I was given the opportunity to complain about Apple’s miserly amount of free iCloud space for Macworld. Apple gives you 5 GB, and that’s it. You can pay (through the nose) for more, to a maximum of 50 GB. For a company trying to push everyone to multiple devices and cloud storage specifically in iCloud, this limit now smacks of nickel-and-diming at best and outright recklessness at worst. If you just screamed “HYPERBOLE!”, be mindful that iOS devices fling up an error message when iCloud storage gets full, killing your back-up. At that point, do you think the typical user will:

• Carefully and methodically work their way through back-up options that are buried within Settings, to ensure that at least the most important data happens to be backed up.
• Pay a load of money for extra space.
• Just turn off iCloud back-ups.

Yeah.

Oh, and to all of the people who’ve already pointed me on Twitter at cheaper cloud-based storage services, well done. But you’ve clearly not bothered to read my article, which is primarily about automated back-ups. Also, you fail to realise that apps increasingly require iCloud for cloud storage and simply don’t offer anything else as an alternative. If Apple really wants people using documents across multiple devices, it should provide enough space to sync at least a reasonable number of items. Right now, if you’ve two iOS devices, that alone will often be too much for the 5 GB you get.