the best thing Apple could do is recognize that we’re already paying a lot to play in its garden, and throw in free iCloud storage that matches the capacities of our Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
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Well, some people (maybe people with 16GB iPhones) might use the free storage to back up the whole device, and then buy a little more to keep their photos and videos flowing to iCloud Photo Library without having to sync the iPhone to a Mac to offload photos that way. To facilitate this, Apple could make it easier to manage what files are kept where–say, by providing an “iCloud Locker” that only lived in the cloud and didn’t sync to your devices. That way you could offload files to the cloud, freeing up space on your devices but still having those files accessible on demand.
I strongly agree with Susie Ochs. I do not, however, thing they need to offer as much storage as a device has. If you have, say, a 512 GB laptop, you don’t need that much cloud storage. But I think they should up the minimum free storage from 5 GB to much more, and take into account how many devices one owns. I have two Macs and two iOS devices that I use regularly, and it would be fair if I were to get, say, 5 GB per device.
The problem is, some people already think that buying iCloud storage somehow magically expands the capacity of their devices. (Yes, I’ve met several people who believe this.) So it has to be made very clear how this works, and which files would be stored on devices and which would be store in the cloud.
Of course, Apple is unlikely to do this. They want to push you toward iCloud Photo Library for photos, and iCloud Music Library and Apple Music for music…
One thing they could do now is make it easy to remove photos from mobile devices, if they’re already stored in the cloud. There’s no way to select photos and delete the full-resolution copies from an iPhone or iPad; this happens automatically, but only when you run out of storage.
Source: Apple should give customers free iCloud space to match their devices | Macworld