On Wednesday, a U.S. federal appeals court dismissed claims from Apple customers alleging the company provided less iCloud storage than promised in paid upgrades. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 3-0 that reasonable consumers in the proposed class action would not have been misled by Apple’s iCloud+ storage capacity claims.
Reuters:
The plaintiff Lisa Bodenburg said she paid $2.99 a month for 200 GB of storage, believing Apple would add it to the 5 GB that all iCloud customers receive, and was shortchanged because Apple gave her only 200 GB of total storage, not 205 GB.
Circuit Judge Milan Smith, however said Bodenburg “received exactly what Apple promised her” when the Cupertino, California-based company offered “incremental” or “supplemental” storage, on top of the 5 GB she got for free… “Apple’s statements are not false and deceptive merely because [they] may be unreasonably misunderstood by an insignificant and unrepresentative segment of consumers,” Smith wrote.
The decision upheld a May 2024 dismissal by U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco.
MacDailyNews Take: We’d say “nice try,” but it wasn’t even.
iCloud+ is Apple’s premium cloud subscription. It gives you more storage for your photos, files, and backups, and additional features available only to subscribers. More info here.
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Apple is correct that they don’t mislead. But they sure are stingy. I pay Apple $2.99/month for 200 GB. I also pay Microsoft $99.99 a year for Microsoft 365, which gives me Microsoft Office AND an additional 1TB of OneDrive storage multiplied by 6 – meaning each of the 6 people in my Microsoft family get 1TB added to their 5 GB of free storage. So although Apple didn’t mislead in their advertising, there is no question that they are stingy.
I cringe at the thought of giving Microsoft any money, let alone $100
Hey Nick, I cringe about giving money to all really large corporations. But at least Bill Gates does plan to donate $200-billion of his wealth to charity in the next 20 years. (Tim Cook plans to donate most of his money, too by the way.) But on the shear economics of cloud storage, Microsoft is giving me six accounts with 1.005 TB of storage for $99.99 (not counting access to Word, Excel and Powerpoint). On the other hand, 6 TB of iCloud storage would quadruple the cost to $395.88.