It does seem petty. “I just paid for a $1000 phone with a massive markup and you mean I have to pay an extra $12 to get a decent amount of storage?” It’s not like the 99¢ gets you a terabyte; you only get 50 GB. They could just swallow the cost, but they don’t.

Continuous services are taxed and accounted differently from one-time costs.

They hook you in with the $1 option, you see how useful iCloud is and then you'll fork up even more. Then you notice that your whole family can share the subscription and soon you'll be paying $10 for the 2TB option and are an Apple One subscriber.

That's just good business nowadays. All companies _could_ just sell stuff with an one-time fee and provide a service forever, but it's not fiscally responsible in the long run.

It's still an extra cost, and 50GB when you've got 30GB of message history, 60 GB of photos and other data doesn't cut it.

Then you can pay the immense cost of $3/mo for 200GB.

Subscriptions are what guarantees quality, you are paying for the service so you can expect a certain level of quality.