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Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

> Creation of invitations requires an iCloud+ subscription.

I really wonder what the uptake is on iCloud+ subscriptions.

Pretty high I suspect, since you need it if you want to back up more that 5 GB.

If you keep photos and videos without dealing with a separate service, it's pretty much a no-brainer. And the cheapest tier is $0.99/mo. for 50 GB so it's not exactly breaking the bank.

> And the cheapest tier is $0.99/mo. for 50 GB so it's not exactly breaking the bank.

This is a huge trick. Like any other service where the most friction is setting up billing... then they can increase the price easily. Do upgrades to other tiers require confirmation?

You have to explicitly upgrade.

There's no trick as far as I can tell.

And they haven't increased the price of the $0.99 tier ever, and it's been around for 8 years I think. I don't think they've ever increased the price of any storage plan in the US ever -- prices in other countries have changed but that seems to do more with currency fluctuations.

Apple is known for their transparent pricing and easy cancellation. I don't think there are any tricks here.

If anything their trick is in how they describe the storage tiers on their website[1]:

> $0.99/mo for 50GB: Storage for thousands of photos, videos, and files.

> $2.99/mo for 200GB: Great for family sharing or larger media libraries.

> $9.99/mo for 2TB: Plenty of space for all the family’s photos, videos, and files.

Other than the $0.99 tier, these storage numbers are comically low for the uses cases Apple describes in plain English. But that's par for the course with Apple... An arm, a leg, and your firstborn for storage and RAM upgrades. As in hardware, so in SaaS cloud storage, I guess.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/icloud/

I did professional photography on the side for the better part of a decade before needing to go above 2TB. You don't have to hoard.

I agree on photos, but when I hear "larger media library" I assume we're talking video content, both family videos taken on phones and commercial media (TV and Movies). Maybe I'm misreading but either 200GB or 2TB are both very small for a whole family's collection of video media.

Are you thinking of their television shows or movies or something? That's not really a use case here.

Does any significant slice of the population store TV shows and movies on their phones or laptops?

Honestly, most families do not maintain a digital collection of media. And I say that as someone who does. Most families just have a netflix or prime or apple tv subscription, maybe cable. If there's a collection, it's probably DVD or Blu-Ray still.

> There's no trick as far as I can tell.

I think that is the trick.

99 cents is so innocuous, that people set up billing to allow it. People who set up their apple id without a credit card will probably attach a card to their account to get the 99 cent storage "deal".

At that point, upgrading to the next tier is inevitable as phones have been steadily increasing in storage capacity.

I think it would be nicer if your icloud storage capacity matched your primary device.

There's no winning then, is there?

If a company doesn't offer a super cheap tier, then people complain it's too expensive and they're paying for space they don't need.

If Apple does offer a super cheap tier, there are complaints it's some kind of trick.

The $0.99 tier has been great for my needs. If you have a 64 GB phone you never need more. If you have a larger phone you quite frequently don't need more -- a lot of my phone storage goes to song, podcast, and video downloads. That stuff doesn't need to be backed up, and isn't by default.

I think that nearly everyone who has an iPhone (at least who didn't get their phone deeply discounted second-hand) has a payment method set up with Apple. I don't remember the numbers from when I had to know ~5 years ago, but it was in excess of 95% in the US.

"with this one trick, you can get everyone to register a credit card!"

I avoided subscribing for years out of principle, just backed up my photos locally (which they make as painful as possible — afaik it’s not possible to just plug your phone into a Linux machine and grab all the new photos).

I finally caved a few months ago when I got tired of fighting with the awful backup storage UI that makes it difficult to determine why the backup is failing even though it’s smaller than 5GB.

Apple has every incentive to make that UI as bad as possible while still being functional.

But, in my experience, it's extremely fast. Noticeably faster syncing than Dropbox. And even the Windows client is being constantly updated.

Don’t you need to get iCloud+ if you want to have more than 5GB iCloud storage? I would guess it’s probably more than 80% of users.

That's where most of it comes from - iCloud+ is different than Apple One.

iCloud+ for 2TB is priced just where if you have ONE other Apple service, you're probably better off with Apple One.

(I admit I misread this whole thing as being a feature of Apple One.)

I switched to iCloud for my personal email once it supported personal domains (switched from Fastmail). It’s all I need really. Work is Gmail of course, with its annoying-in-retrospect tagging system instead of folders, which causes havoc with traditional mail apps.

Not sure but services overall is one of Apples fastest growing business segments.

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