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Apple Launches New 6TB and 12TB iCloud+ Plans

zbugrkx said:
Fully agree but it is "worse" for unfortunate souls of us very old timers of apple services with 2 apple ID (one for icloud and one for puchases). If you only have one, you have the option to go to 4TB using apple one for another 10$ on top. That is not even an option for someone with 2 ID's... i'm about to run out of space and have no option to go to 4 :D
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You could create a Family group for the two Apple IDs — one organiser and one member? Would that help?
 
roar08 said:
My media and purchases account is not a family member.
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One more confirmation before I try (as i'll have to kinda reset/wipe a device). Where did you "login" with your 2nd ID. At the top of the settings app as your main icloud ID for that device? Thanks!
 
I would move from DropBox to iCloud if they added one feature that DropBox has that they don't - the Selective Sync feature that allows storage on the cloud only, not on my local drive, but still shows up in the finder. I use DropBox a a few computers to backup files to, but the laptops have smaller drives so some files are in the cloud only till I need them. With iCloud, if you get those larger options, you better have that storage available on all the computers that sync to it. They may have added this feature, but I have seen nothing written about it.
 
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I didn’t expect any price drops.

But I was hoping there’d be some kind of annual or biannual discount for all plans, or at least the highest tiers.

Why can’t we get a cookie for essentially paying for these services for years and years, decades?

I guess we don’t really have other options as nothing can ever get the same integration as iCloud.

And Apple wants to be able to hike prices for all users from one month to the next with no exceptions.

😕
 
MaSx said:
It's amazing that free iCloud storage is still at 5GB per account since introducing it more than a decades ago. We have 4K Video and HI-RES images being stored but you still get 5GB iCloud storage to backup in 2023. Just WOW.
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well, have had that 5GB iCloud "free" space since it was first offered, and guess what, I'm using just over 500MB of it.
I have currently ~10k photos/videos on my iPhone, and use ~200GB/512GB.
Guess again, I backup my iPhone to my Mac, and I backup my Mac to 4 different drives, mix of SSD/HDD. Have a total of ~ 3TB of data, so backing all that up to iCloud, the new 6TB plan would be $30/month, $360/year, $1,800 over 5 years. I can buy a lot of drives for that $$$. Plus, a restore from cloud - how long will that take if you really need it?
And, do you know that Apple (or any cloud provider for that matter) backup YOUR data?

But then again, I'm not your average person, I am glad they finally offer more choices for those who want/need it
 
They raised the price so crazy in my country .. i had the 2tb plan and used about 400gb of it.
I love icloud and the convenience but I refuse to pay that much.
I invested in a lightning to micro sd and a 512gb sd card.. it was a huge huge huge pain to backup.

I also switched to idrive which cost me the same for 1tb in 1 year as apple charge for 1 month of icloud.

Also I dont understand apple being so cheap to give only 5gb pr account and not pr device.
 
I upgraded family iCloud+ storage from 2Tb to 6Tb, but now my family is not included in the storage, and there's no way to add them back!!??
 
jz0309 said:
well, have had that 5GB iCloud "free" space since it was first offered, and guess what, I'm using just over 500MB of it.
I have currently ~10k photos/videos on my iPhone, and use ~200GB/512GB.
Guess again, I backup my iPhone to my Mac, and I backup my Mac to 4 different drives, mix of SSD/HDD. Have a total of ~ 3TB of data, so backing all that up to iCloud, the new 6TB plan would be $30/month, $360/year, $1,800 over 5 years. I can buy a lot of drives for that $$$. Plus, a restore from cloud - how long will that take if you really need it?
And, do you know that Apple (or any cloud provider for that matter) backup YOUR data?

But then again, I'm not your average person, I am glad they finally offer more choices for those who want/need it
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Man, don't talk such practical solutions!

The corp needs "mo money, mo money!" Enrich the mothership before they go under. Who do you think you are: some kind of "think different" or "think for yourself" consumer??? Resistance is futile. ;)
 
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Silver78 said:
They raised the price so crazy in my country .. i had the 2tb plan and used about 400gb of it.
I love icloud and the convenience but I refuse to pay that much.
I invested in a lightning to micro sd and a 512gb sd card.. it was a huge huge huge pain to backup.

I also switched to idrive which cost me the same for 1tb in 1 year as apple charge for 1 month of icloud.
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Micro-SD are known to be un-reliable. You may want to go for a real disk (and it will be much faster).
 
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zbugrkx said:
One more confirmation before I try (as i'll have to kinda reset/wipe a device). Where did you "login" with your 2nd ID. At the top of the settings app as your main icloud ID for that device? Thanks!
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On my iPad Mini — I logged out of my iCloud account and into my media and purchases account. Then I went into the Apple One Premier options and it shows iCloud+ as a component of that, to which I was able to add 6TB (there was also an option to add 2TB for a total of 4TB). And of course the 12TB option was there. I then checked one of my wife's devices and one of my daughter's devices and they both showed 8TB total.

The conundrum I have now is at first I stupidly went to 6TB on my iPhone, which assigned it to my iCloud account. Fortunately Apple lets you go into your subscriptions and switch from your individual iCloud+ storage to shared storage, but alas THAT feature is not working for me and I am currently on hold with a support engineer.

But as long as you don't make that initial dumb mistake as I did, and do this using your media and purchases account, you should be fine doing what I was able to do ... I would hope.
 
Iconoclysm said:
I just compared pricing between Apple, Google, and Microsoft. At the free tier, Apple is the same as Microsoft. At 200 GB tier, Google and Apple are the same while Microsoft costs more as there isn't a 200 GB tier. At 2TB Google is cheapest at $9.99, then Apple at $10.99, and Microsoft offers 1TB for $69.99 a year. Once you go beyond this, only Apple and MS offer the 6 TB tier, which is shared in a M365 family plan.

As far as I can tell, there is no ripoff at any tier, just a lot of pricing that pushes you up to $10-11 mark with all three companies. If you're looking for cheap cloud storage with no hooks into an application ecosystem, you can probably do better...but this is competitive.
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Microsoft 365 Family seems to be the better deal here. Not only do you get up to 6 TB of storage but also premium versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook plus other features for just $9.99/month or $99.99/year.

MS 365 Personal (for one person) is only $6.99/month or $69.99/year for 1 TB storage plus the other stuff.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Messages with a lot of little video clips will hog up enormous space. The magic with Messages management is NOT leaving them open forever. Treat them like a phone call:
  • When the chat is finished, delete them.
  • When you want a new chat, start a new one.
Messages demand on iCloud will plunge if people stop leaving them open forever... accumulating more and more space, mostly of old videos already watched back when first sent. Close 'em and start new conversations vs. having a forever line of conversation like leaving a phone call off hook forever.
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No, I want a running archive of my messages, which I also export using apps on macOS.
 
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webkit said:
Microsoft 365 Family seems to be the better deal here. Not only do you get up to 6 TB of storage but also premium versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook plus other features for just $9.99/month or $99.99/year.

MS 365 Personal (for one person) is only $6.99/month or $69.99/year for 1 TB storage plus the other stuff.
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But how does Apple get "another quarter of record services revenue & profit" from THAT kind of thinking??? ;)
 
roar08 said:
On my iPad Mini — I logged out of my iCloud account and into my media and purchases account. Then I went into the Apple One Premier options and it shows iCloud+ as a component of that, to which I was able to add 6TB (there was also an option to add 2TB for a total of 4TB). And of course the 12TB option was there. I then checked one of my wife's devices and one of my daughter's devices and they both showed 8TB total.

The conundrum I have now is at first I stupidly went to 6TB on my iPhone, which assigned it to my iCloud account. Fortunately Apple lets you go into your subscriptions and switch from your individual iCloud+ storage to shared storage, but alas THAT feature is not working for me and I am currently on hold with a support engineer.

But as long as you don't make that initial dumb mistake as I did, and do this using your media and purchases account, you should be fine doing what I was able to do ... I would hope.
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Thanks a ton! Wonder if the same would work with a MAC instead of an ipad/iphone, else going to have to figure something out :D
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
OK then, print the archives to PDF files to free up the space. That's easy to do and will purge big space when the message is closed.
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I actually think 70GB for a decade is fine. The 300+GB archive somebody screenshot seems absurd, but I guess it's because Messages will copy a full 4K video to the message archive, even though it isn't sending it in that resolution to the recipient. Seems more like a bug that's gone unaddressed for years. Or just bad design.
 
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Question: How do you use iCloud/iCloud+ cloud storage as an extension to your disk space on your mac? Can you do that? or is it just meant to backup whatever you have on your physical disk, without giving you additional storage space in the cloud? e.g. I got 1 TB on my mac studio, but I don't want to store say some videos on my mac, but I want to buy storage in the cloud e.g. Google Drive, and use it to store my videos there. Does this work with iCloud/iCloud+. I'm new to the mac ecosystem.

Thanks
 
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With all these years, Apple still offers 5GB iCloud free storage. While Google offers 15 GB! Come on Apple! don't be so stingy with your loyal customers! Trying to squeeze every dime out of us to please your investors!
 
If you have several gigs of photos on your phone and you're not getting paid for any of them, you might have a problem! Just throwing that out there. Especially if many of them are selfish-ies.🤣 Psych 101...take it!
 
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BogiTheTomtom said:
Question: How do you use iCloud/iCloud+ cloud storage as an extension to your disk space on your mac? Can you do that? or is it just meant to backup whatever you have on your physical disk, without giving you additional storage space in the cloud? e.g. I got 1 TB on my mac studio, but I don't want to store say some videos on my mac, but I want to buy storage in the cloud e.g. Google Drive, and use it to store my videos there. Does this work with iCloud/iCloud+. I'm new to the mac ecosystem.

Thanks
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There's iCloud Drive to do that so no, not just a backup.

However, you would be much better off to put the money towards an external hard drive or two for videos. It will R/W much faster than cloud and you'll have 100% control of your files.

I use iCloud Drive sometimes to share files between some Macs. I find big files like videos just move far too slow. So I use it for only little files. For the bigger stuff, I use portable drives or my own Synology NAS storage... both MUCH faster than iCloud Drive.

If you need to share these videos with others on the Internet, look into buying your own NAS, set up its cloud service and then store them there. $0/subscription and as easily accessed by anyone you want to have access.
 
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