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iCloud+ Storage Prices Increased in 10 Countries This Year

turbineseaplane said:
I'm a NAS user myself and get what you're saying, but it's really no substitute for how simple the built in solution from Apple is, especially if one also uses Apple Photos

(not mention a NAS solution is expensive and may be way way way more than a given user needs or is interested in dealing with)

I feel we are letting them off the hook by even discussing "workarounds" that distract from the real issue, which is Apple gouging folks into the 2TB option by purposely not offering options up/down the storage amount/price scale

This is a fully digital offering -- it's inexcusable to not have some options between 200GB & 2TB
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Yes, but what has the chorus whining for "more" from Apple for "less" ever gotten us from Apple?

If we want customer value change at Apple, they need to feel it where they most readily measure it. Else, while the money just keeps pouring in in record volume, they can't even see what they are doing as wrong (through a consumer lens). They get their bonuses. Wall Street calls them geniuses. Shareholders dance for joy. Everyone that matters is happy except the source of it all. But the source of it all tends to gripe-gripe-gripe... then roll right over and pay-pay-pay. Why change what isn't (apparently) broken?

I too could make a passionate case that iCloud should deliver more value for less but Apple doesn't care. Why? Because I would be just another person wanting more for less but still contributing to "another record quarter." At least in my case, I opted out of iCloud from the beginning, owning my own cloud space and rolling with it at $0/month. When I need more space, I grant myself more space, also for $0/month. I will use the free 5GB iCloud for select things, but never opt to pay more for a hard drive in the sky when huge HDD storage is dirt cheap and NAS tech lets anyone own their own cloud and bill themselves whatever they want for it.

Yes, it's not as convenient or integrated but none of us had integrated iCloud before iCloud and yet we had ways to back up our mobile devices, restore them, upgrade them, share files between devices, etc too. How did we do that? And the answer to that question still works in 2024 just fine.
 
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pksv said:
NAS is not free to buy, do not auto-sync your phone.
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iCloud can never be bought/owned- only forever rented... and the landlord could raise the rent at any time while controlling "our" media.

NAS has no forever rent, no "trusting strangers", etc... and NAS can deliver many benefits not offered by iCloud.
 
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I chip in my fair share of complaints when Apple is being greedy or lazy, etc too. But what would get much quicker action is collectively cutting off the revenue. If the crowd would reach their "enough is enough" moment, Apple would very quickly notice... and change. Complaints and bad press are a nuisance easily ignored when every quarter is "another record quarter"... until... it's not.

I don't expect big changes favoring consumers until Apple actually feels it, measured in revenue. Instead, by all measures of how a business measures success most tangibly, every such decision is the right one... as long as customers just keep accepting them and voting with open wallets.
 
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Plutonius said:
Prices are increasing everywhere. Should we get more food when restaurants increase their prices ?
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Are they competitive though? I get 1TB of OneDrive for free when I pay $15/year for the entire M365 app suite. Apple charges me $120/year for 2TB, which is way more than I need because they don't offer anything between 200GB and 2TB.

And in response to your restaurant analogy, we actually get LESS food with HIGHER prices is seems.
 
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What Apple needs to do is encourage (REALLY encourage) ISPs to drastically increase their upstream bandwidth. I've had super fast cable (600Mbit down) for 10+ years in CT yet the upstream has stayed at 25Mbit for those 10 years. Therefore, I cannot upload/back up my 100GB+ data to iCloud in any kind of fast way. It would take days to upload 100GB. But, if I could have 500Mbit or faster upload speeds, I could routinely upload my data every day 20 times faster than present. My buddy 4 miles from here has fiber (fiber not on my street STILL) and has 2Gbit upstream and pays the same as I and can quite quickly sync iCloud with his iPhone with all his 4K clips (he's a videographer).

This encouragement would be a vast increase in revenue for Apple as well as ISPs as their customers upgrade their plans. The ISPs' notion of "everyone's gonna suck the bandwidth via uploading!!!" cry is a sham. Plenty of platforms like Youtube and Instagram have had zillions of large-file-size uploads and life seems just quietly tick on by.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Option 2: Backup the pre-iCloud way. Connect device to Mac, click backup. Then you control your own backup and don't have to pay forever rent to wedge in for-profit Corporate players.

Option 3: turn on backup over wifi to automate #2 without even having to connect a cable.
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I have personally never gotten back up over wifi to work consistently - going back to the iPhone 3GS days before iCloud even existed. But if you have, good for you.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
iCloud can never be bought- only forever rented... and the landlord could raise the rent at any time while controlling "our" media.

NAS has no forever rent, no "trusting strangers", etc... and NAS can deliver many benefits not offered by iCloud.
Click to expand...
Until one day NAS company will release some buggy firmware update that will wipe all your NAS data.
You say it won't happen, a theoretical scenario, things like that don't ever happen?

That's exactly what happened about 3 years ago with NAS hardware from QNAP. Hundreds of thousands of devices were wiped by buggy firmware. My friend lost years of data, without any sorry from QNAP.

What I'm saying here is that self-hosted NAS has its problems and shortcomings too.
 
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You're right. So I backup my NAS.

iCloud is just as prone to losing things in a worst-case scenario. And hackers would find iCloud a much more enticing target to crack than some lone person/family's NAS. Crack iCloud and gain access to MILLIONS of people's files. Crack some NAS for access to only 1 or a few people's files. Where is there likely a bigger prize?

This thread has a lot of people anticipating a rent increase or actually getting one... and complaining about tier levels set by a company that knows exactly what they are doing to maximize the cash extraction. I offered up NAS as an alternative to just rolling over and paying more while also getting to have whatever storage in the cloud one wants.

My point is that iCloud doesn't have to be the only option. There's plenty of fish in this sea and/or plenty of clouds in that sky. If we don't like changes, we can make changes ourselves. And NAS is one good one that can eliminate the "forever rent" and bring many other benefits not available in iCloud at any rental rate.
 
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
I actually use the cable method every time because it is faster. I synch media and appreciate wired speed.
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I have backed up my iOS devices to my PC since the beginning. At first it was the only option. But as time went on I kept doing it because I didn’t want to get on the iCloud storage train.
 
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10anta said:
And here was I thinking that storage had got much cheaper over the years. Clearly not within Apple’s reality distortion field
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This allows Apple to show higher profitability in the services segment, storage gets cheaper and prices go up. iCloud Storage is probably the only Apple service (other than App Store of course) that is actually profitable.
 
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brofkand said:
I have backed up my iOS devices to my PC since the beginning. At first it was the only option. But as time went on I kept doing it because I didn’t want to get on the iCloud storage train.
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Me too (PC being Mac in my case (and maybe yours too)). Even in 2024, the original method still works just fine and we both completely control our backups ourselves vs. trusting them to total strangers with "even more profit" motivations.
 
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
Me too (PC being Mac in my case (and maybe yours too)). Even in 2024, the original method still works just fine and we both completely control our backups ourselves vs. trusting them to total strangers with "even more profit" motivations.
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I’m ecumenical so I use windows and Mac equally, so I say PC generically.
 
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Edit: prices are the same but without VAT


I never had more than 50GB and for a few weeks now 200GB because Proton Drive had problems with some 15.x betas.

I don't know if anything changed for the higher options. Because the big Gap always wasn't worth more than a short look.



U.S.:

50GB: $0.99
200GB: $2.99
2TB: $9.99
6TB: $29.99
12TB: $59.99


Euro (including VAT):

50GB: 0.99 €
200GB: 2.99 €
2TB: 9.99 €
6TB: 29.99 €
12TB: 59.99 €
 
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For those crying about the new rates, go cry to your gov for weak exchange rates.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
You're right. So I backup my NAS.

iCloud is just as prone to losing things in a worst-case scenario. And hackers would find iCloud a much more enticing target to crack than some lone person/families NAS. Crack iCloud and gain access to MILLIONS of people's files. Crack some NAS for access to only 1 or a few people files. Where is there likely a bigger prize?

This thread has a lot of people anticipating a rent increase or actually getting one... and complaining about tier levels set by a company that knows exactly what they are doing to maximize the cash extraction. I offered up NAS as an alternative to just rolling over and paying more while also getting to have whatever storage in the cloud one wants.

My point is that iCloud doesn't have to be the only option. There's plenty of fish in this sea and/or plenty of clouds in that sky. If we don't like changes, we can make changes ourselves. And NAS is one good one that can eliminate the "forever rent" and bring many other benefits not available in iCloud at any rental rate.
Click to expand...
All the good points, agree with everything you said here actually.
 
pksv said:
Until one day NAS company will release some buggy firmware update that will wipe all your NAS data.
You say it won't happen, a theoretical scenario, things like that don't ever happen?

That's exactly what happened about 3 years ago with NAS hardware from QNAP. Hundreds of thousands of devices were wiped by buggy firmware. My friend lost years of data, without any sorry from QNAP.

What I'm saying here is that self-hosted NAS has its problems and shortcomings too.
Click to expand...

Just like every other bit of hardware, I don’t update until it’s been tested by others, usually for several weeks. My NAS has auto-update disabled. It doesn’t even have WAN access unless I explicitly grant it.
 
WarmWinterHat said:
Just like every other bit of hardware, I don’t update until it’s been tested by others, usually for several weeks. My NAS has auto-update disabled. It doesn’t even have WAN access unless I explicitly grant it.
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I don't remember what was the reason for it but I'm quite certain that that update was not optional.
 
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