Apple Accused of Trapping 40 Million UK Customers Into iCloud Service

[cicalinarrot]

Leave Apple alone, the market must decide not regulators.

I am on the Apple ecosystem because I like the Apple ecosystem as is, not because Apple forces me in any mysterious way.

The market can't decide because Apple doesn't allow it. That is the point.
You buy an iPhone, Apple uses all sort of tricks to make you use iCloud.
The market has decided about the iPhone, iPhone is good. Apple uses that decision to prevent even having to fight for who makes the best cloud service: when you have an iPhone, you just have to use their service, for no technical reason, just the fact that they're trying to lock it like they did with the App Store.
If Apple is that good at the game, they should let competitors play and prove it.

Edit: they've also done all they could with browsers, maps, cables, repair... it's a very clear pattern.

 

[timber]

How is Apple's iCloud offering "really poor"?

For exemple Google One offers 100 GB for 20 euros per year which I consider a very good offer for normal users and more useful than 50 GB for 12 euros which is what Apple offers. The Google 200 GB plan is also cheaper and from beyond that I don't care.

And of course Google has a free baseline of 15 GB which is a lot better than Apple with 5 GB and usable for a lot of users.

Apple One family offering on the other hand is pretty nice and it's what I use.

 

[Tago]

Easier to go multi-platform with a different service, and if people want that, it is easy to pick a different service. Apple`s job is to make cloud storage/interaction as easy as possible for users of Apple products and software.

If I want interaction between my Mac and my Linux I`ll just pick a different service. But I don`t, and stick with iCloud. A dollar a month.

 

[tomscott1988]

5GB is ridiculous in this day and age.

Apples smallest device is 64gb, 5gb isnt fit for purpose if you loose or have your phone stolen all of your data is gone and it happens a lot to people that dont realise.

Listen to the Upgrade podcast last week. It is shocking and the cost even for a family is expensive to upgrade to give you the safety net and ensure the apple eco system can actually work!

Its not about the service its the fact its not fit for purpose and essentially you have to upgrade it off the bat to make use of the service.

It is a walled garden and you are forced to pay or not to be able to use the service properly which is the point not the fact that the service isnt great.

I have the 2tb for my family. What pains me is we have nearly filled it and the next step up is 6TB which is £26.99 a month up from £8.99. Thats £324 per year.

What's more hilarious is that iMessage is taking up a lot of it and there isnt a way to manage the iMessage storage.

That being said my wife had her phone stolen by a gang that targeted her in Milan a couple of weeks ago, awful experience for her. Her mother passed away through covid and she was devastated that she had lost all the messages from her.

With iCloud she lost nothing and from an emotional perspective she was over joyed but its because I had set it up for her. She had no idea and I would say most people are in the same boat.

That being said it costs £108 a year to enable it.

The readership of this forum is not that of the average person and this is why places like Which exist to help the average person not be taken advantage of.

 

[cicalinarrot]

The British economy:

Criminal level rents draining society = great, let's get rich on this pyramid scheme even if it harms most people and makes young people fear for their future

iCloud, which is free, optional and has various plans = OMG this is a crime

And that's why Britain's tech sector died in the 80s.

What?! How is any of that related? That sounds like politics debates in pubs.
Anyway, iCloud is not that optional, considering you just have to make an account to use your phone.

 

[Chevysales]

Odd lawsuit. How is Apple to blame?

On another note what makes the story political in nature? I see nothing.

 

[Kulfon]

honestly this is a joke I am by no means an Apple fan boy. Noone is forcing me to do anything. Every year I evaluate which device I want to use as my phone, laptop and etc. We all have a freedom to choose)

 

[JosephAW]

Ummm, they can buy a pc and backup and offload files there.
But it would probably be cheaper to use the iCloud storage, even the 2TB plan.
Of buy one of these like in the old days of a digital camera.

SD Card Reader for iPhone/iPad, Trail Camera SD Viewer, USB Memory Micro SD Card Adapter, Plug and Play, No App Required

Plug and Plug,share Videos/Photos instantly. SD Card Reader with Lightening for iPhone, iPad, iPod,etc. Compatibility with iOS build-in "Files" App.Go to the "Files" app on your iPhone,go to "Browse Locations",and then find the folder of the SD card & all your items will be there. ...

www.amazon.com

 

[Lionel Messi]

I have been using Google Drive and Photos for 10 years and just canceled my subscription this year to move everything to iCloud. It was actually easier to use GDrive than iCloud. And Google Photos worked effortlessly especially when searching for images.

 

[Chevysales]

The market can't decide because Apple doesn't allow it. That is the point.
You buy an iPhone, Apple uses all sort of tricks to make you use iCloud.
The market has decided about the iPhone, iPhone is good. Apple uses that decision to prevent even having to fight for who makes the best cloud service: when you have an iPhone, you just have to use their service, for no technical reason, just the fact that they're trying to lock it like they did with the App Store.
If Apple is that good at the game, they should let competitors play and prove it.

What tricks?
They give you five gigs for free then charge .99 cents a month for 50 more. Pretty reasonable.
You are free to use any other service like Google or backup services from ISP’s that offer it.

 

[uacd]

There are so many things wrong with Apple nowadays that I suppose soon they will need to hire 5 times more lawyers than engineers🤦‍♂️ Why not just fire dumb managers and engineers who still impose the “digital dictatorship” rules on the platform? Yeah I know Google and Microsoft do even worse and they must have been included in the lawsuit as well, but still.

I myself use iCloud only for Find My functionality, other than that is pretty much useless since 5GB tier is literally nothing. Hopefully USB C drives nowadays cost less than a monthly subscription and if I wanted I would have allowed myself to buy a USB drive every month just to copy stuff.

Cloud storage is very slow and useless for most creative tasks. For backing up excel sheets it is for sure the best option, but when it comes to uploading a 4 minute long 4K footage it is even more useless than AirDrop

 

[krspkbl]

To be fair 5GB is pitiful but you don’t need to use iCloud. And it’s like £12 a year for 50GB. So the other side of it is how can they not offer 15, 20 or even 50GB for free? £12 a year per user is nothing to Apple.

I don’t even use all my iCloud storage (50GB) so share it with my family. I use Proton Drive for cloud storage. That actually works properly on my PC unlike iCloud which breaks all the time.

 

[iLondoner]

I am a subscriber to Which? in the UK and also a member of Which Legal Services.

I see absolutely nothing wrong in what Apple is doing and I hope the lawsuit collapses on its face.

 

[mac_head]

It's still incredibly sad that by ~2010, capitalists went with cloud direction instead of making well-integrated self-hosting solutions.

Imagine having all your stuff on a Mac mini at home, including phone backups, contacts, etc. Free forever, fully yours, just don't forget to replace hard drives once in a while.

I'm certain that every person could easily manage that setup, just like all the "normie" people used to pirate music for their iPods back in the day.

But of course, it's harder for police and for data brokers to access data that way, so here we are.

Ah, remember TimeCapsule? Apple should just bring that back with 10TB of storage. You could set it up with your iPhone and then it literally becomes your "own little iCloud". Those were the days!

 

[BGPL]

5GB is on the cheap side. Google has given 15GB for a very long time. You can't backup anything with 5GB when phones start around 64GB.

 

[spazzcat]

The idea that markets regulate themselves is complete BS. If humans weren't complete scumbags then it might be true but they are. The markets are regulated, increasingly, in favour of big business. In unregulated markets you would not have free choice because the richest and biggest companies would take that choice away from you in every way possible.

Go look at how much money all the trillion dollar companies spend in lobbying. Look at how much they spend on legal matters. They are not about a fair game or a free market. They want your money and they want to compete as little as possible for it.

There is always a balance to be had and yes, one of the reasons I use loads of apple devices is their tight integration and "walled garden". That doesn't mean there shouldn't be options for people who want to live outside that. The key point here is options.

You have options, and you know what you are buying when you go the iPhone route.

 

[spazzcat]

For exemple Google One offers 100 GB for 20 euros per year which I consider a very good offer for normal users and more useful than 50 GB for 12 euros which is what Apple offers. The Google 200 GB plan is also cheaper and from beyond that I don't care.

And of course Google has a free baseline of 15 GB which is a lot better than Apple with 5 GB and usable for a lot of users.

Apple One family offering on the other hand is pretty nice and it's what I use.

And Google is a data company, guess where they make their money.

 

[timber]

5GB is on the cheap side. Google has given 15GB for a very long time. You can't backup anything with 5GB when phones start around 64GB.

They would have to redo everything. If you offer 15 selling 50 becomes a bit harder and so on.

And Google is a data company, guess where they make their money.

More an advertising company.

 

[Sal09]

Scratch the Apple Silicone cases idea.

£70 worth Polishing Cloths .

I'll send couple to Which? as well lol.

 

[amaze1499]

Leave Apple alone, the market must decide not regulators.

I am on the Apple ecosystem because I like the Apple ecosystem as is, not because Apple forces me in any mysterious way.

Can the customer decide consciously to use less data?

I would argue, the majority is not aware that file sizes increased hugely across the board over the years as well as redundancy. Neither can or do they want to do something in order to reduce it right on the spot if you want to keep using the new technologies seamlessly.

A JPEG file was like a couple of years back say what 300kB? If you send a picture today, you easily can achieve 15 to 50 MB in file size with one picture or short video. Give or take.

You take that one (live)picture and send it to 10 of your friends. Now suddenly you don’t have only one but 10 pictures in each chat using Messages. Those will also go straight into your iCloud back up and additionally remain in your photo app.

Redundancy effect goes further, because Messages are stored separately in your iCloud account. Now add all your messengers like Whats app for instance. Which creates a proprietary backup, but is also to be found in your iPhones iCloud backup.

So it’s true Apple doesn’t force you to use their services. They rather push you very softly and ever so slightly in the direction before you even get to the pain point. Now make it a subscription model and you forget about it.

The best alternatives are still: Have the music app or iTunes do a backup and import all your pictures into your Photos app on your computer etc or let Apple handle it all at once and pay for it.

 

[ifxf]

The British economy:

Criminal level rents draining society = great, let's get rich on this pyramid scheme even if it harms most people and makes young people fear for their future

iCloud, which is free, optional and has various plans = OMG this is a crime

And that's why Britain's tech sector died in the 80s.

If it wasn’t for ARM where would Apple be?

 

[iMatt.]

£3bn is pocket change. Might as well give me the £70 in Apple Vouchers as I'll just be giving them the money back anyway.

 

[2761216]

Anyone else starting to think both EU and the UK have gone totally mental?

The gov needs to reign in when the super big corps act like the laws don’t apply to them but it’s starting to look like the EU and the UK now acting like they’re the ones drunk with power lately with nothing better to do.

For some inexplicable reason Apple’s being targeted for both good and nonsensical reasons.

 

[polyphenol]

I think you fail to see the issue.

The issue is, if you want to back your iPhone up to a cloud service, iCloud is the only option. That’s by design, you can’t use anything else

Why can't you backup your iPhone to your macOS machine?

Then you have multiple choices for backing up your macOS machine(s).

Not a one-stop continuous backup, of course. It might take some thought and a little effort.

(I have no idea if iPhones can be backed up to non-macOS machines. So there might still be some restriction imposed.)

 

[Tago]

5GB is on the cheap side. Google has given 15GB for a very long time. You can't backup anything with 5GB when phones start around 64GB.

Depends what you choose to keep and what you choose to back-up/sync. 50gb is a dollar a month. Most people who can afford an iPhone/Mac can afford that.

I don`t really care what Google is offering "for free", because it isn`t.