It’s time for Apple to review it’s iCloud storage tiers

With WWDC upon us I’m doing my annual review of what I’m storing in iCloud. When I did it struck me how limited Apple still are in terms of offerings.

Here’s my storage, I pay £6.99 a month for my almost 400GB of storage, where’s the 500GB option? Whilst I’m at it I also thought again how much Apple is taking it’s customers for a ride still only offering 5GB for free when we spend so much on products.

5GB in 2018?

It’s small and in my experience gives users a bad time using an Apple product. I’ve been asked by almost everyone moving or new to iPhone why they can’t back up. You can guess the remarks when I tell then they need to pay to back up their device or store their photos. Having spent upwards of £600 on a new device it’s a bit galling to have to pay anything to backup the phone you just paid a lot of money for.

I’m concerned with Apple’s focus on making revenue from services that a bigger free tier (to at least back up our device completely) isn’t going to be coming anytime soon. Apple have boasted for a while about how much services is making, you can bet that they are not suddenly going to offer everyone something for free.

I’d like to see Apple offer 50GB for free, for all it’s users. Not just ones that say bought an iPhone X but any device that exceeds the 5GB. I’m saying that if your device hits a limit in iCloud you should be given some more, up until the capped 50GB that they offer for free. This would be a much better user experience and would certainly stop all of the conversations I’ve had with friends and family around this matter.

Come on Apple, you can afford to do this.

Tier review

At the moment there is a jump from £2.79 (200GB) straight up to £6.99 (2 TB), for my use case I need 500GB or 1TB. I’d like to see Apple add new tiers

  • 500GB at £3.79 a month
  • 1 TB at £5.50 (including family sharing)

This would me to save just over £3 a month.

What about family sharing?

Regardless of if you set up family sharing (I don’t) or not I feel that offering this new costing is the right thing to do. Technically if you have a large family all with iDevices then maybe at £6.99 you’ll save some money but in my experience family sharing is a nightmare. I’ve tried (and failed) to set it up in the past and now don’t trust the service.

Saying that though most families would be ok with my new 1 TB tier, therefore saving families money over paying for 2 TB as I do.

Am I mad, is my maths our of whack? - as always, let me know…

Lee Peterson @LJPUK