Google has just announced some new price plans for its Google Drive service. The new plans start at $1.99 for 100 GB (down from $4.99), $10 for 1 TB (down from $50) and 10 TB for $99.99. This storage is shared across Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos.
It should be noted that Google bills customers monthly. Even so, these new price points make Apple’s iCloud storage offerings look awful in terms of value for money.
For iCloud storage, Apple currently charges $20 yearly for 15 GB, $50 yearly for 25 GB and $100 yearly for 55 GB (lumping in the free 5 gigabytes Apple gives to every user). Rather amusingly, Apple’s options do not even allow users to perform a 1:1 backup of their 64 GB and 128 GB devices — the top iCloud tier totals 55 GB of storage.
Whatever way you cut it, Apple’s prices are exorbitant in comparison to Google’s. Doing some basic arithmetic, for one gigabyte of cloud storage over a year, Google charges you 24 cents. Meanwhile, Apple charges you 1.8 dollars. This means Apple’s current rates are 7.5x more expensive than Google’s.
Obviously, there are differences in the quality of services this storage can provide. Google Drive is almost like a hard drive in the sky, you can store whatever you want there. It could be argued that Apple’s solution is more integrated to the iOS and Mac platforms, for instance, or that Apple’s motivations for hosting your data are much more ‘honest’. Unlike many Google services, iCloud is ad-free. Even so, I think anyone would find it hard to justify that this convenience is worth approximately eight times the price.
As an additional metric, for most iOS devices it costs $100 dollars to add an additional 16 GB of local storage. This translates to 6.25 dollars per gigabyte. This is both more expensive than iCloud and Google Drive and generally less appealing. Apple won’t offer you any more than 64 GB of storage on iPhones and iPod touches, whereas Google Drive’s paid options start at 100GB. Local storage also lacks the convenience that the cloud offers, in terms of ‘automatic’ data backup and syncing.
Also, don’t forget that if you pay nothing at all … Google still wins out in terms of generosity. Google gives all users 15 GB for free compared to Apple’s measly 5 GB per Apple ID offering.
Google has recently begun offering to back up Apple users’ photos with its Google+ Auto Backup on the Mac and Google Plus App for iPad and iPhone. With prices this low, many may forgo Apple’s iCloud and use Google’s offerings, whether for price or logistical reasons.
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why not use both? With all the free storage out there, it’s easy if you just slit all your stuff among them.
Your quote here “an additional metric, for most iOS devices it costs $100 dollars to add an additional 16 GB of local storage. This translates to 16 cents per gigabyte.” should be $6.25 per GB not $.16 although that would be awesome!
Thanks, corrected. Stupid math going on there.
Benjamin.
where did “$100 dollars to add an additional 16 GB of local storage. This translates to 16 cents per gigabyte. ” come from?
He flipped the dividend and divisor… easy mistake but funky when you read it. I was impressed that he continued to sell his point with inflammatory information. Still a good article :P
Apple ‘usually’ uses limiting capacities to be able to give a good UX.
I do not know if Apple, someday, will give so big space and low price as Google, but it is still building its own data centers.
And up to now, they are no more than 4-5, while Google has tens, maybe hundreds of data center.
“As an additional metric, for most iOS devices it costs $100 dollars to add an additional 16 GB of local storage. This translates to 16 cents per gigabyte.” No, it doesn’t…
Apple at $530 a share. Google at $1200 a share. You can easily see why Google is a better investment. With Google’s cloud deal, they’ll probably increase their cloud storage market share tenfold. Investors see a bright future with Google. Apple doesn’t care. The company’s only intent is to continually hoard money before they go private. Apple has no intention of giving customers a fair deal or giving anything back to shareholders. Considering the huge amount of reserve cash Apple has and the decreasing price of storage, Apple could easily offer loyal Apple customers plenty of free storage and entice potential customers to buy Apple hardware. Apple is always saying they want to give their customers the best user experience possible. I guess a lot of freebies are lost due to that goal. I’m not going to try to figure Apple out. I’ll simply buy a high-end NAS and make my own cloud storage.
Quick lesson in investments, you don’t compare the stock price between two companies, you compare “Market Cap”. Apple = 475 billion and Google = 399 billion.
Share price is irrelevant when comparing two companies on value or quality of investment. Share price is a function of value / number of shares outstanding. If Google did a 3-for-1 split, the company would be worth the same, but the shares would be worth only $400/share.
As a company, Apple has a market cap of around $478 billion. Google is valued at around $400 billion. So Apple is the more valuable company by a good margin.
But that still doesn’t translate into a better investment. The better investment is the one that has the most chance of growing in the future. And that is a complete guess. If you happen to know which of these stocks has more upside over the next 12-36 months, let me know. We’ll make a fortune!
What does the share price have to do with this discussion? Here’s a free tip. Investing works by buying low and selling high. It’s clear that with the myriad of bubbles in last few years you people don’t know the first thing about how investing works.
“Google charges you 24 cents. Meanwhile, Apple charges you 1.8 dollars. This means Apple’s current rates are 7.5x more expensive than Google’s.”
Actually, Benjamin, this means that Apple’s current rates are 7.5x as expensive as Google’s, or 6.5x more expensive than Google’s.
If apple seriously want people to backup their devices on iCloud, they need to drop the price asap.
Given how well-implemented is Google Drive as a drive-in-the-sky, it’s a no-brainer that one should prefer this over iCloud, which offers very limited functionality, comparatively.
iCloud is good for syncing stuff between your iOS devices. If we’re not allowed to file-manage our iCloud storage and all we’re left with is tagged files, it’s no use for the desktop.
Using tags (even nested ones) to structure / categorise our content is not better than a well-organised folder structure. In fact, after you’ve created about 30 of them, you’ll start looking for ways to nest them, which again brings us back to folder structures, done differently.
Then again, iCloud needs to address exactly that. If I have a project in iCloud (under a certain tag), I’ll want to have all sorts of files underneath. Documents, images, PDFs, some audio, maybe some archives and so on. You get the picture. Having to run each and every possible App to discover if I’ve got any content in it under that specific tag is not exactly my idea of “simplified organisation”.
And then what if some of those files can’t be opened by an iCloud-compatible app? Then half my stuff is on iCloud and the rest of it sits in my Google Drive. No, thanks. I’ll stick with Google Drive.
Seems more like a direct response to Microsoft’s OneDrive pricing than anything Apple is doing. Apple hasn’t cared about the pricing discrepancy to this point so I doubt they will change iCloud pricing anytime soon.
“Rather amusingly, Apple’s options do not even allow users to perform a 1:1 backup of their 64 GB and 128 GB devices — the top iCloud tier totals 55 GB of storage.” — If you knew how iCloud backups work, you wouldn’t make this deceptive statement. Apple does not back up things like apps, music, videos, podcasts, etc. to the device’s iCloud Backup. It restores these things directly from the App Store, iTunes Store, or the user’s mac/pc. I have a 64 GB iPhone and manage to completely back it up on the basic (free) 5 GB iCloud space.
Apple is not going to drop its prices in response to Google. Google’s main business is ad revenue. They price is just to offsite operating cost. the profit is made by mining your the data you store on Drive to show you ads. They are pretty up front about it, yet no one gets it. iCloud is meant as a convenience to keep your devices in sync to give you a better device experience. It is not meant to compete on price with Google, Box, Dropbox etc. As user data grows Apple will slowly increase the amount of free space. Just enough to keep devices in sync but not enough to use iCloud as storage solution, because is not the business they are in.
I think the title of this article is inflammatory. The Google Drive price drops aren’t about iCloud pricing. As an Apple site, I get that you are simply comparing for context, but they aren’t the same type of service and your head line just adds fuel to a worthless fire. I agree that iCloud storage is pricey…but why not write a more in depth analysis at the state of the Online Storage/Online Backup markets and have a real comparison, instead of Frakensteining an article together to start a fire in the comments.
I will never pay for anything… I have my wn hard drive and use Google Docs for one thing and Apple for my bookmarks, etc and Box for other thing.
With Drive you’re getting a lot of space for little cash but it comes at a cost of speed. Drive’s up/down is inexcusably terrible. My theory is they’re dropping prices to mitigate all the anger from customers who can’t get more than 20K u/d on modern hardware and good internet connections. Just do a search “Why is google drive so slow”…it’s not pretty.
I was happy to see my billing drop from 5$ to 2$. Usually, subscribed services such as phone or cable goes up without telling you. Prop Google! <3