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Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

Given that Apple was spending in the order of $1 billion to store iCloud data in AWS I don't think this claim is exactly credible.

Dropbox reportedly had to move 500PB of data off of AWS which at a very naive $0.03 per GB per month would only be around $180MM per year. $0.03 is probably higher than the rate dropbox pays per GB but I'm ignoring network ingress/egress costs.

From those back of the envelope calculations I think it's safe to say that iCloud is very likely larger, or at least a similar size to Dropbox.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastr...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3045436/data-center-cloud/app...

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Maybe. This report seems to just take Dropbox Google Microsoft and Box into account. But is iCloud really that big when you talk about usage? They store tons of data but most of it might be just iOS backups which are activated by default for every user. Consider that usage or not.

I think so - and the fact that it's so in the background speaks to how well the user experience is designed for iCloud. Apple pretty much surreptitiously hides the backup of contacts, photos, calendars, email (yes - a lot of people use iCloud mail), and lastly documents. The fact that Apple was so late to the game on iCloud Drive was that a lot of the shit that the average person doesn't want to manually back-up and monitor are handled in the background by Apple ("magically" to use their term.) I personally love Dropbox, but I would find it a nuisance to manage my contacts, or anything else beyond my documents and occasional photos backup.

Therefore, regardless of manual input necessary, it should still count as usage. I imagine a lot of people store backups on Dropbox, and that looks like it's counted in the article.

Yet, I am kind of surprised that the prevalence of Android software doesn't correlate to Google Drive market share.

Re: Google Drive being less than you expect... Lots of handset makers and carriers put their own crappy cloud backup software on there and attempt to push that.

e.g. Verizon has their own cloud storage service.... it's annoying on Android, not sure if it exists on iOS.

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