craig1410

maccrazy said:

I think the problem with iCloud Drive is that you can’t customise which files are stored on your Macs – you have to store all the files on all of your computers. Until Apple address this their cloud solution really isn’t that useful for people with a lot of files that can’t fit on a laptop SSD. 

That's not true actually. You can enable "Optimize Storage" on both iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Drive so the machine will retain the most commonly/recently accessed files and photos on your Mac and leave the rest in iCloud. Go to System Settings -> iCloud -> iCloud Drive -> Options and you'll see the checkbox. There is a similar checkbox in the Photos app in preferences. I expect these are both defaulted to being on for a new install but I'm not certain. 

Apple Support link here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206996

mindwaves said:

For the user above, mathematically, you are correct, but rarely would a person even come close to using their full iCloud allowance. I'm on the free tier plan and only use 3GB. And other places are offering much more generous free and cheaper paid options than Apple too, especially considering it has been known that Apple actually uses Google for their iCloud storage. Apple is just too cheap here and offering a free 20GB would go a long way.

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.

Yes I mentioned this point in my post. However, the general complaint is that 5GB is not sufficient and since people take more photos than ever and rarely have backups of those photos, it's highly desirable to have some form of online backup. My main point was that, if Apple were to announce a higher storage tier then they would need to have the infrastructure in place to deliver at least a high proportion of it. I'm sure Apple have better stats on typical iCloud storage usage per user than you or I and can probably model how much actual infrastructure they might need to be able to offer, say 50GB of free storage. From experience with my own family, including my Dad who is a very light user of iCloud, I suspect the average usage is probably at least 20GB, especially for people who don't have a PC or Mac too offload photos to. I remember before iCloud Photo Library my iCloud backups were very large due to the fact it was backing up the camera roll. For many iOS users their iPhone or iPad is their only computing device.

My own iCloud Photo Library is 160GB and my son has even more because he often uses a Go Pro when doing activities and video files are much larger than still images obviously. I actually have the 2TB family plan with 6 family members on it and I'm very happy with that service. I used to use Dropbox but prefer Apple due to their strong stance on privacy. Personally, I think if you choose your online storage provider carefully and take measures to secure your most sensitive information by encrypting prior to uploading (eg. using Arq + S3/Backblaze B2) then you can gain the considerable benefits of off-site backups without compromising your security or privacy. I think for most people, the risk of losing important data is far greater than the risks of it falling into the wrong hands.

To those who are up in arms that Apple doesn’t just give everyone 50GB instead of 5GB for free, or even 200GB for free, have you considered the data centre implications of this? It’s not just an finance/marketing exercise - we are talking many hundreds of millions of active iOS devices and iCloud users who would suddenly be granted access to 10x or 40x more storage. Lets’s Throw around some numbers, admittedly based on a bunch of, hopefully not unrealistic, assumptions:

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.