Apple & US carriers partner on 200GB iCloud promo ahead of new iPhones
Apple and the four major U.S. carriers are offering two free months of iCloud's 200-gigabyte tier to some people looking to upgrade their iPhone this fall.
The promo, noticed on Reddit, is only available to new (paid) iCloud customers, and is nominally meant to ensure they "have enough space to safely back up all the important things on your iPhone, like photos, videos, files, and apps" so the data can be restored once a new phone arrives. The link above mentions Sprint in the URL but should also work for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Apple has actually been offering 30-day trials of its paid tiers since May, so in reality the new promotion is simply an extra month on top of that. People who sign up will also be charged $2.99 per month after the deal expires, unless they cancel.
iCloud only includes 5 gigabytes of data for free, which for many people is just enough for a single device backup. In the U.S. Apple charges 99 cents per month for 50 gigabytes, $2.99 for 200 gigabytes, and $9.99 for 2 terabytes.
The company is expected to reveal three new iPhones next month at its usual September press event. These include 5.8- and 6.5-inch OLED models, and a less expensive 6.1-inch LCD device. It's possible that Apple could once again bump up maximum local storage to 512 gigabytes, which would keep iPhones competitive with Samsung's Galaxy Note 9.
The promo, noticed on Reddit, is only available to new (paid) iCloud customers, and is nominally meant to ensure they "have enough space to safely back up all the important things on your iPhone, like photos, videos, files, and apps" so the data can be restored once a new phone arrives. The link above mentions Sprint in the URL but should also work for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Apple has actually been offering 30-day trials of its paid tiers since May, so in reality the new promotion is simply an extra month on top of that. People who sign up will also be charged $2.99 per month after the deal expires, unless they cancel.
iCloud only includes 5 gigabytes of data for free, which for many people is just enough for a single device backup. In the U.S. Apple charges 99 cents per month for 50 gigabytes, $2.99 for 200 gigabytes, and $9.99 for 2 terabytes.
The company is expected to reveal three new iPhones next month at its usual September press event. These include 5.8- and 6.5-inch OLED models, and a less expensive 6.1-inch LCD device. It's possible that Apple could once again bump up maximum local storage to 512 gigabytes, which would keep iPhones competitive with Samsung's Galaxy Note 9.
Comments
What I'd like to see is a good-better-best and family tiers. Something like the current 50GB for $1, 200GB for $3, but add 500GB for $5. That would cover most individual users, but for the rest: family tier would be as it is now, 2TB for $10.
(addendum: Microsoft also doesn't monetize their free tier -- apart from nagging you to buy Office 365 -- as far as I know. Their free tier is 5GB, same as Apple. For the same reason.)
Use offline backup on Mac or PC. Or a Lightning drives ,which are available now.
For basic photo syncing , use Photo Stream.
Are you saying that Apple is busy selling hardware internationally but don't give a hoot about offering things like trade-ups, specials or even features like maps flyover in all but a handful of non USA cities? Sad but true. But the "special" in the article is for US telecoms selling new iPhones though I bet Apple give buyers of unlocked phones sold in their Apple Stores the same little freebie ... in the USA. As for me in my city with 2 Apple stores and 1.5 million people we still don't have flyover. As to the freebie - too late I already buy 50gb.
Say we have 1.3 billion active iOS users (announced by Apple in Jan 2018) and each user has the current 5GB of free space. That’s 6500 Petabytes of storage which, to put it in perspective is roughly 10x the total storage size of the well known backup and cloud storage company Backblaze. Now imagine Apple moving to a 50GB free tier overnight. That needs 65000 Petabytes or 100 Backblaze sized datacentres. Now imagine 200GB free tier...you get the idea. I realise that not every user would max out their storage budget immediately but it would also be disingenuous for Apple to give away 50GB to every user if in reality they only had data storage space for, say, half of those. How annoyed do we all get if we can’t get onto an overbooked flight for example?
Anyone following Apple knows that they are building, or trying to build, data centres all over the world and have had some setbacks with planning approvals etc in recent years. They also, rightly in my opinion, try very hard to make their data centres renewable powered which no doubt makes the process a bit slower and dependent on suppliers of PV panels amongst other things to also scale up.
i don’t know how many Petabyte or Exabytes of storage Apple actually has available but I also know from following Backblaze and their excellent company blog how much investment and actual work it takes to build storage racks and there is no magic! It comes down to physically building hundreds of storage enclosures using many thousands of 3.5” hard drives, which also have to be built by someone else. The supply chain involved is complex and takes a finite time to deliver.
i have no doubt in my mind that Apple would love to be able to give away iCloud storage at least equal to the storage size of the devices being sold because the marketing narrative would be worth more than the loss in margin. But they need to be able to deliver the goods and that is a multi-year exercise in data centre building. That said, I think we should expect them to at least be able to make a step up from 5GB soon but my guess is that it’ll be to 20GB or 50GB at most with paid tiers beyond that to ensure that demand doesn’t outstrip supply until they can build more data centres.
Why do I only use 3GB? I don't believe in storing sensitive files online (including my non-sensitive photos and videos). All of that is on SSDs.