If the iPhone is going to keep creating higher quality photo and video, iCloud storage options need to match.
Over 3 trillion.
That's the number of photos taken around the world on iPhones just last year, according to Apple. The company announced that milestone at its latest Apple Event just earlier this week.
While many marveled over that number, all I could think of was "damn, that's going to require a lot of storage." And that's where Apple is lacking.
It's the year 2022 and Apple is still offering a maximum iCloud+ storage plan of 2TB. It doesn't make any sense.
Every year that Apple announces a new iPhone, a major focus is the upgrade in camera hardware offering major improvements on photo and video quality. That means better pictures. It also means larger files. According to Apple itself, a single minute of 4K video recorded on an iPhone can take up as much as 400mb of space. This year, the company put major focus on the new iPhone 14 Pro's insane 48mp camera at its Apple event. One photo taken with this iPhone camera, in the high quality ProRAW format, can be around 75MB.
You're going to fill up your measly 2TB iCloud storage plan mighty quickly with photos and videos of that size. What does Apple want you to do then?
The iCloud storage conundrum
It's unclear why Apple doesn't offer an iCloud+ storage plan larger than 2TB. Seems like an easy thing to do! More money for Apple, right? The company offers much, much smaller storage options. All iCloud users are offered 5GB (lol) for free. There's upgrade options at 99 cents per month for 50GB and $2.99 per month for 200GB. Then of course there's the largest plan at $9.99 per month for 2TB.
"You already have the largest iCloud+ plan available," reads the iCloud settings once you look at the upgrade options page when you have the 2TB plan.
Also, Apple itself markets the iPhone to users beyond the "average" iPhone consumer too. At recent Apple Events, the company frequently lauds how the iPhone can be used by professional filmmakers and photographers because the device can create high quality media, which in turn means large files.
And, remember, that storage space is for everything, not just your iPhone photos and videos. Your music and movies, documents and other files, app data, your iCloud backups all count towards your iCloud storage. If you're a Mac user as well, Apple encourages you to connect your iCloud drive to your laptop or desktop computer and share that whole 2TB of iCloud storage space with those devices too. Insanity!
Much of the advice one would find online when they max out their iCloud+ storage is to simply move older media off iCloud and to physical storage space. Sure, that's one solution. Those users would also have to give up the other selling point for iCloud+ and that's the software Apple uses to highlight photos and memories on iCloud.
But, even if losing that isn't a dealbreaker, this will convolute things for the average iPhone user. And that's because users should be storing their photos on a local, physical hard drive already anyway as a backup. Once they're deleted from iCloud, those photos would still then need to be backed up on a second cloud or local storage location. Simply moving those photos off iCloud and on to a hard drive would mean a backup of those files wouldn't exist.
