Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.
They are a TRILLION DOLLAR company. They aren’t flinching.
They are not a trillion dollae revenue company, not to defend them but it would still hurt. Assuming 50% of the UK population is paying £2 a month for 1tb of storage that £70m a month which is £840m a year. The fine would be three and half years earnings on this product.
Wait - you can get 1tb for £2 there?
I wouldn’t mind as much if it was that price.
Comparing the euro price is 2.99 for 1tb so I asumed the £ price would be rounded and lower.
We only get 200 GiB for that price in the USA - I was surprised they offer so much more over there
Lads ye get fucked every direction, I have family over there and they say things like how we dont get credit card points and other such oddities and random bits but we just have stricter regs on offerings and generally better value for money.
Not getting it. There’s nothing stopping you from storing your photos in Amazon Photos, or Google photos, or Dropbox, or whatever.
This is false. Apple OS’s contain numerous blockers and friction points that not only stop users from storing much of their data in other clouds, but prevent competitors from being able to develop them at all. Apple does this via elevated privileges/processes and proprietary API’s available ONLY to Apple’s own local apps and cloud servers, for example:
- If you backup your photos to iCloud, everything happens in the background with elevated priviliges and “just works”.
- If you backup your photos to ANY other provider, they run in a separate sandboxed process which doesn’t “just work” because the OS can kill it at any time, meaning users often need to leave 3rd party apps open for their photos to sync at all.
This is the same for every 2nd/3rd party service in comparison to Apple/iCloud across Apple OS’s. Nobody can develop a true competitor for anyone who purchased Apple hardware as Apple has access to a range of processes, services, and API’s which are not available to external developers. You can’t boot up an iphone and set Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3 as your authoritative cloud data or backup provider. You must use iCloud, or you get an inferior experience – not because of any technical limitation, but specifically because Apple designed non-Apple integrations to be inferior.
I don’t get it. I mean, their free tier is a bit chintzy, but I give 'em a dollar a month and get 50GB. You can get 2TB for 3 bucks. This hardly seems a ripoff.
For me (europe) it is:
- 2,99 = 50GB
- 9,99 = 2TB
Everyone with a family or social life has between 20-200GB photos and videos. Notice how there is no plan for 5,99 = 1TB. You either do not back up everything and pay 3€, or you pay a tener per month to have a cloud storage that is always 50-70% empty but still have to pay for.
I will be the first to leave Apple iCloud if there is a viable solution that works like apples own OS integration without jumping through hoops and losing albums and meta data
I don’t get it either, what does perceived affordability have to do with a “monopoly”?