“My colleague Bradley Chambers recently wrote that his single biggest disappointment with WWDC was that Apple made no move to announce an upgrade to the 5GB free iCloud tier,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “The 5GB free tier is now nothing less than an embarrassment.”
“No increase in the free tier in seven years, while storage costs have plummeted, makes Apple look like it hasn’t noticed. An embarrassment because 5GB isn’t even enough to back up an iPhone once you start filling it with content like photos and videos,” Lovejoy writes. “An embarrassment because you get exactly one quota of 5GB even if you’ve bought dozens of Apple devices over the years. Even if you just spent thousands of dollars on a shiny new MacBook Pro. Immediately forcing people to spend more on upgrading their iCloud account feels like nickel-and-diming customers.”
“But the paucity of the free storage tier isn’t the only embarrassing thing about iCloud. The second is security. For a company which not only prides itself on privacy, but uses it as a key marketing issue, it’s ridiculous that iCloud still doesn’t employ end-to-end encryption,” Lovejoy writes. “The third improvement I’d like to see is absolute transparency and choice about what is and isn’t stored on iCloud – especially on the Mac.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, yes, and yes.
Apple is stingy and should at the very least give users 5GB of iCloud storage per device. — MacDailyNews, July 15, 2016
And here’s a fourth fix we’d love to see:
On iCloud.com, Apple should add a tool where people can enter multiple Apple IDs and passwords and combine them into one.
SEE ALSO:
Biting the iCloud storage bullet – June 22, 2017
also please let me merge my icloud accounts. or at least transfer all the assets and CLOSE one of them??
absolutely!! just do not understand why they won’t allow this. also agree with the other mdn comments too.
YES!!!!!
Agree with all three points!
I mentioned MDN’s request to an Apple VP two years ago. Unfortunately, he did not see the necessity.
Keep hammering away MDN! Maybe Apple will someday get the message.
Been saying this for years…I think they should at least match the competition! Google gives 15GB I believe……so where is Apple?
Apple doesn’t need to race to the bottom. Let the storage be kept on the customer’s device, one less thing the government can look at by asking Apple provide it.
I guess Apple figures if people are stupid enough to pay $1,000 for a disposable iPhone X or thousands for an outdated Mac Pro thet do not need to be competitive. Otherwise, the fanbois have Stockholm Syndrome.
Cook knows the bulk of customers will buy whatever phone Apple sells since the only serious competitor is Android. Apple has gotten fat and lazy- those are the seeds of decline.
I strongly disagree. I would prefer iCloud to be unwoven from the OS, treated as an optional plug-in, and users should ALWAYS pay for what they use.
Free tiers are what ad companies do to trick you into thinking you aren’t the product.
No intel or knowledge the subject but I doubt Apple would make such an announcement outside of an iPhone releases. If they ever think they don’t have a “lot” to talk about would be nice benefit to throw on top of an iPhone announcement to get folks to move to iPhone or stay put. b
Every byte of data that leaves your device should be encrypted, stored in the cloud encrypted, and only decrypted when brought back to your device.
And Apple shouldn’t be able to decrypt your data at any point in the cycle.
Agreed. But don’t expect Apple to promise that in writing for you. Timmy talks a good game but Apple — not the end user — holds the encryption keys.
Are Apple execs. Brain dead? Seems like more and more disappointments than good news. Shameful.
I’m sure there’s an incredible update in the pipeline!
How about getting iCloud to work correctly with Windows 10. My iCloud for Windows stopped working months ago and I cannot seem to fix it. A real inconvenience when needing to move files from my Mac to my PC (design software). Multiple calls to tech support… nobody knows how to fix it.
I use iCloud to sync the calendar, the keychain, and other Apple software, but that’s it.
If Apple thinks the Documents folder contains only user-created files, they haven’t been using Macs. It seems to be the Lazy Developer’s Library Folder. It contains too much stuff that I don’t need or want to sync.
I created a separate Files folder on both my Macs for files I personally create. The only cloud service that can’t sync it is iCloud.
Another example of Apple’s greed under Cook. When public perception changes to Apple being a greedy company on the back’s of their customers… it will be very tough to turn that opinion around.