iCloud storage
As online storage becomes essential, it’s time for Apple to stop being so miserly
The first time you ever use iCloud, you’re probably quite happy to see that Apple has given you 5GB of space entirely for free. That seems pretty generous, but any joy rapidly evaporates when you realise just how fast that space fills up. The problem is that Apple wants you to use iCloud for everything. It’s where your iOS backups live. It’s where all of your photographs are supposed to be stored. And it’s increasingly where iOS and even OS X apps default to when you try to save anything.
Naturally, when you blaze through 5GB, that’s not the end. Apple provides four monthly payment options for upgrading your storage: 20GB for 79p; 200GB for £2.99; 500GB for £6.99; and 1TB for £14.99. (Your eyes aren’t deceiving you – it’s actually more than twice as expensive to buy 1TB per month than two lots of 500GB would cost you, if that happened to be an option.) It’s perfectly justifiable to ask heavy users to splash out, but we’re reaching the point where a single iOS device backup can stretch that 5GB, and two device backups is often impossible. We don’t know what the solution is – 5GB per new Mac/iOS device purchase, or free backup storage; we just know backups at the very least should just work. As it is, lots of people see a storage error and stop backing up.