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.

3uTools

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.

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?

And it's the software I hate the most on my mac

Dropbox works also. It would be cool if one could do it via usb like other phones before.

That's unsurprising considering how much Apple charges for local storage. You can buy 2TB of NAND from them for $800 or rent it for $10/mo, so the break-even on buying is almost 7 years.

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.

Approx 2/3rds of Americans pay Apple monthly for storage, according to consumer research.

Original source is paywalled but lifted quotes here:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2024/08/21/cirp-survey-apple-i...

The smallest one is the cheapest, it's basic economics to assume that it sells the best. I would guess 60%+ buy the smallest, and I don't even need to look at data. You're welcome to disprove me.

The popularity of the storage subscription is basically why Apple is a $4tn company.

I don't know that I buy your basic economics theory. Starter prices are a thing to get people in the door and upsell them later. According to [0], the iphone 17 pro has a larger share than the regular 17, although it's more expensive.

And, again, paying for cloud storage doesn't automatically mean that they do it because their local storage is too small for their needs. Apple pushed iCloud as a solution to safely back up your stuff, and I doubt nobody bought into this angle.

[0] https://telemetrydeck.com/survey/apple/iPhone/models/

> Starter prices are a thing to get people in the door and upsell them later.

Yes, with services such as storage.

I very much doubt that. I just checked the apple store page for an iphone 17. They try to sell me the larger storage model, they try to sell me apple care, but I don't see anything related to icloud. If I look at the pro, they try to sell me the max.

The difference between a 512 GB and a 256 GB non-pro model is 250 Euros. The 200 GB icloud subscription (which, again, they don't talk about when buying an iphone) costs 2.99 Euros a month. Break even is in seven years. I bet many phones don't actually last that long. If you look at a 2TB plan (which doesn't have an equivalent phone) the break-even is 2 years.

It makes no sense to try to sell the cheaper iPhone in the hope that I'll buy some icloud storage, since they actually leave money on the table. Looking at pro models, the difference between the base 256 + 2TB icloud and 2 TB model has an even longer break-even period!

So, basically, it looks actually cheaper to get a smaller phone + icloud than a bigger one.

Apple is a consumer services company, it contributes the half of their profits, and storage is their most popular service.

https://www.ft.com/content/3687fab7-3aea-4f81-9616-ed3d1f7be...

> Services are on track to make up a quarter of Apple’s revenue but as much as 50 per cent of its profit, said JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee, reflecting the “stickiness” of products such as recurring payments for iCloud storage.

Your rational take makes sense but the market disagrees. Apple cloud storage is very, very poplar.

I think we're talking past each other. I never argued icloud wasn't popular or people didn't buy it. I disagree with the reason why it's popular and with the fact that apple would push cheaper devices in the hopes of enticing people to buy icloud.

I posit many people use it for syncing / sharing stuff and easy "backup", and not mainly as a way to increase storage for entry-level devices.

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".