Apple Highlights Five Perks for iPhone Users Who Pay for iCloud Storage

[Benjamin Nabulsi]

After launching new iPhones last month, Apple is promoting iCloud+ with a prominent banner on its home page, in a bid to boost its services revenue. In addition to more storage, all iCloud+ plans include five perks for iPhone users.

As a refresher, iCloud includes 5GB of storage for free. If you want extra storage, you need to subscribe to an iCloud+ plan. In the United States, prices range from $0.99 per month for 50GB of storage to $59.99 per month for 12TB of storage.

Here are the five perks included with all iCloud+ plans:

• Private Relay keeps your Safari browsing history entirely private from network providers, websites, and even Apple.
  
• Hide My Email generates unique, random email addresses whenever needed.
  
• HomeKit Secure Video allows you to capture and review home security footage in an end-to-end encrypted format.
  
• Custom Email Domain enables you to personalize your iCloud email address.
  
• Apple Invites app lets you create event invitations.

Some of these iCloud+ features are not available in all countries.

Apple's comparison chart for iCloud+ plans in the U.S. is shown below.

Article Link: Apple Highlights Five Perks for iPhone Users Who Pay for iCloud Storage

3$ should get us 500 GB by now..

 

[svish]

Private Relay and Hide My Email are useful features. Don’t see any point in keeping iCloud invites as a subscriber exclusive.

 

[Jensend]

I've been disappointed with iCloud.
It can be slow to sync, and there is very little indication of the status and speed of syncing.

I have family members who can't update their devices because they don't have enough free storage space on their device, and the OS is too stupid to automatically delete the local copies of the gigabytes of photos and message attachments that are also in the cloud, even when the "Optimize iPad Storage" option is selected. It drives me up the wall.
There are ways to work around it, by turning off iCloud on the device before doing the update, but the slow sync speed means that the space may not be freed up for several minutes (even though all the data is already in the cloud), so it looks like the workaround isn't working.

So much for "it just works". Does Apple make it bad on purpose so people will upgrade to newer devices with more storage?

 

[dumastudetto]

Having a feature to use a local external drive for 'iCloud' syncing purposes would be amazing.

They went the other way and made it so every cloud storage provider has to use the internal storage. I think they probably did this for data integrity and security reasons. I can't think why else they would take such an approach?

 

[ifxf]

Time for the EU to step in and require Apple to allow cloud storage providers to offer backup services for phones. A little competition would force Apple to respond.

 

[switz]

Dropbox is still around as an alternative and it supports non-Apple equipment. It also allows one to create a folder and make is accessible to a single person with a dedicated link.

 

[maxoakland]

I would absolutely love the ability to plug whatever storage provider I want into the back of iCloud. Do the encryption / decryption on the device end (like Advanced Data Protection already does) to address privacy or security concerns.

Of course, Tim will never allow competition from cloud providers. You want to back up your iPhone to Proton, automatically in the background? Tough luck.

That kind of thing is exactly what we need government regulation for

 

[maxoakland]

Private Relay and Hide My Email are useful features. Don’t see any point in keeping iCloud invites as a subscriber exclusive.

Yeah, that just guarantees it’s not popular