iCloud Finally Joins Cloud Storage Pricing Race
Some cloud analysts feel as if Apple has lagged behind the rest of the pack with its cloud storage offering. iCloud was Apple’s solution for users who would like to store data in the cloud. Unfortunately for Apple, the service was met with mild reviews. Apple looks to change the way users view iCloud with a restructuring of the pricing model. This pricing restructure is intended for iCloud to be more competitive with the likes of DropBox and Google drive.
What will iCloud users get with this new pricing restructure? For $3.99 per month, Apple had given iCloud users a generous 200GB of space. Many cloud analysts point to the fact that price point is cheaper than what is currently offered by OneDrive or DropBox. 200GB at OneDrive costs $8.99 per month and DropBox may not be able to compete with iCloud on this price point because DropBox leases its cloud servers from Amazon as opposed to owning the servers outright. If users need 20GBs of space, iCloud sells this service for only $.99 per month.
More technology analysts still question Apple’s approach to the cloud. Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz mentions, “Hence one could suggest that Apple loves the cloud, just not the web (or, not URLs). This is obviously a contrast with Google, which has pretty much the opposite approach. For Google, devices are dumb glass and the intelligence is in the cloud, but for Apple the cloud is just dumb storage and the device is the place for intelligence. And it’s built a whole new set of APIs, CloudKit, to enable this for developers, which it is (for the first time, I believe) dogfooding, building the photos product on it.”
One burning question still remains for those tracking Apple’s cloud journey: Does Apple “get” the cloud? Steve Jobs once vowed to kill upstart cloud storage provider DropBox. Although that predication hasn’t come true, there still hasn’t been a clear cut winner crowned in the Cloud storage pricing wars and it appears that iCloud is ramping up to compete with the industry’s biggest players.
