In place of the headaches users of Apple's iOS 6 have been facing, some Apple customers got a pleasant surprise ysterday (Sept. 30), finding that their free iCloud storage had been upgraded from 5GB to 25GB — for 38 years to 2050. That $1,520 gift is clearly a glitch that will soon be fixed. But if it weren't, or if users decided to pay $40 per year for the upgrade, what could they do with it?
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Even without glitchy upgrades, iCloud is a good deal. In addition to 5GB of storage for whatever users want, it also provides free space for music, movies, apps, books and TV shows purchased from Apple, as well as 1,000 pictures taken from mobile devices that are stored (for 30 days) in Apple's Photo Stream service. None of these media types count against the 5GB of storage.
How much can you store?
That leaves such items as emails, text documents, videos you shoot, photos from other cameras (say your point-and-shoot or SLR ) and any songs not available in iTunes that you have to upload manually. Aside from video, none of those items takes up too much space. Here are some estimates of each item’s typical size and how many you could fit in 50GB.
- Email (10 Kilobytes): 2,500,000
- Document (100 KB): 250,000
- Photo (3MB): 8,333
- Song (7MB): 3,571
- 720p HD video (240MB/minute): 104 minutes
What are the alternatives?
If you really want that 25GB, you have other options, too. Here's the pricing for other popular cloud services:
- Google Drive: $30
- SugarSync: $30 (for 30 GB)
- Microsoft SkyDrive: $10 (for 27GB)
- Dropbox: smallest plan (beyond 2GB free option) is $100 for 100GB.
Follow Sean Captain on Twitter @seancaptain.