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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

iCloud's free storage tier still being stuck at 5 GB as the base phone storage has grown to 128 GB is the main thing I'd criticize. You realistically can't use iCloud for photo storage or backups with that plan. I bet most people can blow through that just with Messages history if they have anyone sending them videos.

I think the upgrade prices are reasonable, $1/month for 50GB and $3/month for 200GB, but I can see characterizing that as nickel and diming. They should have bumped up the 5 GB base plan years ago.

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Don't forget disallowing local backups for no reason other than moneygrubbing.

$3/month for 200Gb is reasonable in your opinion, but people who don't buy Apple can buy a 2T drive for $50.

When did Apple start disallowing local backups? I'll admit I haven't tried recently -- there's no data worth backing up on my iPhone anyway -- but it definitely worked just fine a few years ago. Apple's "Back up iPhone" support page[1] agrees with me.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...

I was talking about encrypted laptop backups where only the customer has the key.

I'm not all over the details because there were so many reasons for me not to go Apple that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Local backups still work fine, you just do it in Finder now instead of iTunes. Not sure what the situation is for Windows users.

As far as comparing prices, yes, a bare hard drive is cheaper but I'm paying for that storage with services and backups attached to it. A hard drive won't automatically sync photos between my phone and my computer, and I'm more likely to have that hard drive fail than I am to lose iCloud.

Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle. Yeah you can buy way more acceleration for less money, but good luck moving your furniture.

>Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle.

What you lose in convenience, you gain in privacy, since iCloud backups are not e2e encrypted.

https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/iphone-backup-icloud...

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