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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

I’m having a hard time understanding a complaint about the skyrocketing price of free 5 GB storage (or $1 for ten times that). And I’m having a hard time imagining a need for more than the free offering for settings, which AFAICT is the only thing you can’t trivially offload to a bulk cloud storage competitor. Of which there are many, easily available on the App Store.

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Many iOS users use the Messages app to send and receive text messages which can be trivially backed up to iCloud but not other cloud storage solutions. Among people who text (common in the US) I'd imagine there aren't many iPhone users with less than 5GB of data stored in iMessages

That said, you can back iMessages up to a computer and back up files on your computer. You just can't restore iMessages to different Apple devices like this, but now we're talking about minor grievances to a really tiny segment of the population

Photos is the place where storage gets eaten alive. People take a photograph with the camera app and it gets saved into the photos app then offloaded to iCloud. While it is true that with some effort you can copy stuff from iCloud and remove it from the photos app, it’s not a particularly seamless experience and it requires you to use another app chain than the one natively attached to the camera.

I don’t find the iCloud pricing egregious though. It’s 0.99 for 50gb, which is roughly s3 public pricing, and goes down from there in per gb pricing. That’s pretty sensible given iCloud is s3.

My bigger gripe is that the top end is actually not enough for bigger families that do a lot of video etc.

But would I turn down a chance to swap it with backblaze or something? No.

> iCloud is s3 Are you sure? I remember a few years ago, when I was working for NetApp, they were selling their E-series boxes to Apple in a special deal to be used for iCloud. Although things might have changed by now, at Apple’s scale, I would have imagined they build and operate their own block storage..

Yes I’m sure. They actually have redundancy with Google and they do have their own infra too, but iCloud is more or less s3. It’s by far the largest s3 user. Within aws people whisper about iCloud as being “fruitcart” and other fairly transparent code names. It’s supposed to be a secret but at some level everyone knows.

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