Apple Accused of Trapping 40 Million UK Customers Into iCloud Service

[cjsuk]

It's not anticompetitive, Apple is just greedy.

They’re not really. Storage, bandwidth, running the services and managing it is expensive.

The only reason Apple doesn’t treat you and your data like garbage is fundamentally because you have to actually pay for it rather than let them make revenue up somewhere else.

 

[cicalinarrot]

The market can decide. Vote with your $$$. The idea that for profit consumer discretionary companies should be giving away their IP is ludicrous.

not sure what you're talking about but... again, Apple doesn't want you to decide with your money, once you've bought an iPhone.

There are no tricks. For the first 9 years I used iCloud in a limited fashion.

"I don't have a problem so the problem doesn't exist"

Citation for “no technical reason”.

You're asked what browser you want to use, you can be asked what backup service you want to use if Apple think it's almost mandatory.

What pattern is that?

Apple finding petty excuses to prevent competition.
There's been only Safari for a long time, then just Safari-based browsers. For money. Apple took money from Google to make them the standard browser. Which ultimately pushed more people who didn't know better to just give their data to one of the most data-greedy companies on Earth. So it turned out that Apple was just using privacy as a marketing tool for those who care.
Lightning cables. It was cool that it was reversible, then it's been vastly surpassed by USB C. Apple didn't want their customers to get a better cable (or to buy less cables, you know, for the environment they pretend they love so much), they just wanted to upsell proprietary accessories.
You still can't set other maps apps as default, other than Apple Maps.

And, boy, I could spend hours talking about repairing your iPhone.
They've used ALL the tricks they could to prevent third party repair. I know, I used to do that for a living.

So, let's say you decided with your hard-earned $$$ that the iPhone 7 is the best phone. Congrats! Just when warranty expires, it comes out that it had an engineering problem that made the audio chip fail. Your phone is no longer a phone. Apples wants hundred of dollars to replace the motherboard, third party repairmen want a third of that to fix the motherboard. Thank God there's competition! Even if a chip is broken, it can be swapped.
...but when that happens to the CPU, it can't be swapped. For security reasons. Fine. Same for the SSD. For security reasons. Alright. And the modem. Mmm... security? Wi-Fi... security again? The display too. Ok, maybe "security" meant "money" all along.
Think of a car with electronics that don't allow the engine to start if you bought wheels made by another manufacturer.

If you don't see a pattern here (we sell phones, we should be the only ones to sell anything that's related to that phone, no matter how much better the competition could be)...

 

[cyb3rdud3]

You say you're happy with how iCloud intigrates with all of your Apple products then go on to say that competitors can't provide an equivalent seemless option. What you're missing is that is is exactly why there's a lawsuit against Apple. It's Apple that prevents competing services from being able to supplant their own services. Sure, you can use Google Drive but you can't use it for everything like you can with iCloud. That's why Apple provides such a small amount of storage on most of their devices. Your choice is pay an overpriced premium for extra on device storage OR pay more than fair market value for Apples cloud storage.
The irony is that Apple uses Google servers to host iCloud. Look it up.

Hmm if that was the case then how come you can’t get close to equivalent experiences on android with windows or Linux?

 

[cyb3rdud3]

It cost too much. The first two tiers should be FREE in my opinion.

There is no such thing as free. Where does free gets paid from?

 

[Photoshopper]

And how do you suggest the average normie protects themselves against fire, theft, hard drive failures, or security breaches?

You keep another drive (periodically updated) off-site. Pretty basic stuff- I rotate two, so I've always got a recently updated drive in my bank's safe deposit box.

 

[Lizzard899]

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.

Agreed, the first two tiers should be FREE

 

[Lizzard899]

There is no such thing as free. Where does free gets paid from?

The first tier is free and so Im saying they should make the first 2 tiers free. END OF STORY

 

[chrono1081]

You never tried

iPhone backups can only be kept in iCloud or locally on a Mac/PC.
iPhone photos lose additional metadata when you export them as files, and you can't self-host Apple Photos. In theory, you can store Apple Photos Library on a server, but it will be only accessible by one computer and that's it.
iTunes Home Sharing is artificially limited to LAN only.
Apps like Keynote or Journal only work with iCloud, etc.

Sure, you can switch to third-party software and self-host it, but I kinda wish Apple kept doing Mac OS X Server and promoting it as the way to run your digital life or whatever.

Like hey, you can buy 2TB of iCloud storage for $9.99 per month, but you can also buy our fancy dual hard drive Mac mini for $999 and do all the same things while keeping complete control over your data!

Wow you literally have NO clue what you're talking about. I'm not responding, literally nothing you said above is correct, you just don't know how to get it working.

 

[Tago]

The first tier is free and so Im saying they should make the first 2 tiers free. END OF STORY

A dollar a month.

 

[Timpetus]

Always be weary of anons who take advantage of you.

While I am also weary of them, the thing you wanted to advise us to be is "wary."

 

[jonblatho]

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.

I could manage such a setup, but I’d still go with iCloud. I pay $3 a month for more iCloud storage than I need. At that rate, with a Mac mini, it’d take me about 15 years — comfortably longer than the supported lifespan of the device — to come out ahead buying a dedicated device for this hypothetical self-hosted solution.

Plus, who’s more likely to encounter downtime: my home internet, or Apple’s data centers/cloud providers? And who’s likely to come back up faster when downtime does occur?

Incredibly easy value proposition for me.

 

[SMH4KIDIOT]

Thanks, but I’ll keep my data on Google servers.

Fixed that for you.

 

[MajorFubar]

You say you're happy with how iCloud intigrates with all of your Apple products then go on to say that competitors can't provide an equivalent seemless option. What you're missing is that is is exactly why there's a lawsuit against Apple. It's Apple that prevents competing services from being able to supplant their own services. Sure, you can use Google Drive but you can't use it for everything like you can with iCloud. That's why Apple provides such a small amount of storage on most of their devices. Your choice is pay an overpriced premium for extra on device storage OR pay more than fair market value for Apples cloud storage.
The irony is that Apple uses Google servers to host iCloud. Look it up.

I can see where you're coming from.

But any facility to provide an equivalent service from another provider will almost certainly affect how seamlessly iCloud integrates with my Apple devices and their OS's. I absolutely cannot disagree that this was a completely deliberate move by Apple in order to 'bribe' us into using their service as a preference because it's baked-in to just be easy and slick. But equally, I personally don't want that slickness slashed away just to give me an option of using a competitor's cloud service that I won't use. (Other alternative opinions are obviously just as valid, but these are mine.)

 

[Radin.Y]

Many commenters are not entirely sure what the issue is here.
It's not about the free 5 GB option. It's about not allowing you to choose other services for backing your phone up. That's the anticompetitive practice, not the free 5 GB being too small.

 

[wanha]

You keep another drive (periodically updated) off-site. Pretty basic stuff- I rotate two, so I've always got a recently updated drive in my bank's safe deposit box.

That’s cool but normies ain’t doing that

 

[PhoenixAnhart]

I normally agree with regulatory decisions that goes against corporations including Apple, but this is absurd.

 

[rp100]

Apple has ensured that you have a poor or miserable experience with 3rd-party alternatives. For instance, you cannot natively send a file via Bluetooth to an Android device - it must go through an app or website. How do they recommend fixing that problem? Replace the Android with an iPhone. 3rd party backup apps have to keep the screen on to do large backups, or will not run automatically in the background. Solution? Use iCloud.

Apple has zero incentive to make enhancements that will deteriorate their bottom line.

 

[wanha]

It cost too much. The first two tiers should be FREE in my opinion.

In that case the word you’re looking for is “expensive” not poor

 

[Radeon85]

5GB of free storage is a bloody joke considering pretty much the majority of Apple’s devices have more RAM than that!

May as well be zero free storage at this point considering how useful that is. Considering the high prices Apple charges, the absolute bare minimum should be at least 50GB by now.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

That’s cool but normies ain’t doing that

Are "normies" backing up their Mac at all? Why can't they back it up to iCloud?

Such a juvenile word, by the way.

 

[j26]

What I find bloody minded is that you can't properly access iCloud from another device - I have a Mac and an iPad, but an Android phone. I can't sync photos I take with my phone to iCloud. That makes Apples Photos app redundant for me, and essentially forces me to look at cross platform options, such as Google (which I have) or OneDrive, or get an iPhone, which is not on the cards until there is one with stylus support.

That's quite aside from how they've hobbled transferring files from phone to iPad and vice versa.

Apple does make it hard to choose a non-Apple route and still be able use them to the fullest.

 

[applepotato666]

Giving you a bad deal (5gb free storage) isn’t anticompetitive when Google and Microsoft both have pretty well integrated cloud storage systems across the Apple ecosystem. I know they're good, I’ve used both but ultimately came home to iCloud+.

I agree. Can't even call it a "deal" when you're getting it for free as there's no deal. It's a freebie meant for sync and whether it's 5 or 15 wouldn't affect iPhone sales in any way. Trust that they will immediately increase it if there's a business reason to do so, but there isn't.

My problem is the constant unstoppable whining that "iPhone hasn't been backed up" and that you're low on iCloud storage which you will inevitably start getting if you have more than about 3 seconds worth of video and a pic or two in your photo library. There's no way to stop iCloud altogether, any newly installed app will automatically back up to iCloud even if you don't want it to and you have to turn it off for each manually. It's a dark design pattern having iCloud Photos especially be automatically on since they know the 5GB is not enough. Many customers don't understand what's wrong and since it's their iPhone telling them through a notification that they don't have storage they end up buying said storage through Apple. It is easy to see it as monopolistic behavior.

 

[Radeon85]

There is no such thing as free. Where does free gets paid from?

Apple charges an obscene amount for Mac upgrades when you buy it, between that and every other place they rip customers off on they aren’t short of money. Apple won’t up the free tier because they are simply cheap and very greedy.

 

[rforno]

That apples’ srrvices, hardware and software work well together is exactly what apple does and why it is so popular and why it has billions of customers. Many companies strive to make their services work well together, but few succeed as well well as apple, imo.

I have no problem with that, but it should not also exclude basic expected functionalities from others being used on their operating systems.

(Yes, yes, I understand Apple's business case here....)

 

[Ramchi]

I use OneDrive and Google Drive to backup photos and keep my documents etc…I use the base plan of iCloud (Cheapest one, less than 1$) . You can backup Messages, Contacts in the base plan and keep rest of the content in One Drive or Google Drive. OneDrive is 6 TB with 6 accounts for $70+ for one year and Google Drive 200 GB is $24 for one year (Can be shared as well).