Apple Defeats Lawsuit Related to iCloud's Measly 5GB of Free Storage
Apple Defeats Lawsuit Related to iCloud's Measly 5GB of Free Storage
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this week upheld a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that Apple illegally deceived...
FTA: In the ruling, three Ninth Circuit judges said the plaintiffs failed to establish that it is "virtually impossible" for them to reduce their storage, or that they will inevitably be forced to pay for iCloud storage. In fact, two named plaintiffs were still on the 5GB tier. The judges added that customers have the option to turn off iCloud at any time.
I think a better argument would be to make apple let you use other cloud providers for functionality like backups, or provide some way to automatically back up locally (iTunes used to do this). Still probably won’t work in the US, but might in Europe.
Yeah.... to be fair, it does work, I personally don't pay for iCloud, but the way they aggressively push it and auto-enable it in so many places leaves less-technical users stuck with an unusable computer without more storage, unless they're savvy enough to know how to disable everything... which they aren't.
It's a frustrating practice, and MS is no better with the way they force OneDrive down your throat.
This feels like both a bad argument from the people filing the suit, and a bad call from the judges.
Sure, you don't have to use iCloud, but Apple has absolutely tied so much functionality - including automated backups - to it that, honestly, it's de-facto required if you're going to stay in the ecosystem and expect all the features that are listed on the side of the box to work.
And, of course 5GB is really not sufficient space to even reliably back up a modern iOS device, let alone file syncing, email, photos, messages, etc. at this point.
It feels like the people who brought the suit didn't really have formulated a good argument (or even had reasonable standing - if you're using the 5gb tier it's hard to argue Apple force you to do anything), but I don't think the general gist of 'Apple is providing 5GB knowing you're going to almost certainly going to be forced to upgrade' is all that wrong.
Me and my family are all on Apple products since ~2014 (or even before). We never paid for iCloud. I opt in this year because (I) the 1st tier costs me 1€/month for 50Go and (II) it’s very convenient to get auto backup for the whole phone (except photos / videos, we are using a family plan with Google Drive for that).
But I admit that enabling iCloud by default and frequently showing a pop up because you are beyond the 5Go plan is pretty bad. But you can disable it at anytime, and there is no more pop up when you have done it.
My solution is I only back up things like contacts. Only local backups for photos and the like… I don’t want my or my partner’s genitals on a web service, no thank you
I think a better argument would be to make apple let you use other cloud providers for functionality like backups. Still probably won't work in the US, but might in Europe.