lack business smarts

Nothing lacking at all. It’s business intelligence. Greedflation. A corporation has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders to maximise profits by whatever means they can. It’s capitalism pure and simple. You can rest assured that people who get paid lots of money did complex forecasts to predict what the ramifications would be. In the end they decided it was worth it. And for them it probably is.

What is it with companies that they lack basic business smarts?

Short-sighted greed and appeasement of shareholders.

We're in a consolidation phase. The streaming market is now well established and the market shares are largely settled. In the past many services ran at a loss or without much profit to establish their market share. Now the market is in a phase where they try to figure out how much people are willing to pay for that service that they're used to.

They'll continue to raise prices as long as enough people remain to pay them. All of the services.

Certainly the price increase involves losing a very small but vocal percent of users, that is covered by the rest of users who swallow the new price.

To me, their pricing wasn’t competitive. The only good plan is Apple Music plus TV+ if you’re st udent.

Unfortunately a lot of these streaming platforms purposefully run at a loss to increase numbers, then start to raise prices as they think they can/need to. I'm deep enough into to ecosystem that I tried it out, but same conclusion.

I run my own storage, mostly via NextCloud (as a docker on unRAID). But I still use a couple apps, and my old phone to take advantage of Google's old 'unlimited original uploads of photos' as a secondary, backup. I like this for publicly sharing photos vs giving people access/direct links to my stuff.

Nextcloud is also our dropbox/onedrive etc..

Important bits are backed up ultimately to Backblaze (my only cloud storage)

The biggest thing I worry about with this setup which is pretty low cost compared to paying Google, Apple, MS for cloud storage/features. is that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. This stuff will likely eventually fade into oblivion. While I did finally get my wife onto a shared password manager I am not so sure she'd be able to recover stuff if she needed. Of course it would all work as it does right now for a while. But eventually unRAID will crash or have some hardware failure, then things get tricky. Again, my wife has access to accounts/passwords through the password manager, but there are still technical challenges. I guess I need to add to the 'in case of emergency' to pull off all important digital documents and start backing them up some other way.

I’m always amazed that people happily pay these prices.

Agree, generally Apple One is expensive as I don’t think most people use all the services (or that Apple provides all services in your country). It is still worth it for me with Family Sharing …

Only issue is I have had my phone stolen once and dropped into a drain once by a drunk friend. So for me backup of photos is critical (with apple I have never lost photos even after this happened). My photo library is currently 205GB and the other phones in my family are 249gb of data.

So I have the 2tb icloud plan and the apple one plan so it is all shared (currently using 463gb/2.2TB) among my family. 4 people use these 2 subscriptions.

How am I supposed to get a service that auto backs up my photos daily for me, and for 3 other phones unless I use apples offering?

Genuine question. I have not been able to answer this question for over 3 years now. Other services I tried like amazon photo backup expected me to open the app to make photo backups. Makes the service pointless imho.

None of apples cloud services make sense to me. They are all overpriced for what they are.

I posted about it last week too. It sucks. I’d cancel it too, but I got my whole family on there. Leeches!

If you want to say they’re greedy and pricing people out, that’s true. But don’t confuse this with a lack of business smarts.

When pricing products, there’s a balance between charging more to increase margins, and charging less so more people will buy.

Apple absolutely doesn’t play the latter side of the scale and never has. The problem with “charge less and sell to more people” is that it becomes a race to the bottom. With thin profit margins you need staggering volume to still make money, and that’s hard to do when everyone is undercutting each other.

In a nutshell, “charging less” is something anyone can do. But making products people will pay a premium for, that’s hard. And that’s what Apple does. Their products have minority market share, but their profits are massive. That’s what you’d call business smarts.