Today's iPhone 15 launch came with a little throw-away surprise right at the end. Not enough for a "One More Thing..." card on the deck; just another page on the pricing. A simple announcement by Greg "Joz" Joswiack as he ran through all the phone pricing that iCloud is adding 6TB and 12TB tiers, a huge boost from the previous 2TB limit.
• Read our guide to the best cloud storage for photos
Now for most people, this might not mean a lot, but the 2TB limit on cloud storage is on the verge of being the limiting factor in my day-to-day photography. Right now my own Photos – which is almost entirely filled with iPhone-captured images and video – occupies 1317.7GB of my 2TB. All told, my iCloud Plus account has a worrying 1.9TB of 2TB Used message.
I suspected I wasn't alone – now I'm sure of it.
I've been shooting photos on my iPhone since, well, since there was iPhone and I'm certainly not the only loyal iPhone customer out there who takes photos. I'm also not the only one who doesn't want to manage images.
I'm also a big fan of the shared album system as a way of quickly posting pics of my son as a form of family communication. The idea that I was about to run out of space filled me with horror at the thought that I might actually have to sort through the photos I'd taken.
At the same time, it hasn't been terribly easy to get excited about the new phone. Of course, Apple has undoubtedly enough to get me to hand over my cash (despite, rather than because of the Action Button, I should add).
That's not to say that the iPhone 15 Pro Max (yes, if I'm in, I'm all in) isn't enough to tempt me. I'm excited by the tetra-prism periscope lens with 3-axis stabilization. 5x optical zoom is very appealing.
On balance, I think I'm encouraged by the advantages of USB-C (let's hope it doesn't confuse CarPlay on older cars!) The titanium does look pretty cool, too, and the price increase might not be so bad since I already plumped for 512GB last time.
But most of the features have been leaked. The only real surprise has been the spatial video recording to view with Apple Vision Pro. For obvious reasons that isn't really of interest right now!
All that's mildly exciting, but the idea of paying a bit more a month to push the idea of sorting through all my phones and files further into the never-never is, well, easily worth the extra $20 a month to me. I'm not saying I'll love paying more, but I don't like deleting memories or thinking I might have to stop making them, so honestly if I had to choose between more iCloud and buying the new phone, it'd be the extra terabytes.
The new pricing tiers are $29.99 for 6TB and $59.99 for 12TB, the latter being cheaper than the 10TB option on Google Drive. They will become available from Monday 18 September and can be shared across a Family Plan.
You can read thoughts as we went through the whole launch on our iPhone 15 Wonderlust launch event coverage, and view the event video.
