Google have been doing this for quite a while if you store your photos in G+ (and accept them being resized to 2048x) - People seemed to grasp the concept and separation from drive/documents/etc without confusion there....
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I honestly don't think my photos & videos should count against my 5GB...
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Google have been doing this for quite a while if you store your photos in G+ (and accept them being resized to 2048x) - People seemed to grasp the concept and separation from drive/documents/etc without confusion there....
The photo stream that was free only let you store the 1000 most recent photos taken (not all of your photos and no videos either).
iCloud Photo library is allowing us to store all photos and videos, not just 1000 photos. Could the free amount be higher than 5GB? Sure. But they have to start charging somewhere for it since these libraries will surely grow and they do have data centres to maintain. It's not that they're being excessive in the pricing either. They matched google drive and even recently MS has lowered the One Drive pricing to match this upcoming iCloud pricing.
I absolutely can not stand when someone is given something free of charge and proceeds to ask for more stuff free of charge.
The idea of paying for extra storage whether it's an external HDD, Memory Card, or cloud service (not just Apple's) is a tried and tested money maker. Entire companies have been made solely for the purpose of storing end users photos and videos and they don't do it for free.
I think Apples prices come this fall are more than competitive especially considering the rates at the time they announced theirs. I say this because no company was going to make a change but when apple changes something you better believe everyone else has to copy them and try to edge out ONLY AAFTER THE FACT. I have no respect for those companies and that is the only reason Google Music is now free, it wasn't in the beginning.
Not to take away from your opinion but just providing a different view.
A lot tof people won't need that extra storage anyways and if they did they'd usually buy a 64 GB device and manage accordingly. I however do have a 64 GB and 128 GB device and will be using the storage as photography and videography is a hobby of mine and I welcome it but for a lot of people photo stream works fine for now.
Besides isn't the rumor iPhone 6 will be 128GB?
Anyways my 2¢
The issue isn't storage space it's people's habits. People take 1000's of pictures and don't bother going through them and deleting the pictures that just aren't good, blurry, bad lighting etc. They get all caught up in the moment of "this would make a great pic!" and then do no editing after the fact.
I've seen 500 photos on a person's camera roll where 100 of them are blurry, 25 are duplicates and the rest are of their kids taking goofy pictures while playing with the phone.
I was answering both even though your post was off topic. I doubt everyone knows.
The appropriate response to this is, "You may buy more storage."
I agree with most here. It's expensive to maintain server farms. However, I'm about to be upgraded on my Microsoft OneDrive account to 1TB storage space for my 365 subscription https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/ . I will be purchasing more storage for iCloud but Microsoft seems to be uping the cloud game a bit.
Why shouldn't it? This costs apple money, if you need/want more you should pay for it. I mean if photos and videos don't count what should? Why not make everything not count? See how ridiculous your argument gets once you start picking and choosing?
It sure is, I payed 32 ($43) for a year of 20Gigs just about a month ago.
Where did I get that offer you asked? Well it was iCloud storage from Apple. $12/year is very cheap in comparison.
I use Dropbox, and use their Carousel app to back up my photo library. Dropbox only gives you 2 GB free, but you can use fiverr.com and spend 5 dollars for 22 GB permanently. They use the referral option to get you the free space.
22 GB using Dropbox and Fiverr for $5.
22 GB using Dropbox and Fiverr for $5.
I like the idea of Ferrari donating an F12 to me.
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It's not expensive, but "good deal" compared to what? MS and Google, it's main competitors, blow that deal out of the water. It's not even close.
Think apple could be a bit more generous if you buy more than one device and have it associated to the same apple ID. It doenst have to be another 5gb but 2gb or 3gb extra would be welcome. A sort of thanks for buying more stuff 
everyone says about apple costs but their data centres are going to be zero energy soon, it won't cost them a penny. They'll be making more money hand over fist.
everyone says about apple costs but their data centres are going to be zero energy soon, it won't cost them a penny. They'll be making more money hand over fist.
Think apple could be a bit more generous if you buy more than one device and have it associated to the same apple ID. It doenst have to be another 5gb but 2gb or 3gb extra would be welcome. A sort of thanks for buying more stuff
everyone says about apple costs but their data centres are going to be zero energy soon, it won't cost them a penny. They'll be making more money hand over fist.
So the cost of buying/making the actual servers and maintaining them won't cost a penny? Cool.
I agree that Apple can be a bit more generous. And like I posted earlier Microsoft is upping their storage to 1TB for 365 subscribers. But can we be realistic that server farms still cost money to the companies building them even if they will be self sustaining energy wise?
And of course, the cost of making their data centers self-sustaining I'm sure didn't cost anything either
That's true but I think most people are fine with 20 GB and don't need 100 GB and therefore Apple's variant is cheaper
It will be much cheaper in the future and it will have enhanced capabilities. iCloud photo library is many steps ahead of what we had previously and I wouldn't mind spending a couple bucks a month for every photo to be synced in full resolution unlike the max 1,000 and weird backup method we had before that didn't count against the storage.
Or switch to a competing smartphone OS that offers device backup for free, and only counts your files against your limit
hell for that matter lets give everyone a $100 credit in the iTunes store every time they buy a computer or device. And a 10 year warranty with unlimited free replacements even for damage. And lets drop the price of iPhones down to $100 off contract.
How dare Apple actually make any money. They have more than enough money, they should be paying us to take their stuff.
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Because he's lazy and wants to just use iCloud to save all of his stuff rather than use his computer for his photos and videos. And he's a cheap wad that doesn't want to pay for more storage.
in other words a pretty typical Apple user, especially for someone who hangs out on a board like this. People around here think Apple shouldn't charge for anything, should enough every feature under the sun on everything etc
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Not if we are just talking about you but there are millions of Apple users and yes all that hardware plus the maintenance, operating costs etc does add up
Also, here's another reason why they don't hand a zillion bytes to everyone for free is because they want folks to take responsibility for their own data. If you can put everything on Apple's servers without a single thought then its too easy to make Apple responsible for it. So if their server crashes and you lose all your photos with no personal backup all hell breaks loose, even though Apple will be the first to say that its your job to secure it, not theirs.
What do you care whether Apple makes money or not? Competition is king and it's free. Someday iTunes match will be free as well.
Although you raise some valid points, Google still seem to be able to manage it just fine within their resolution limitations, so it can't be *that* costly... (and thats for a lot of users iOS and most of Android as well now it's the default + option).
(and on a side note; hardware/operating costs are irrelevant given iCloud still makes extensive use of Azure and EC2 cloud....)