Since setting up my iPad Pro and Mini again I think I might have a fix for my iCloud sync issues. Notes seems to have sorted itself out now across all of my devices but Reminders is still acting weird on my iPhone and I’m also getting some strange Calendar Ui glitches. This seems fine on my iPad so I think the answer is to reset my iPhone.

I’ve not done this since getting it out of the box back in September so it might be time to do a full iTunes reset (DFU mode) on the iPhone and see if it fixes my issues.

I’m going to take this opportunity to reset a little mentally and try not to install social media or podcasting apps. Time to get a little headspace back on my devices and take a step back for a bit.

This is a good one, so I recently purged everything out of Reminders and it’s iCloud database. The weird thing is that slowly but surely they are coming back but only for things scheduled. I had several daily Reminders that remind me to take a break and get out for a walk, these were moved over to another system and deleted from iCloud. The problem is they keep coming back and I have no idea how to fix it.

You can see this in the above screenshot. So I have two of these deleted daily Reminders that have come back from nowhere. One of these is even coming from a list that doesn’t exist. Check out the My Lists area saying there is 1 Reminder in the system but Today is showing 2, argh.

So I currently have Zombie Reminders in iCloud coming back for me and kind of another confirmation that moving my data out of iCloud slowly in the background as I’m currently doing is a good idea.

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…