Prices should be going down
Should at least offer 10-15GB as the fee tier at least, it’s 2023. Or add 5GB per owned/registered and in use device.
Should they? The cost of everything is going up not down.
Storage costs are definitely going down.
Yes, but that’s been slowing. They’re reaching limits until the next advance in HDDs.
Flash is still much more expensive per GB.
Power costs, server costs and Datacenter space are going up.
The next advance on HDDs literally came last year. 20tb+ drives are available at ever decreasing prices these days, after being stalled at 16/18tb for a good few years.
They’ve been out for a while, but it’s the same SMR tech. HAMR/MAMR are just starting to get going that will enable the next leap. But they’re not shipping in volume and reliability isn’t yet known. It’ll be a bit before you see them in widespread use.
The HAMR/MAMR are exactly what I’m talking about. It is obviously unproven, but you can get new 20/22tb CMR HDDs now for 17.5¢ per GB very regularly, not counting sales. They’re what I’m currently running, and the normal price has dropped something close to 20% in the last year alone.
HAMR is still not out, but will be 30+TB. We’ve had 20+TB drives for a long time. They’ve been plateaud there for a while.
Price per GB hasn’t really been coming down much on CMR/SMR.
Which was my point. Until HAMR is in use and at mass production, storage costs haven’t really come down.
Maybe you’re thinking of home devices as opposed to commercial products that pay salaries for employees buildings, IT infrastructure, R&D, development, security, etc?
There really should be something in the 500GB-1TB range for like $5-6 or at least just allow people to buy multiples of the lower tiers
Please. And the 200GB price should get bumped down to $2 to match Google’s low-tier pricing.
It’s incredibly silly that you can just run out of the top iCloud storage tiers. It’s not something most people will run into probably… but it’s really weird that they won’t just sell you more. Glad there’s some higher tiers now, but I hate bucket sizes like this. I wish it was more granular and we paid per byte or something.
But that way they cannot charge you for the storage you don’t use
This is almost certainly the primary reason why they do this… It’s just a dick move. Especially since, sure, per byte the accounting gets more complicated… but there’s no reason to not let people buy storage in reasonably sized increments. Even 50gb at a time would be an improvement.
hey so what are you guys using to back up your iphones or at least the photos? i guess some of you use a mac or a NAS with some kind of software? or are we all paying clpud subscriptions?
icloud 200gb and photoprism for the rest
PhotoSync app with a nas
PCloud, once in a lifetime payment. Quite happy with it and works well with RSync
Just buy it on black friday as it’s usually their lowest “on sale” price (they are always on sale it seems)
I haven’t seen these 1 time payments work out well for cloud service companies that have monthly bills to pay.
I know and I researched quite a bit before making the jump.
Basically there are couple of things which make me think they won’t just shut down:
- They’ve been around for quite a while (10 years as of now)
- They’re betting on the ever decreasing costs of storage to manage their margin
- They still try to sell you complementary products
- They don’t ever have to increase your max storage unless you pay again
- They still have monthly subscription available
All in all, I’ve felt pretty safe using them and I’ve done the cloud provider switch once so I can do it again
