money on principal.


As to deterrent, that’s not a bad thing. Right now the plaintiffs aren’t paying for their attorneys fees. I’d even be happy with that if they were forced to pay attorneys fees for their own side. There needs to be some downside for them to bring up a frivolous lawsuit when they lose.

They take zero risk, and even if the defendant wins, they’re still out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

[bobbybino]

In that case they should let me pick a 3rd party online back up service of my choice but they don't, since they love locking us in.

Samsung for example offers it's own backup solution, yet they also let you back up on OneDrive, Google or even a connected thumb drive.

You can also back up an iPad or iPhone to a connected Mac or PC.

 

[Starfia]

Remember before Apple charged for online storage the operating system was designed to be the hub of your digital life? Wouldn't it be neat to have all that cloud stuff just work off the device you are in front of occasionally throughout the day instead of that data being on Apples servers? It used to be that way, not real time backup, it used cables, but it could have evolved into its current form without adding another subscription cost to our lives.

Reyesmac –

Since iCloud was introduced, I've still used cable-based sync to a "hub" Mac for all my iOS devices, alongside the free tier of iCloud. This form of things feels to me like the result of an evolution without adding a subscription cost.

Plus they made things like photos impossible to easily export to logical names and folder structures. Making it that much harder to pull the plug on iCloud. They are slick, and they are getting away with it.

No idea what you're talking about here. On iOS, you have a Photos app and a Files app. You can export any number of photos, or a whole album, to any folder in the Files app, with two taps. You can export from either place to the Mac, wirelessly or with a cable, wirelessly to another Apple device, or using a portable USB drive to any other device.

 

[AiPone12mini]

My iCloud storage are some megabytes only for contacts, passwords, notes and my videos always are optimized with ffmpeg and photos/videos are backed up to PC. I am semi-offline user, i do not need big cloud services.

 

[Abazigal]

I've been saying for years that Apple should give 5gb of free storage for each Apple device you purchase. So if you bought a Mac, iPhone and iPad, you'd have 15gb. That seems reasonable to me.

I am curious as to how numbers like this are derived. I suspect that people are arguing more in favour of the amount of storage they feel they need as an individual (ie: it's just enough for them to use while staying on the free tier), and less so about what they feel is truly best for the majority of Apple's user base.

I am curious as to how your formula would work. Say I am holding on to a 2018 iPad Pro and 2017 iPhone 8+. Am I grandfathered in to an additional 10g of free iCloud storage forever?

I am also currently using about 37 out of 50gb of my iCloud storage. By your math, the amount of free storage I would get still wouldn't be enough for me at any rate, be it 15 or 20 or even 25gb. I am still paying at the end of the day. At the same time, 55 or 60gb of storage wouldn't make any meaningful difference to me either; I would still be paying $1 a month.

It seems that we are never going to stop debating about how "miserly" Apple is. Personally for me, my attitude towards iCloud storage is similar to my attitude towards the App Store - it should not be run as a loss-making entity, because then, it will simply incentivise Apple to look towards offsetting their costs in other ways (like what Google is doing to pay for all the free stuff they give users). I am happy to pay, just as I don't really think about how expensive Apple products are. I find the middle ground between what I need and what I can afford, pay for it, and get on with my life.

It should be that simple, not endless whining online about how this product should come with free this or free that, IMO.

 

[Siliconguy]

This reminds me - I need to figure out a network attached storage system that will allow me to entirely bypass any paid cloud storage system.

2012 or 2014 Mac mini. You can fit a pair of 1 TB SSDs in either one, and add another drive or drives in an external case. Mohave on the 2012 or Monterey on the 2014 can handle the file serving. Or just install Linux. Setting up Samba is a pain, but it does work. And the power consumption is agreeably low.

If power consumption is no issue then a 2010 Mac Pro gives you four SATA drives and you can add an PCI-e NVME card too. The Power THE POWER! /Toolman Tim Taylor mode

 

[ellpee]

Apple should not be allowed to sell anything in the Settings app, this is a no-brainer.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

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

So buy more. Seriously, the entitlement in this thread is really off putting.

 

[Graphate]

It was a frivolous lawsuit, thinking you should get a certain amount of free cloud storage. It’s not difficult to win a lawsuit against the company because you don’t even need a unanimous jury. You just need to convince the majority of them and so many people hate big corporations they will just award the money on principal.


As to deterrent, that’s not a bad thing. Right now the plaintiffs aren’t paying for their attorneys fees. I’d even be happy with that if they were forced to pay attorneys fees for their own side. There needs to be some downside for them to bring up a frivolous lawsuit when they lose.

They take zero risk, and even if the defendant wins, they’re still out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It’s not a perfect system, but that’s not a fair or accurate representation of the legal system in America, jury involvement, plaintiffs side, or defense side.

As far as frivolous used colloquially, I agree it would apply to your description of the lawsuit.

 

[Foxglove9]

5GB is just not enough for me to be useful. I basically shut it off on all my Apple devices, and do the same for family members who complain to me about all the nagging messages from Apple asking for more money.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

It’s criminal that McDonalds only gives the small fries for free.

 

[slomtbr]

iTunes Match does that for $30 a year, if it’s still available.

It is, but I don't want Apple to substitute their music for mine.

 

[slomtbr]

Have you tried it recently?

I read the description again this morning - Apple would still substitute iTunes songs for mine.

 

[Timo_Existencia]

5GB is just not enough for me to be useful. I basically shut it off on all my Apple devices, and do the same for family members who complain to me about all the nagging messages from Apple asking for more money.

Yeah, sort of how the appetizers at a restaurant just aren’t enough for a meal. And all the pictures in the menu nagging me to order an Entree. The nerve!