From the Department of Spending Tim Cook’s Money: Online Photo Storage Is Surely Expensive to Offer, but Apple Should Offer More

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Some follow-up comparison points regarding my gripe today about Apple’s new commercial telling iPhone users they needn’t worry about photo storage:

  • The free tier for Google One offers 15 GB of storage. That’s still not much, and only a fraction of the on-device storage for any recent phone, but it’s 3× more than iCloud. 10 extra GB doesn’t sound like much, but 3× is a large factor.

  • I shot 2.07 GB of footage (96 photos, 5 videos) on Easter Sunday alone. Those are the keepers, after culling all the blurry and meh shots. (iPhone 15 Pro for videos and a few photos; Ricoh GR IIIx for most of the photos.1)

  • Google used to offer “unlimited storage for photos and videos” to owners of Pixel phones, but they dropped this offer starting with the Pixel 6 in late 2021. That was such an appealing offer — especially considering that much of the appeal of Pixel phones comes from their renowned camera systems. I can only surmise that this proved more expensive to Google than they deemed worthwhile.

  • You don’t need to pay for iCloud to back up a large amount of iPhone storage — you can still back up to a Mac or PC manually. I don’t know any non-expert users who do this, though, and there are zillions of iPhone owners who don’t even own a Mac or PC. For the masses, iCloud backup is the only backup.

Here’s a comparison of the current U.S. pricing for cloud storage, including photos, from Apple and Google:

Price/month iCloud Google
Free 5 GB 15 GB
$1 50 GB —
$2 — 100 GB
$3 200 GB 200 GB
$10 2 TB 2 TB

Google’s only clear win is at the free tier, and once you start paying $3/month, they’re tied. Both companies offer additional storage beyond 2 TB at the same price: $5/month per extra TB. Google only shows those more-than-2-TB storage tiers if you’re signed in and already pay for storage. $5/month per extra TB is also exactly what Dropbox charges.

So on the one hand, it’s not like Apple’s iCloud storage pricing is out of line with its competitors. But on the other hand, the free tier of iCloud has been stuck at 5 GB since the day iCloud was announced, which was so long ago that Steve Jobs announced it at his final WWDC keynote in 2011. iCloud’s $1/month 50 GB and $3/month 200 GB tiers have been unchanged since 2015. Like the stingy U.S. minimum wage — which was last increased, to $7.25/hour, in 2009 — these tiers ought to be adjusted for “inflation” periodically, but aren’t.

In the case of the minimum wage, “inflation” is, well, actual inflation. In the case of cloud storage, “inflation” should account for factors like increased device storage (2011’s iPhone 4S was offered with 16, 32, or 64 GB) and increased image size (the iPhone 4S only shot video up to 1080p 30 fps, which consumes about 65 MB per minute; today’s iPhone 15 shoots up to 4K 60 fps, which consumes about 440 MB per minute).2 [Update: Mike Gore reminded me that the iPhone 4S only shot H.264 video, not the more efficient HEVC format that debuted with iOS 11 in 2017. 1080p 30 fps video recording in H.264 is about 130 MB per minute.]

It’s very easy for me and you to just declare that Apple ought to just foot the bill to offer more storage for over a billion users worldwide, but we’re not the ones making new TV commercials telling iPhone 15 users they needn’t worry about photo storage. If Apple really wants iPhone users not to worry about photo storage, they should offer more with iCloud, cost-to-Apple be damned.

  1. Much like with Fuji’s deservedly-heralded X100 line, the fixed-lens Ricoh GR IIIx is seemingly backordered everywhere — perhaps because Ricoh recently announced a minor upgrade. I bought a Fuji X100S in 2014 and loved it; but bought the GR IIIx a little over a year ago because it’s small enough to fit in a pocket and the X100 cameras aren’t. I just find myself carrying the smaller Ricoh more often than I did the X100S. They’re both absolutely terrific cameras. ↩︎

  2. Idle thought that just occurred to me: is the paucity of available iCloud storage in the typical user’s account — free or $1/month — the reason why iPhones still default to shooting 1080p video rather than 4K? Default settings really matter. There are surely tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) of iPhone owners who shoot 1080p instead of 4K only because that’s the default. That’s a big difference in resolution for permanent memories. But I suspect almost everyone with 128 GB or more of storage has plenty of available space on device to store 4K video. It’s iCloud where they’re running short on space. ↩︎︎