Which? claims firm engaged in anti-competitive practices that led to 40 million people ‘being overcharged’

Apple is facing a near-£3bn lawsuit over claims it breached competition law by effectively locking millions of UK consumers into its cloud storage service at “rip-off” prices.

  • @[email protected]English
    -9•2 days ago

    I don’t get it. I mean, their free tier is a bit chintzy, but I give 'em a dollar a month and get 50GB. You can get 2TB for 3 bucks. This hardly seems a ripoff.

    • @[email protected]English
      15•2 days ago

      For me (europe) it is:

      • 2,99 = 50GB
      • 9,99 = 2TB

      Everyone with a family or social life has between 20-200GB photos and videos. Notice how there is no plan for 5,99 = 1TB. You either do not back up everything and pay 3€, or you pay a tener per month to have a cloud storage that is always 50-70% empty but still have to pay for.

      I will be the first to leave Apple iCloud if there is a viable solution that works like apples own OS integration without jumping through hoops and losing albums and meta data

    • Darth_MewEnglish
      6•2 days ago

      I don’t get it either, what does perceived affordability have to do with a “monopoly”?

      • warm
        19•2 days ago

        It’s not the price that is the problem, it’s how iCloud is integrated into the device, in a way Apple don’t allow other cloud services to do. iCloud has access other apps simply do not, so they cannot compete fairly.

        • astrsk
          -7•2 days ago

          What? You can host your own nextcloud instance and use it in the files app as a storage location and have all the same “save to” and “Read from” actions for documents that iCloud has. I use that and smb shares regularly and the only apps that don’t work with it are the ones who choose not to implement the apis for it. How is it monopolistic if Apple’s 1st party apps and software only work with their 1st party storage offering while allowing anyone to use the system api’s to connect and access any other storage service they want? Is it just them complaining that you can’t backup photos to anything but iCloud (except you can, by plugging it into any computer locally)? I really don’t understand, legitimately.

          • RomkslrquszEnglish
            11•2 days ago

            except you can, by plugging it into a computer locally

            That’s not even remotely close to being the same as the experience iCloud offers.

            • astrsk
              -1•2 days ago

              So don’t use iCloud and the photos app? What’s the problem here? There are plenty of third party camera apps and photo managers that could all use the same apis to access your directly integrated nextcloud storage the same way the photos app works. Hell, Plex offers automatic photo backups to your plex server! Y’all need to actually explain what this monopoly claim is in better detail. What am I not understanding here?

              • Darth_MewEnglish
                2•2 days ago

                not everyone is a pc geek with self hosted services numbnuts. you’re annoying as hell

              • RomkslrquszEnglish
                1•2 days ago

                Third party apps don’t have the ability to back up in the background all the time the way the native Photos / iCloud experience does. They need to be periodically opened to have temporary background access.

                Launching the third party camera app cannot be done from the lockscreen.

                What you’re not understanding is the entire point of folks’ complaints. With arbitrary restrictions put in place by Apple, there cannot be full parity in functionality between Apple’s native apps / cloud experience and those that can delivered by third party apps. While it’s possible to use third party apps, there are a bunch of little quirks and inconveniences that will ultimately drive the user back towards the native apps and spending money on Apple’s cloud service.

                • GHiLAEnglish
                  0•12 hours ago

                  Who’s forcing them to buy an iPhone?

                  I mean, at some point you might want to pull the problem up by the root. The root seems to be Apple.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•2 days ago

            Having to regularly plug your phone into a PC to back up 100GB+ of photos and videos over a USB 2 connection is not even remotely the same as automatic backups to iCloud that you can then access instantly, at any time, anywhere.