Summary: As promised in June, Apple has dramatically cut its cloud storage prices - but rivals are still undercutting it.
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| New iCloud pricing plans up to 1TB. Image: Apple |
Apple's new iCloud pricing was announced at its developer conference in June, signalling the company was finally willing to address criticisms over price, as well as rivals that had severely undercut it — most notably Google, which in May began offering 15GB of cloud storage for free, 100GB for $1.99 a month and 1TB for $9.99 a month.
The new iCloud pricing partly addresses the gap, offering 5GB for free, 20GB for 99 cents a month, and 200 GB for $3.99 a month, with the last bundle, which costs $48 a year, likely to be popular. In contrast, 55GB storage in iCloud previously cost around $100 a year.
Apple also released pricing for two additional tiers yesterday, including 500GB at $9.99 a month and 1TB at $19.99 a month.
In the UK, iCloud users can now get 20GB for £0.79 a month, 200GB for £2.99, 500GB for £6.99, and 1TB for £14.99. In France and Germany, those figures are €0.99, €3.99, €9.99, and €19.99. Up to 5GB is free across the board.
But while Apple has scaled up its storage capacity for users, iCloud is still more expensive than Google and Dropbox, with the latter last month introducing 1TB for $9.99 a month (a price it rather unfairly converted to €9.99/month in Europe).
Still, Apple's new pricing may have prompted Dropbox's price change, with its previous tiered model costing $9.99 a month for 100GB, $19.99 a month for 200GB, and $49.99 a month for 300GB.
Unfortunately for Apple, it's consumer-friendly pricing has launched to a backdrop of security concerns around content stored in iCloud following the recent celebrity photo leak.
To that end, Apple kicked off a new alert scheme to tell users when attempts are made to change their passwords, restore data to new devices, or when someone logs into to iCloud from a new Apple device.
And while the common security advice for users to prevent theft of data from iCloud was to enable Apple's two factor authentication, security researchers late last year drew attention to the fact iCloud two-factor does not protect iCloud backups, Find My Phone data and documents stored in the cloud.
~ Liam Tung
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