After what seems like forever, Apple has finally joined the cloud storage race and is looking to catch up very quickly. It won't be easy, but with the large iPhone and iPad user base, the Cupertino giant is already in a good spot to move forward.
The cloud has become a key area of survival and huge battleground for all the top technology companies, and with Apple just joining the fray with iCloud Drive, it should be clear now how important cloud storage and computing is to the industry.
With iCloud Drive, Apple is coming out with a lot of guns blazing, but it is not yet up to the level of services such as Google Drive and OneDrive. However, when it comes to competing with DropBox, it appears Apple's iCloud Drive has an easy target since DropBox doesn't have its own server farms. In fact, DropBox gets its storage space from Amazon, which is the main reason why this service is unable to compete on price.
As it stands, Apple's iCloud Drive is much more reasonable in some areas that Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive. For example, if consumers want 200GB worth of cloud storage, iCloud Drive is the better option right now, as Apple is offering this for only $3.99 per month, while OneDrive offers this for $8.99 per month or $100 per year.
If consumers want 20GB worth of storage, they can get it from iCloud Drive for $0.99 per month, Google Drive and DropBox doesn't offer this. However, OneDrive does, but only if consumers purchase a $6.99 Office 365 subscription.
Now, where iCloud Drive is lacking comes in the form of how much free storage it offers, how many devices the service is available on, and storage amounts. At the moment, iCloud Drive only offers 5GB in free storage, and the service is only available on Windows, Mac and iOS. Furthermore, it doesn't have a 1TB option; this can be had on Google Drive for $9.99 per month, $15 per month on DropBox, and $2.50 per month for OneDrive business customers.
Storage for consumers isn't the only thing Apple is making available. The company also announced CloudKit for developers. Developers on the iOS platform can use it to power their server based apps, but it isn't worth it if a developer create apps for multiple platforms since CloudKit is only available for iOS apps. Android and Windows Phone version of the same iOS app won't be able to take advantage of what CloudKit has to offer developers.
