The iPhone 16 is selling well. Very well, in fact: it was the best-selling smartphone in the first quarter of 2025. But the device has created plenty of problems for Apple because of what it isn’t doing: delivering on the promises made at launch.
Personalized Siri, a feature so flashy and appealing that it appeared in iPhone 16 ads, has been severely delayed, likely until long after the launch of the iPhone 17. That’s a conspicuous fail, but sources suggest Apple will remain silent on the subject at today’s WWDC keynote. This theory is backed up by company bosses declining an invitation to a live talk show they normally attend; what questions are they trying to avoid?
Life, then, is tricky at the moment if you work for Apple’s PR department. But there’s a simple trick the company can use to turn public opinion in its favour–one that’s long overdue. Apple could and should increase its free iCloud storage allocation from the current paltry 5GB. It could stretch to to 20GB, surely. Perhaps even 50GB. But it definitely needs to be more, and we can prove it.
Since 2011, when iCloud was launched, the free allocation has remained the same. But that amount of storage has long since fallen out of date. These days even the most frugal users can’t do anything with it.
While the free allocation has remained the same, the download size of iOS itself has increased by a factor of 11, from 0.8GB in 2011 to 9.5GB when iOS 18 came out last September. This means that even backing up an iPhone without any files at all is no longer possible using free iCloud storage. For that alone, users would have to pay for a 50GB (or more) subscription.
Granted, Apple deserves a certain amount of credit for keeping prices mostly steady since the introduction of iCloud and periodically adding higher storage options at the top end. But the existence of an Apple subscription with a whopping 12TB of storage (for $59.99/£54.99 per month) also shows how ridiculous 5GB is in comparison.
Apple would be wise to remove what increasingly looks like an anachronism from its system. At the same time, the company could present the increase as a gift to its own customers and thereby deflect some of the discussion away from the Siri disaster.