[ipsi]

Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3, for example, or about what you'd pay for S3 glacier storage, not including transfer costs.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges for downloads.

Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple are making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word "lucrative" here.

[gruez]

>Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3

...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the 200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't).

[1]

    50GB: $0.99
    200GB: $2.99
    2TB: $9.99

[shantly]

The funny thing about consumer cloud storage is it's only useful if you aren't using all of it. Stuff just automatically showing up there is the point. If it's full, that doesn't happen.