Which? argues that a customer who would have theoretically paid £1.99 for the service but was not able to do so because the actual £2.99 price was unaffordable suffered a £1 loss, even though the customer paid nothing.
Maybe you have to be a lawyer to understand this, because to me it sounds like complete nonsense.
Maybe it means the customer lost a theoretical £1 in value?
My wife and I were talking about this a few weeks ago. I had iPhones from 2009 until early last year, so had a shit load of photos in iCloud. She got her first iPhone in 2012, and still has one, so also has a shit load of photos in iCloud.
Now that I don’t use an iPhone, I’ve been able to save all my photos to bung over on my Immich server, largely because my Pixel doesn’t give a shit what camera app I use, or where I save the photos.
My wife, however, is in a situation where she kinda has to keep using the stock camera, and the photos from that have to go into iCloud because there’s 80gb of photos and she sure as shit doesn’t have 80gb spare on her 128gb phone to even begin the process of saving them all. So she is, in effect, trapped into paying for iCloud storage every month.
And sure, in theory it’s reasonably easy to shift across to another app - now. But for a long, long time the default was basically the only game in town. Being able to map another one to the shortcut on the lock screen is relatively recent. Is the new camera shutter button on iPhones able to open and control a third party app? I don’t know.
Long story short, they made it super easy to get to a place where iCloud lock-in was the default, and it was only a few quid a month so fine, whatever. But as soon as you try to change, you’ve got to jump through a bunch of hoops.
Added to that is their fucky storage levels. You get 50gb for 99p, 200gb for £2.99, or 2tb for £8.99. We ended up hovering around 500gb of usage between us and my kid, so a 1tb plan would have been perfect. But nope, we had to pay £9 a month because there genuinely wasn’t another way to do it at that time.
FYI you can access and download iCloud photos on a computer, which might help your wife transfer them without using her phone.
Yeah, she’s in the process of doing that now, but it’s a whole massive arsehole that they baked into the process from the start; either intentionally or not.
And that doesn’t get around the fact that if you use the default camera app, which most people will, there’s no way to save the photos to anywhere other than the camera roll. And you can’t integrate the way photos work with iCloud into something like Immich. As far as I’m aware.
