I'm utterly baffled why my iOS backups can live in Apple's cloud but not my Mac ones.
I honestly expected them to launch it years ago. The fact they still haven't seems to mean they've firmly decided not to for some reason, but I'm totally clueless as to what the reason could be.
Especially when making more money off services is a strategic priority for the company.
About every six months I do a fire drill and completely factory reset my macbook. Takes about 10 minutes for me to go from a fresh device to one that has all my apps, data, and developer tools ready to roll. Only annoying thing you can't really automate is signing into services like OneDrive or Dropbox, but this isn't a problem if you use iCloud Drive.
Redundancy because the thing most people care about backing up is media and important documents, which are likely already stored in iCloud. If you care about Time Machine back ups you probably want your whole filesystem with point-in-time restores. That's a lot more data for Apple to hang onto, for a small segment of its target market. Of course, Apple does have 2TB+ iCloud+ plans, but I would bet that the average iCloud+ subscriber is using nowhere near their limit.
But that's my point. To sell the 2TB plans to people who are merely on the free 5 GB or paid 50 GB plan.
And yes -- I don't even keep many files on my Mac, it's mostly in the cloud already. But if it gets lost/stolen, I want to restore all my apps and preferences the same way I do with my phone. Which is why I use Time Machine with a NAS, but it's silly to need a NAS at all. I just want to use the cloud.
The way I was looking at it is that Apple has successfully sold iCloud+ 2TB plans to a lot of people who don't need much more than 200GB. If everyone on the 2TB plan used even close to 2TB, I'd bet they'd have to charge me a lot more to make up the provisioning and usage costs of storage.
I would have no problem if Time Machine separated out OS and known signed application packages and basically just stored pointers to standard versions of them, as long as all that detection is done client-side.
There's no reason the backup would need to store anything but the list of those files (that list being encrypted), and then everything unique to me -- my configurations, my files, etc.
Suddenly I find myself 1TB in, and desperate to find a fix!
On the other hand, that would require convincing your kids to do that...
I suppose Apple is keeping track of these numbers as well (keep in mind they know exactly how much storage each Mac has - because you can't expand it). I am also hoping it's under intensive internal testing; the quality of their software has been going downhill for a while, no power user would ever care if they shipped another broken product.
They’ve brought back SD slots in recent years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102352
Meanwhile NVMes are a dime a dozen, and some laptops can fit two.
I'd bet that the rigid APIs on iOS also play a huge role here. Compared to the "anywhere you have permission to `open()` on disk" approach on macOS, iOS developers don't have as many options for where/how to store data. This probably makes backup / restore an order of magnitude simpler / reliable.
If anybody can decide to start building out massive datacenters of their own, it's Apple, and AWS/Azure know that.
And Apple just passes its rates along to the consumer. It costs what it costs.