“Apple has doubled the storage of its most expensive iCloud storage plan from 1 TB to 2 TB, retaining the same $9.99 per month price point,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac. “The old 1 TB plan is no longer available, so Apple still offers a total of three paid iCloud storage plans.”
Mayo reports, “The company has also announced that multiple users will be able to share a single iCloud storage plan with Family Sharing in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.”
“Apple still only offers 5 GB storage to free accounts,” Mayo reports. “The 50 GB plan for $0.99/month and the 200 GB plan for $2.99/mo are also unchanged.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup, we just checked and each of our iCloud storage capacities now total 2048 GB of total storage!
“Apple still only offers 5 GB storage to free accounts”
That’s insane. It’s like they are saying: “Here’s a demo of this thing we’d like you to pay for, but we will make sure the demo really sucks and makes the thing look bad!”
All your info on someone else’s computer priceless..Google Heaven.
I remember the day I bought a computer with 1GB storage and my geek PC friend told me I’d never use all that space. Now it’s “insane” to try to live with just 5GB. Funny how perspective works.
What do you need more than 64k for?
It’s insane when you can’t even backup your device, let alone have any email, app storage, etc etc., let alone backup your 2nd device. Does Apple want to sell more devices?
Good news. Also great news that iMessage will have optimized storage. That will free up tons of space on most everyone’s devices.
I consider myself to be fairly savvy in terms of computers and electronics, but I have been too busy over the years to spend time on figuring out how to best utilize iCloud. This is one function in the Apple ecosystem that the company has not managed or marketed well. To me, Apple’s cloud offering have always seemed fragmented – iTunes, App Store, iCloud, and their relationship to your Apple ID.
I got on board with Apple’s early cloud offerings – music sharing across devices, photo and file sharing, and website publishing. These functions worked well and seemed fairly straightforward to me. The family plan option arrived a bit late to fully benefit me, although it did help me to maintain some degree of integration across devices for a few years. But, in the transition to iCloud, Apple ended the photo sharing and website publishing functions that were useful to me. As a result, iCloud has remained a somewhat shadowy and nebulous service to me.
I still pay for the music sharing feature (although I may cancel after this year), and I use iCloud to back up my iOS devices – contacts, etc. But I never took the time to figure out how I the updates to iCloud might help (or hurt) my efforts to maintain a complete photo library. I am used to offloading photos from iPhone and iPads and other cameras to my iPhotos library on my iMac, and it still isn’t clear how all of this would work with iCloud photo features as my family is fragmenting away from my established Mac ecosystem at home to form their own Apple ecosystem bubbles.
Sure, I can (and, eventually will) take some time to figure all of this out. But the point is that I should not have to do so. Apple has created confusion over the years with their somewhat chaotic approach to the cloud — for instance, Apple’s original processes drove people to establish multiple accounts, but Apple never found a way to let people consolidate accounts after the process evolved.
Given Apple’s historical focus on user experience, the company needs to do a much better job with the basics of streamlining the collection and protection of my valuable private data – photos, videos, music, and data files. Apple’s unifying vision for the Mac-iOS-iCloud triangle is still incomplete, in my opinion.
ICloud is a mystery to Apple as well. Just like iTunes is for movies, books, tv shows, backing up iOS apps, songs that you buy, music you subscribe to, and your own tracks that are backed up via iTunes Match. So is iCloud a place to backup pictures, videos, files of various programs, pdfs, but not books, movies or tv shows, unless you created them, but then they’re usually in iMovie theater, or maybe you ripped them and need a place to store them offline, so it’s a bit like Dropbox, except it’s also where you store your Contacts, but not where you store which apps you have, that’s on your Apple ID account that you paid for your apps with, but it is for signing in to your iMessages, but iMessages aren’t backed up there (will be soon). It’s a mystery to you because it is a complete mess.
Very well said. I have no idea what iCloud is for at all.
They should have doubled everything at the same price points, even the free 5GB to 10GB.
They should provide more free space for every device you own. For example, if you buy an iPad, iPhone, and a Mac, you should get three times as much as if you only bought one device.
This may be heresy, but I’m sticking with Microsoft OneDrive. For $100 a year, my brother, my three roommates and I (all 5 of us) EACH have our own licensed copies of Microsoft Office 365 which we may install on our Macs or PCs and our iPhones or Android phones and a tablet; we EACH have 1TB of OneDrive storage; and we EACH get 60 minutes of Skype. That’s just $20 a year per person for Mac, iPhone & iPad Office, 1TB of storage and 60 minutes of Skype.
I like how iCloud automagically puts a copy of the photos that I take with my iPhone onto my Mac, but it is so damn flakey. Half the time it doesn’t work and I have to kick it by taking a picture and then deleting it off my iPhone while Photos is running on my Mac.