I believe that if you buy a Mac or iDevice, and AppleCare, you should get that capacity added to your iCloud account, permanently. That would encourage more people to buy AppleCare.
I believe that if you buy a Mac or iDevice, and AppleCare, you should get that capacity added to your iCloud account, permanently. That would encourage more people to buy AppleCare.
There would probably have to be a charge of some kind and AppleCare would be an option for that but it would have to be an ongoing payment. Microsoft wouldn't roll their plans back unless they found the costs excessive. It's shareholder money they are spending. Apple has over 1 billion active devices and growing every year. 16GB for 1 billion users is 16 million TB. In hard drives at $50/TB that's $800m. SSD is about 6x that, $4.8b. Plus servers, staff, power usage. Some costs would be over the lifespan of the drives but it could be as much as 5% of Apple's revenue.
Using a multi-device AppleCare subscription would work so that families can have a single plan. $5/month personal plan can cover 1 computer, 1 phone and 1 tablet up to 3 years. $15/month family can cover up to 4 computers, 4 phones and 4 tablets. Additional devices can be $3/month. The personal plan can have 100GB of total backups and the family one can have 300GB. Additional storage can be added at $1 per 100GB.
This can be usable by Macs too for Time Machine functionality, not per-app iCloud backups. It can know to exclude music files it has copies of. They can sync data in blocks the way that FileVault works so small chunks of say 5MB can be compressed and encrypted at a time and uploaded so that interrupted uploads don't cancel large uploads. These would be tagged with inodes and checksums. The OS can track changes to inodes and on the next sync, it runs through each checksum per inode and syncs the changed blocks. This works better for virtual machine and other dmg backups as only small portions of the multi-GB files will change.
Our household uses a lot of storage. I have found Apple's price scheme to be fair. I would love to see Apple get serious about replacing Office. For most numbers is ok but not for an accounting department. I am tired of Microsoft hosing businesses with server and app licensing schemes.
The lesson here is how to run a business, which people who whine about Apple being rich and not giving away free stuff clearly don't understand.
Each division of Apple has to be accountable in its own right: there is no robbing Peter to pay Paul. The price Apple's storage has been set to ensure that the services division is profitable in its own right. Tim Cook will not stand up at a board meeting and say, 'Let's just give storage away for free; the phone division will cover it.'
In my opinion, Microsoft's destruction in the phone market is more to do with poor management than anything else. They didn't have an incentive to try because they knew Office licenses would hide the losses the other divisions (Xbox… oy!) were making. when you manage a company like this then the other divisions suffer when your cash cow starts to wobble.
Microsoft is now trying to make each division accountable, so goodbye free stuff.
It's not 'free'. It amounts to offering enticements to purchase and then withdrawing them after the purchase.
Well if true then that's a pretty low move.
It is worth noting that Apple's iCloud nee MobileMe nee .mac nee iTools has gone through several metamorphoses of free/fee services.
As costs rose, most particularly due to iDisk storage space, the wide demand for @mac.com email accounts, and increasing support needs, iTools was renamed .Mac at Macworld Expo New York on July 17, 2002, as a subscription-based suite of services with a dedicated technical support team.[23]
FWIW, I worked for a company in 1959 - 1960 that made maimframe-related computer products. The company had 12 divisions ... Each division made a profit, but the company made a big loss. There were a lot of sales between divisions. Seems each division would book interdivisional orders at cost, and interdivisional sales at MSRP.
So we can embed SoundCloud links but can’t have animated GIFs?!
This limitation is usually to do with hosting. SoundCloud, Youtube, Vimeo etc are all hosted externally. Gifs would be hosted on the AI server and can push each page view bandwidth up significantly. You can host them somewhere and link to them no problem. It would be easier if you have a lot of them to get some file hosting. A cheap unlimited bandwidth web hosting package from GoDaddy or similar would work. DropBox has a public folder option on paid plans. box.com looks like it has a free plan with public linking. With the hosting setup, you can upload every gif/image you have at once and link across multiple sites.
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Using a multi-device AppleCare subscription would work so that families can have a single plan. $5/month personal plan can cover 1 computer, 1 phone and 1 tablet up to 3 years. $15/month family can cover up to 4 computers, 4 phones and 4 tablets. Additional devices can be $3/month. The personal plan can have 100GB of total backups and the family one can have 300GB. Additional storage can be added at $1 per 100GB.
This can be usable by Macs too for Time Machine functionality, not per-app iCloud backups. It can know to exclude music files it has copies of. They can sync data in blocks the way that FileVault works so small chunks of say 5MB can be compressed and encrypted at a time and uploaded so that interrupted uploads don't cancel large uploads. These would be tagged with inodes and checksums. The OS can track changes to inodes and on the next sync, it runs through each checksum per inode and syncs the changed blocks. This works better for virtual machine and other dmg backups as only small portions of the multi-GB files will change.
It is worth noting that Apple's iCloud nee MobileMe nee .mac nee iTools has gone through several metamorphoses of free/fee services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe#iTools
FWIW, I worked for a company in 1959 - 1960 that made maimframe-related computer products. The company had 12 divisions ... Each division made a profit, but the company made a big loss. There were a lot of sales between divisions. Seems each division would book interdivisional orders at cost, and interdivisional sales at MSRP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Engineering_Corporation