@daringfireball anecdotally, it seems like, effectively, “no one” uses iCloud Photo Library. I frequently pull up decade+ old pictures in response to “hey, do you remember when we did ____?” conversations, after searching for them by date, place or face on my phone. Every time someone asks “you just have all of those on your phone? How?”, and every time I explain that I have 200,000 photos in iCloud, accessible to my phone to download on demand, but not “on” my phone
@joelion I wonder how many of them are using iCloud Photo Library but don't even know it? I keep teaching extended family members things like how you can search for "dog" in Photos and it actually works.
@daringfireball it seems to me that at the very least you should get more storage when you buy a new iPhone and/or the amount of free storage you get should be based on the amount of storage on the phone you buy. Similarly if you buy one or more iPads a similar scheme should apply.
It would add an additional incentive for people to upgrade their phones more often or opt for more storage on the devices they buy.
@daringfireball This was my exact first thought. Surely we’re beyond the point where when you spend £1,000 on a phone you should get its capacity online for 2 years.
@daringfireball It not just you @gruber the same thought came to my mind when I first saw the commercial. If it isn’t backed up in the cloud somewhere how safe is it really?
@nep I generally don't complain about music I don't like, but I really dislike auto-tuning, so that just irritates me even more each time I see this commercial.
@daringfireball I'd also be curious to understand how Apple Sales Associates are trained to sell iCloud storage to new iPhone buyers. Seems to me you want to at least talk them into the $1/mo plan. In most people's mind $1 is very close to "free” and would be an easy sell.
@apolloni (a) The DOJ filing doesn't mention this one; (b) Apple's pricing is, alas, pretty much exactly the same as Google and Dropbox. I'm sure someone could undercut them, but someone trustworthy?
@daringfireball I have the 6 TB plan and use a little over 2 TB in photos (it's videos that take up all the space), but what really annoys me is not being able to use that iCloud storage I'm paying for to do back-ups of my Mac, especially now that all the SSDs are soldered onto the logic boards. I don't worry so much about my iPhone having soldered non-removable storage because it's always backed up to the cloud. When I've had tech foul-ups in the past with a Mac, I had not only my most recent back-up to an HDD but also could take out the drive to get all my most recent data off before a repair. That's no longer possible, which is why a cloud back up would be great. My Mac has a 512 GB SSD, while there are iPhones with twice as much storage that Apple allows to backup to the cloud—why not the Mac?
@swingerofbirch But, to be clear, I do think there should be an option to back up your Mac to iCloud. And I say that as a longtime happy Backblaze user.
@swingerofbirch That's a good question. Maybe because with a Mac, it's hard to define what to back up? Just your user account(s)? What about external drives?
@daringfireball The only explanation that I can think of is that the free tier is very limited so they can upsell you to a paid tier, thus increasing that oh-so-important “services” revenue stream. Even if it is to the $1/mo. On a billion devices, thats a billion dollars a month.
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