Apple doubles its $10/month iCloud storage plan to 2TB, adds family sharing for 200GB and 2TB plans
Context & Ripple Effects
A year ago, Apple's top iCloud tier was the $20/month 2TB plan it rolled out ahead of the iPhone 7 event; this move cuts that price in half while keeping the $10 entry point, effectively repositioning 2TB from a premium tier to the default heavy-user plan.
The addition of family sharing on the 200GB and 2TB tiers turns each subscription into a multi-user product — a structure Dropbox would later copy when it raised its own Plus plan to 2TB at $12/month and then launched a $17/month shared family plan for six people.
First-order effects
- Existing 2TB subscribers see their bill drop from $20 to $10 per month, while households can now pool one 200GB or 2TB plan across family accounts instead of buying separate upgrades.
Second-order effects
- Dropbox's subsequent pricing moves — doubling Plus storage to 2TB and adding a six-person family plan — track Apple's playbook almost step for step, forcing the standalone storage vendor to compete on features like Rewind and Smart Sync rather than raw capacity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer cloud storage consolidates into ecosystem bundles where capacity is cheapened to lock users into a platform's broader services, pressuring single-product storage providers toward family pricing and differentiated software.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is entering a price war in which Apple and Dropbox converge on doubled capacities and shared family plans, trading per-gigabyte revenue for ecosystem retention.