Comment by walthamstow
9 days ago
> You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription
This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up.
I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.
As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft).
I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard.
Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago.
Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.
You're someone who is comfortable in a terminal desktop environment on Linux. What you or I do for storage is irrelevant to the wider consumer market.
Apple's hardware prices mean that millions of people buy the smallest on offer and pay Apple monthly instead. It's a deliberate play for recurring services revenue.
My point is this: would they buy a phone that had virtually-zero free storage and rely solely on iCloud? Probably.
Some of them had 64GB models, in my view they are already doing that!
I don't know, do these small-storage-size models actually have that big a market share compared to the others?
They also sell 1 TB iPhones and I think on the latest generation the minimum storage has been increased. If nobody bought them they wouldn't sell them (see the lack of newer "mini" models).
I always thought that these models with tiny storage and tiny ram (for laptops) where just so that they could hook you with a low "starting from" price.
My point wasn't that "nobody falls into apple's trap", I'm sure plenty do. Rather, unless you're sure your audience is representative of the "wider consumer market", just asking them if they pay for icloud and they say yes, it doesn't prove much.
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You tell me how to automatically sync photos across iOS+mac devices using non-Apple services. I'll wait. (hint: it's a monopoly, you can't use other services). Yeah, I know you can do a manual backup to e.g. Google Photos. It's not the same as seamless bidirectional sync.
OneDrive supports automatic syncing of photos from iOS to the Mac.
Will it actually do it in the background on iOS though? It's been years since I had an iPhone, but basically you had to keep the phone awake to keep the sync moving for any application that wasn't Apple's.
And it's the software I hate the most on my mac
Provided it…actually works, which shouldn’t be a high bar, but it’s one drive we’re talking about here.
And provided it doesn’t lose your stuff. Again, should be a core competency, but it has a track record of messing that up.
And arguably here, you’re trading one giant for a net-worse one?
Dropbox works also. It would be cool if one could do it via usb like other phones before.
3uTools
Not everyone is in it for the storage though, I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos, as well as for iCloud private relay.
> I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos
That is... storage.
I think GP's point was rather the "optimized storage" schtick of apple devices, where they "unload" whatever you have locally on iCloud and use that as "regular" storage. Syncing, even though it also actually stores, is a fairly different use case. Could you implement that some other way? Sure. But I still think it's fair to point it's a different use case than "regular storage".