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After the Apple event in September - typically packed with new hardware like the iPad Air and inexpensive Apple Watch SE participate with his top-of-the-line Apple Watch Series 6 (but sadly, no new iPhone) - It's the affordable iCloud photo and backup service that can have the greatest impact on your relationship with the company through the newly announced Apple One subscription bundle.
Apple One bundles a number of the key services the company has launched over the past two years, including Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and for the top tier Apple News Plus and the newly announced Fitness Plus. Surprisingly, iCloud storage, which is hardly mentioned at such events, served as the anchor for these bundles.
Apple One pricing, tier breakdown
Get Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade and 50 gigabytes of storage for $ 14.95 (£ 14.95, AU $ 19.95) on the Individual Monthly Tier. The "Family" plan for $ 19.95 (£ 19.95, AU $ 25.95) gives you the same services plus 200 GB. The "Premier" plan for $ 29.95 (£ 29.95, AU $ 39.95) includes Fitness Plus and News Plus and 2 terabytes of storage. As is common with Apple plans, the low storage space in the smaller plans essentially forces power users to go for the Premier option.
The cloud storage that allows you to store photos, videos, and other items online that can then be accessed from multiple devices is becoming more and more popular at a time when the file size for things like 4K videos or high resolution photos getting big, physical hard drives become more and more important. It's another example of how many aspects of our lives have gone online, from the shows we watch to the goods we buy.
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The irony is that even if cloud storage becomes increasingly important in our lives, you wouldn't suspect this shift if you watched tech companies talk about the latest and greatest bells and whistles. While they all offer ways to store and share your photos, Google, Facebook, and, yes, Apple have largely ignored cloud storage and instead focused on more noticeable developments in Areas like augmented reality or artificial intelligence.
At Apple's "Time Flies" event, Lori Malm, Apple's director of services, noted that those plans were all focused on iCloud storage.
Indeed, cloud services are a huge market. Back in 2016, Eddy Cue, head of software and services at Apple, announced in a podcast with Jon Gruber that the company had 782 million iCloud users, despite finding that this spanned multiple devices. Most of them were likely free accounts (Apple never disclosed the number of paying subscribers), but even if a fraction of those users had accounts, it's huge business.
By comparison, Apple had 60 million subscribers last year. The company hasn't announced any Apple TV Plus subscribers, though analysts say many are still in free trials. The company also didn't offer numbers for Apple Arcade or Apple News Plus, although News Plus reportedly struggled early on in finding an audience.
Bundling everything together can be a way of getting more people interested in the individual services. But iCloud storage might be the ingredient that really draws people in thanks to its large user base and the fact that it serves a need that anyone who is running out of storage on their iPhone can understand. (Access to the originals Apple TV Plus or a bunch of video games you've never heard of is more dodgy.)
"In some cases, Apple One will also encourage people to subscribe to less popular services like Arcade and News Plus in addition to Apple Music," said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight.
If Apple One is similar to Amazon's Prime service package, iCloud storage is essentially the same as free shipping.
The bundle is the first change since Apple cut the price of its 2TB plan to $ 9.99 per month. The plan is almost a no-brainer considering that the lower-priced (50GB for 99 cents and 200GB for $ 2.99) plans won't be enough for heavy users or families. In comparison, Google Photos lets you store "high quality" versions for free, but you have to pay for Google Drive storage to store original photos. As part of Prime, Amazon offers unlimited photo storage and 5 GB for videos.
However, Apple has the option to automatically sync these files in the background.
I was skeptical of the need for iCloud until a thief stole my iPhone last year while I was in Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress. I ended up being able to access my work files again, but I had lost many of my family photos because I hadn't backed up the device in a few months. I use Google Photos but since I haven't opened the app in a while, photos were never backed up for a few months.
I immediately grabbed the 2TB plan for $ 9.99 and gave my family access. Suddenly, my wife and mom stopped complaining about running out of space. At that point, I could never go back to life without iCloud.
If you're using Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and Apple News Plus for a discounted additional fee, I may be more willing than ever to delve into the company's universe of services.
