Where’s the iCloud storage bump for the rest of us?


At today's education event, Apple announced that student accounts for schools would have 200 GB of iCloud storage free. This is an increase from 5 GB that Apple offers everyone. Dan Moren make the case it's also time to upgrade all free accounts.

Dan Moren:

The standard 5GB of free iCloud storage has been in place for years now, and, frankly, it’s starting to wear thin. When most iOS devices come in 32GB configurations at the smallest, and many start at 64GB, 5GB feels pretty paltry. Especially when the next step in the upgrade tier is to pay $0.99 for 50GB of storage space. I realize Services has become a moneymaker for Apple, but it just feels cheap.

I would say a good rule of thumb is Apple should give enough free iCloud storage to back up active devices. You bought the device and I think it's reasonable Apple can kick in enough cloud storage to back it up. Typically I think people will pay $1 per month to get enough to back up their devices. That seems stingy and I know people who don't back up because of it. That's not a good user experience either way. Another idea is to just make device backups free and keep it at 5 GB for data files. (On that note, it would be great if Apple offered Time Machine backup in iCloud)

With that said, we happily pay the 2TB tier. We don't use nearly all of it, so I'd be happy if there were some options between 200 GB and 2 TB. I like iCloud's family storage so no longer need to get a bunch of micropayments a month for devices. The killer feature though is macOS dynamically manages iCloud data so I can access many GBs of data without filling up a small SSD.

So, personally, we'd still pay for it even if Apple bumped it up to 200 GB, but 5 GB these days seems ridiculous when you factor in device backups can easily eat that up.