[kaylynb]

I saw this iCloud pushing in-person at an Apple store a few months ago:

Someone had brought in their iPhone and it needed to be wiped for repair. The rep was pushing iCloud under threat of losing their data. It seemed like such a scam. I can only imagine what it feels like to be tech-illiterate and told you must buy a subscription or we'll wipe your family photos.

A 'premium' phone like an iPhone should really have a free backup for at least the data size of the phone. At the very least you should be able to get iCloud free for when your phone is in for repair.

[Traster]

The iCloud story particularly annoys me, because I got nagged for filling my storage so I upgraded to a pay tier. Then it immediately filled up and it started nagging me again. It's such an un-Apple experience. If I don't have the storage don't bug me about it. If you think it's that important, include it in the cost of the phone.

[dkonofalski]

While I think the sentiment is nice here, I don't think anyone would ever accept the liability of that kind of service. How long do you save people's data after their "free iCloud" is over and their device has been returned?

On the flip side, while I agree with you on the free tier for data size, I feel like that would be unsustainable. It would raise the price of the phones even higher than they already are. It would be nice if the tiers were restructured so that the bottom tier fully covered the storage capacity and I would love something more than 2TB for the max.

[easton]

I mean, they own the stack. They could make a high speed machine purely built for storing encrypted device backups while a device is in repair, once the ticketing system says the device has been returned to the customer (or once the backup is restored to a device), the machine could erase it. 2TB should be enough to hold a Apple Store’s daily repair backlog, and of course let the customer accept or deny this service when their device is dropped off.

I’d say it’s not economically feasible, but they built an entire robot for fixing iPhone screens, it probably is economically feasible unless you really value the iCloud backup revenue that geniuses get in store.

[dkonofalski]

That wasn't really what I was referring to. I meant the customer that comes back after their repaired iPhone gets dunked in water and they don't have a backup anymore and now it becomes Apple's "fault" that they didn't keep this customer's backup. There's way too many variables for that to be feasible when it's better to just promote that customers do their own backups and/or sell their service to automate it for them.