icloud should be free up to storage capacity amount of the highest idevice a user (with an apple ID account) has, for at least iphone 6 users and up... So if you just have a iphone 6, 64gb he/she should have 64gb icloud storage to go with it. if you have an iphone 6, 64gb and an ipad 32gb then again 64gb of free icloud storage... that would make a usable and hassle free experience for the majority of users...
having it totally free would need a huge investment in storage from apples side and I dont see it as a viable solution.
the 5gb per user model that currently exists is a joke and harms the average user experience and ultimately apple. This will even worsen with the upgraged storage capacity of the purrent iphone lineup and once photos for mac kicks in it will be a big mess.. dont say i didnt warn you!
That's probably a little overkill, considering music, photos and documents take up the most space. If you have a huge music library, iTunes Match has that covered, so no need for a ton of iCloud storage. That leaves photos, documents and iCloud email/attachments. I think email should be unlimited, not restricted to your iCloud allotment.
If anything, I agree that iCloud storage should be, at a minimum, 5GB per device, not Apple ID. Apple could monitor this by backups per device. If you don't backup a device within 30 days, you lose the 5GB for that device, signaling you potentially no longer use or own that device.
There's a big difference between iTunes Match and photo storage. iTunes Match stores songs. If a million people have the same song, that song is only stored on Apple's servers once across all users. Huge space savings. But each photo is entirely unique. Huge space demands.
I agree that Apple needs to do something to address this cloud storage problem, but I don't think it's wise business sense to just make it free. They are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into data centres... and users of those centres should be picking up the tab for that.
You don't think people who have forked out for the most expensive phone on the market with the highest profit margin for any manufacturer, aren't already paying for those data centres?
10gb is not hard. Google offers 15 as its free tier plus photos are free. I Dont see why apple can't go to ten GB. Last I checked cloud storage is cheaper then it was three years ago. Apple should get with the times. They are not paying the same for that 5gb in 2015 as they paid in 2011 while at the same time the user base is taking on average more photos. To me able should adjust their storage pricing.
iTunes Match, for example, has worked flawlessly since day one
Ummm... ah no.
iTunes Match was (still is?) a horrible and buggy product. Streaming the wrong songs, lost playlists, failed syncs. iTunes Match is certainly not a flawless product.
Sorry. I don't think this is terribly confusing for anyone. Sure there are people who have no clue about technology that it may confuse, but then again... They are probably used to being confused and simply go ask their 13 year old nephew what to do.
10gb is not hard. Google offers 15 as its free tier plus photos are free. I Dont see why apple can't go to ten GB. Last I checked cloud storage is cheaper then it was three years ago. Apple should get with the times. They are not paying the same for that 5gb in 2015 as they paid in 2011 while at the same time the user base is taking on average more photos. To me able should adjust their storage pricing.
Yahoo offers 1 TB free. I find Apple's 5GB very dated.
If you buy a 64GB phone it should come with 64GB of cloud storage to back it up. If you buy a 32GB iPad it should come with 32GB of cloud storage. Your total free cloud storage should be the sum of all the SSD space on all your iDevices.
>Apple became the first U.S. company to reach over $700 billion market cap value. > That's double the value of Microsoft and almost double that of Google. Why are they > choosing to nickel-and-dime the users that account for over 70% of their record > breaking profits? If Google and Amazon can offer free, unlimited photo storage, > so can Apple.
They reached $700 billion market cap value precisely because they are not doing what Google or Microsoft do.
If you buy a 64GB phone it should come with 64GB of cloud storage to back it up. If you buy a 32GB iPad it should come with 32GB of cloud storage. Your total free cloud storage should be the sum of all the SSD space on all your iDevices.
All of us new Mac Pro users thank you for this idea.
Storage is so cheap, five gigs seems to be pretty skimpy for a company selling premium devices. Five gigs per device might make more sense. The ultimate reality is that I already get a terabyte of OneDrive with Office365, and really don't feel like paying for iCloud.
Yes, I agree with this to a point. The storage equation is not quite working well. I've already had to walk my gf through upgrading her iCloud storage twice now just so that she can take pics. Yet days later, her Photos app still says that her iCloud storage is full (but it's not). Multiple device restarts has not fixed that. Apple has more work to do.
Did you check how many different iphones back-ups she has. That happened to me and it was my old iphones back-ups that were the problem, i deleted my old iphones of the back up list, problem solved
Apple never promised unlimited permanent storage of photos in the cloud. The initial Photostream stores only last 1000 photos. Free storage of last 1000 photos vs. fee based storage of all your photo library, is that confusing to the average user? If you want to store more than 1000 photos then you just enable iCloud Photo Library and begin to consume your storage space.
I end up using OneDrive for photo backup since Microsoft is much more generous with what they provide for free (I am getting 40GB free ongoing 100GB free for the next year currently). OneDrive works great for photos and files, but I would really like to see an Apple solution that is just as good or better.
I think beluga has it right -- give us iCloud storage that matches the size of storage on the device. That would make the user experience better, and also help to justify the significant additional cost Apple charges for the higher capacity devices.
A bigger problem in my opinion is that people confuse local and iCloud storage. So when their phone is full they think they can buy more iCloud storage so it won't be full anymore, which is of course not the case. Conversely, they get a warning that their iCloud storage is full, and think that it is talking about their local phone storage so they buy more space needlessly.
Comments
Also a better description of the problem to the user.
icloud should be free up to storage capacity amount of the highest idevice a user (with an apple ID account) has, for at least iphone 6 users and up... So if you just have a iphone 6, 64gb he/she should have 64gb icloud storage to go with it. if you have an iphone 6, 64gb and an ipad 32gb then again 64gb of free icloud storage... that would make a usable and hassle free experience for the majority of users...
having it totally free would need a huge investment in storage from apples side and I dont see it as a viable solution.
the 5gb per user model that currently exists is a joke and harms the average user experience and ultimately apple. This will even worsen with the upgraged storage capacity of the purrent iphone lineup and once photos for mac kicks in it will be a big mess.. dont say i didnt warn you!
That's probably a little overkill, considering music, photos and documents take up the most space. If you have a huge music library, iTunes Match has that covered, so no need for a ton of iCloud storage. That leaves photos, documents and iCloud email/attachments. I think email should be unlimited, not restricted to your iCloud allotment.
If anything, I agree that iCloud storage should be, at a minimum, 5GB per device, not Apple ID. Apple could monitor this by backups per device. If you don't backup a device within 30 days, you lose the 5GB for that device, signaling you potentially no longer use or own that device.
There's a big difference between iTunes Match and photo storage. iTunes Match stores songs. If a million people have the same song, that song is only stored on Apple's servers once across all users. Huge space savings. But each photo is entirely unique. Huge space demands.
I agree that Apple needs to do something to address this cloud storage problem, but I don't think it's wise business sense to just make it free. They are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into data centres... and users of those centres should be picking up the tab for that.
You don't think people who have forked out for the most expensive phone on the market with the highest profit margin for any manufacturer, aren't already paying for those data centres?
I get 30 Gb of free storage with my cheap Nokia.
50 GB free would be a lot better already
Also a better description of the problem to the user.
No, free storage of photos and videos is a better solution. 5 GB should be what you get for mail and documents and iMessage.
Ummm... ah no.
iTunes Match was (still is?) a horrible and buggy product. Streaming the wrong songs, lost playlists, failed syncs. iTunes Match is certainly not a flawless product.
Yahoo offers 1 TB free. I find Apple's 5GB very dated.
I personally have no desire to backup anything other than contacts and bookmarks to the cloud.
Everything else can stay on the IMAP server or my hard drives.
Time Machine works pretty well and my network attached storage does the rest.
Good article, thanks.
If you buy a 64GB phone it should come with 64GB of cloud storage to back it up. If you buy a 32GB iPad it should come with 32GB of cloud storage. Your total free cloud storage should be the sum of all the SSD space on all your iDevices.
> That's double the value of Microsoft and almost double that of Google. Why are they
> choosing to nickel-and-dime the users that account for over 70% of their record
> breaking profits? If Google and Amazon can offer free, unlimited photo storage,
> so can Apple.
They reached $700 billion market cap value precisely because they are not doing what Google or Microsoft do.
"Apple" and "free" never go together.
All of us new Mac Pro users thank you for this idea.
Did you check how many different iphones back-ups she has. That happened to me and it was my old iphones back-ups that were the problem, i deleted my old iphones of the back up list, problem solved
I think beluga has it right -- give us iCloud storage that matches the size of storage on the device. That would make the user experience better, and also help to justify the significant additional cost Apple charges for the higher capacity devices.
While I think there are valid points in the article, I have a very different impression of iTunes Match.
Almost every time I open iTunes I get a message about 30-50 songs (out of about 7,800) that it's suddenly lost track of,
and they are even sometimes songs I purchased in iTunes, in addition to songs I've ripped from cd's.
So I do agree that Apple hasn't mastered cloud related services yet.
Perhaps viewing storage limits from a five-year-old perspective is an aspect of the overall problem?