£70 for 50GB iCloud storage? Yup, I’m in!

Mr Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment notes that today Apple revealed their iCloud pricing.

I’ve been waiting for this. I’m sure you have too. Whilst Steve’s iCloud pitch looked rather exciting, in the back of my mind, I was wondering what would happen after I (easily) exceeded the 5GB free storage he mentioned.

I do like the idea of all my photos (and other data) synching up-and-down dynamically to Apple’s data centre. I was concerned to see how Apple would price it, though. The company has got a bit of a challenging reputation when it comes to online services — you just have to look at the abomination that is ‘iDisk’. It’s certainly improved in recent years, but I’m still a tiny bit concerned as to whether Apple can deliver a cloud service properly.

That said, I’m having a whale of a time with the desktop App Store and whenever I’ve wanted to use the .me service (principally to find a mislaid iPhone), it’s been live and available.

So provided the price is right, I’m ready.

And, I think it’s fair to say, the price is most certainly right.

Here’s what Stuart reports:

10GB of additional space will cost $20 a year – this is on top of the free 5GB for 15GB total space – while 20GB will cost $40 a year and 50GB will cost $100. Users will pay for the extra storage from their iOS device’s settings menu.

In the UK, this pricing converts to £14 a year for 10GB of extra space, £28 for 20GB and £70 for 50GB

I don’t think that’s prohibitive at all.

The BIGGEST ball-ache with the whole Apple experience is managing media. Photos, yes, but actually, the more annoying portion of the iExperience is dealing with movies. I buy a lot of movies and TV Shows.

Over the years, I’ve had to become adept at docking about — DICKING ABOUT, WASTING MY TIME — managing my own media. I have a whole 1TB hard drive dedicated to iTunes. I have a highly alarming 932GB of data in the ‘iTunes’ folder. Utterly ridiculous.

I don’t want this problem. I don’t want to have to deal with it.

I had to dick about putting it all on a dedicated drive once the library got into the 500GB range because it was having an effect on system performance.

Utterly annoying.

95% of the content has been bought from Apple. So I’m hopeful… ever-so-hopeful — that this might not actually count toward my total. Given that Apple already has a copy of all the movies, song, TV shows, surely they’ll just give me electronic access to that in ‘The Cloud’? Meaning, that, if I wanted to, I could delete my local copies.

Right now, the onus is on the user. I have to keep physical copies for some stupid licensing reason. I can’t re-download the content if somebody steals my computer. In practice, if you complain to Apple Support, they’ll probably sort you out, but it’s not-the-done-thing.

So iCloud could well seriously help out here. I am hopeful.

It’s so frustrating when, all of a sudden, I decide I’d like to watch a particular movie — only to find that since I’m in the States, or away from my physical data store, that I can’t actually do it. I either need to buy the movie again to download it to my iPhone/iPad or.. ah it’s just ridiculous. So bring on a solution, Steve!

What are you thinking about iCloud? Will you be buying more space when it becomes available?