Will Apple Ever Give More Than 5GB iCloud Storage For Free?

Steve Jobs unveiled iCloud in June 2011 and, a decade on, the amount of free storage offered has still not increased beyond 5GB. 9to5Mac has published a good history lesson of the service, including speculation on how the paid tiers could change to help both Apple and users.
There is an argument to be made that Apple’s services revenue would actually benefit from giving away slightly more upfront to reel people in and entice customers into paid plans. 5 GB isn’t enough to even try out iCloud Photos in any meaningful capacity. If instead the free tier was matching Google’s at 15 GB, it would enable Apple users to get a reasonable amount of photos backing up to iCloud, experience some of the benefits of cloud sync, and then be more likely persuaded into committing to a paid plan. To pull this off, you’d have to adjust the paid tiers accordingly. Maybe a lineup of 15 GB free, 100 GB for $0.99/month, 300 GB for $2.99/month and 2 TB for $9.99/month could be compelling. An even cheekier approach could be to only increase the storage offered as part of Apple One, making the higher-value subscriptions more attractive for consumers migrating from the free plan.
Tags: iCloud