If there was any doubt at all about how pathetic Forbes has become, just take a look at the latest bit of drivel posted to the Web site.
Forbes’ Eric Jackson asks the question “Why has Apple AAPL overpriced iCloud so much?” Okay, pricing is a subjective thing, so let’s take a look at why he thinks it’s overpriced.
That might have been a great deal for storage a year ago when iCloud was first rolled out. However, Yahoo!’s new Flickr storage pricing certainly catches your eye.
Yahoo! is giving you 1 terabyte of storage for free. That’s 1,024 GB of free photo space.
Wait, what?
The whole basis for this article is that iCloud is overpriced because Yahoo is offering more space for photos? Clearly Jackson doesn’t know much about iCloud, but let’s address his main complaint first.
From Apple’s Web site:
Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?
No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not count against your iCloud storage.
So, what the hell is he whining about? He has no idea.
Let’s get to the more obvious point. iCloud is a collection of services that allow you to sync information—and images—across multiple devices. That includes, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and other data. Apple’s cloud services have expanded in recent years to include iTunes music and videos too. In short, a completely different service than Flickr.
According to his bio Jackson is “the Founder and Managing Partner of Ironfire Capital LLC, which runs a tech-focused hedge fund and angel fund.”
People, call your broker and make sure none of your money is with guy.
I didn’t want to link to Forbes so I wouldn’t reward their stupid story with traffic, but if you want to read the original, you can [here](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/06/17/why-has-apple-overpriced-icloud/).
Even ignoring the reasoning, it is quite expensive. Consider Google’s additional 100GB for $4.99 a month ($60 a year).
Or for the same $100 price as Apple’s 50GB, on Dropbox you’d get 100GB.
Not defending Forbes because this stuff still goes out under their name, but these “contributor” stories are basically vanity blogs people can create that happen to be hosted on the Forbes website. Forbes views it as a win-win because it’s free content, and as you know anything about Apple is total clickbait. My company has a Forbes contributor blog too, but we only blog about niche topics so we don’t get nearly the hits as the daily Apple crap does.
It depends on what you want it for. I can’t back up my entire phone to DropBox automatically. For just file storage and sharing, yeah, Dropbox is a much better deal. But iCloud offers a different service. Obviously the better deal depends on what you need out of the service.
I do feel though that Apple really needs to sort out the way they handle photos. It is way too easy to end up with lots of duplicate photos and no easy way to manage them.
For example, with Photo Stream on, your photos are sync’d to iCloud across devices, which doesn’t count against your iCloud storage limit, but with Camera Roll back up also enabled the camera roll is backed up to your iCloud account and this does count against your storage limit.
If you also use another app to edit photos (e.g. Snapseed) you end up with another album with another duplicate image. And then there’s iPhoto…it’s a complete mess.
Of course, the Forbes article is nonsense.
What DOES make iCloud a bit expensive though, is that none of it can be used in a Dropbox-like manner: automatic and versioned back-ups for all files and sharing between apps and with other users. There are also almost no iOS apps with iCloud support (and WWDC did not mention any improvements in this area either). I must pay for two services to do what I need. I do not mind, but I would prefer if Apple could at least bring iDisk functionality back.
It’s a poorly reasoned article to be sure, but the main point is correct. Storage on iCloud is very overpriced compared to the competition.
Do you know what Apple doesn’t allow you to store for free? Your iPhone/iPad backups. Those backups include the photos and videos on your device, and with the quality of media the iPhone now takes, your backups surge past 5 GB very quickly. I have iTunes Match so I get the 25GB of space, but I’m still unable to backup my iPhone (due to the aforementioned videos & photos) so I now rely on the old fashioned wired iTunes backup due to the very high cost of more storage on iCloud.
iCloud is a nice product. I rely on it daily. However, compared to other similar services the cost of storage is much too high.
No idea how common that is, but Photo Stream is a complete failure for me. I have iPhone, iPad, MBP, MBA and an iMac connected to the same account, and Photo Stream does not show the same pictures on even two of them (and I did not manually delete or move anything). I just concluded that it is junk?!
Much like others are saying here – it still seems over priced considering it just doesn’t work. Sorry Jim, not much support for you on this one.
does this still work?
Go to the cached page:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/06/17/why-has-apple-overpriced-icloud/
Therefore no link juice?
That’s hilarious.
Yahoo’s pricing is far from 1TB because they wanted too. They HAD to do something big to win people back so they gave away the farm.
Major difference!
I use iCloud all the time, i don’t pay a penny for it.
Yep. Different beasts.
Argh!
1TB storage is free, because only a small minority will use more than 1-2 Gigabytes.
The upgrade from 1 to 2 GB is the real cost of storage at Flickr, because that’s the price one has to pay if he really uses (more than) 1 terabyte.
The majority of iOS users will have no problems with the 5GB included iCloud storage.
I got an iPhone, iPad (both 32GB) and MacBook Air and still have 1GB free.
Those who only use an iPhone will have 3-4 GB free and they are the majority.
I can see a need for more than 5GB in the long term, but i guess they will have increased the capacity by then or perhaps will 5 GB per account + 3 GB per additional device free
Don’t link to those bitches. It’s what they want.
Almost no apps with iCloud support? You must not be looking at all.
Several apps I use on a daily basis — Instacast, Byword, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, 1Password, Camera+, Safari, Evernote, Day One Journal, Tweetbot, Netbot, Fantastical, Soundhound etc. — use iCloud. And some of these have OS X versions. Some of my desktop only apps — e.g. Pixelmator — use iCloud to sync content.
Do a search in iTunes for “iCloud”.
As for cost. Dropbox and iCloud do NOT do the same thing. Comparing them is like comparing a truck to a car. iCloud is my iPhone backup system. If my iPhone/iPad is lost/stolen/damaged I can buy a new iPhone/iPad and recover all my data AND phone settings. I have purposely wiped my iPad and iPhone several times to test it. It works. No data loss ever.
Dropbox/Box/Google Drive are just online file stores. Nothing more.
Usually Eric Jackson is pretty good on Apple ananlysys. He gets the company and mocks financial analysts who don’t understand the tech sector and apple. Ultimatley though, this piece you cited is done because he wants to prop up Yahoo!, the one company he has more stake in than apple. Here are two pieces I think you would approve of, Jim, written by Jackson in Frobes. He’s usually one of the few financial guys that gets it. There are MUCH MUCH worse guys out there than Eric Jackson. He’s really one of the good guys, despite this most recent silly piece done in order to prop up Yahoo!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/01/28/how-tim-cook-should-really-be-running-apple/
From another pro-Apple Jackson piece:
“Financial bloggers howling about Apple’s stock price on Twitter is just a new version of Joan Rivers slapping down some Hollywood starlet for a poor dress choice at some awards show. It is less analysis and more outrageous entertainment and group laughter therapy.”
Usually Eric Jackson is pretty good on Apple analysis He gets the company and mocks financial analysts who don’t understand the tech sector and apple. Ultimately though, this piece you cited is done because he wants to prop up Yahoo!, the one company he has more stake in than apple. Here are two pieces I think you would approve of, Jim, written by Jackson in Frobes. He’s usually one of the few financial guys that gets it. There are MUCH MUCH worse guys out there than Eric Jackson. He’s really one of the good guys, despite this most recent silly piece done in order to prop up Yahoo!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/er…
From another pro-Apple Jackson piece:
“Financial bloggers howling about Apple’s stock price on Twitter is just a new version of Joan Rivers slapping down some Hollywood starlet for a poor dress choice at some awards show. It is less analysis and more outrageous entertainment and group laughter therapy.”
Usually Eric Jackson is pretty good on Apple analysis He gets the company and mocks financial analysts who don’t understand the tech sector and apple. Ultimately though, this piece you cited is done because he wants to prop up Yahoo!, the one company he has more stake in than apple. Here are two pieces I think you would approve of, Jim, written by Jackson in Frobes. He’s usually one of the few financial guys that gets it. There are MUCH MUCH worse guys out there than Eric Jackson. He’s really one of the good guys, despite this most recent silly piece done in order to prop up Yahoo!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/01/28/how-tim-cook-should-really-be-running-apple/
From another pro-Apple Jackson piece:
“Financial bloggers howling about Apple’s stock price on Twitter is just a new version of Joan Rivers slapping down some Hollywood starlet for a poor dress choice at some awards show. It is less analysis and more outrageous entertainment and group laughter therapy.”
Free burgers with every BBQ
It pisses me off too, but Forbes is an over the hill rag. What I found if a contributors articles gets too much negative press, they put it. Also put the CheatSheet, Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance, CNN Money in the same league. These rags pit one company against another and they mislead their readers. Maybe its our time to shut down this typical of journalism.
I find icloud is overpriced, just imagine 500gb for $30 annually it will hooked me up for life and a great revenue stream for Apple.