You can now buy 2TB of iCloud storage for $20/month, but free tier is still just 5GB

iCloud 2TB Storage tier

With eight days left until Apple’s big iPhone 7 reveal scheduled for September 7, the company has just added a brand new two-terabyte tier to its iCloud storage upgrades.

Now available for purchase on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch in Settings → Storage, or a Mac in System Preferences → iCloud → Manage, it’ll set data-hungry users back $19.99 each month.

Quickly, do the math in your head—at $20 per month, you’re looking at a yearly cost of $240 for the privilege of having two terabytes of iCloud storage for your device backups, photos, videos, personal information, files and whatever else you like.

By comparison, Dropbox’s 1TB tier is a $99.99 per year value, or about $8.3 per month. Unfortunately, Apple’s free iCloud tier is still paltry five gigabytes. Price points for other tiers have not been tweaked. After today’s change, iCloud storage tiers are as follows:

  • 5GB—free
  • 50GB—$0.99 per month
  • 200GB—$2.99 per month
  • 1TB—$9.99 per month
  • 2TB—$19.99 per month

Check out Apple’s support document for availability information and pricing of iCloud storage upgrades around the world.

The new tier makes sense for people who plan on using macOS Sierra’s new feature which keeps the contents of a user’s Documents and Desktop folders synchronized and available on iOS devices via iCloud Drive.

Also, Sierra includes another feature, called Optimize Storage, that frees up storage space on your computer by keeping only the latest and frequently used files locally while storing those you access infrequently in iCloud.

What do you think of the new 2TB iCloud tier? Does the fact that the new offering went live ahead of the iPhone 7 event indicate that the new phones will double the storage versus existing models, do you think?