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Wow! It's amazing that with so much data yet Apple still finds it cheaper to store on public clouds instead of building its own storage.

iJohnDoe 5y ago
Apple finally realized they weren’t very good at hosting stuff. They never were. Plus, it’s a no brainer leveraging Google and AWS. Their global footprint and expertise alone is worth it. Also, $300 million a year is a drop in the bucket to Apple’s bottom line. They probably make that alone from the millions of adapters they sell each year.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  It's not just $300m. It's $300 for storage. I'm sure they spend more on the GCP platform. They also use AWS, which is over $350m a year. That contract ends in a year or two. Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. It's not hard to believe they're spending $1B+ on external cloud partners. At $57B net revenue ($274B), a high margin space such as the cloud services could make sense. Although if they're not selling it to the public it would only account for 1-2% net revenue. Apple likes to learn from companies.. Soon there will be an Apple cloud using low energy ARM (M1X) servers. Let's call it the "Digital Apple Tree". Maybe a small reference to the DAT recorder, as Apple likes music. Of course this last part is just made up ;-)
  - ksec 5y ago
    >Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. why?
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      could only find old articles mentioning it..
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Everyone is acting like that $300MM expense is being paid by Apple. I'm paying Apple $120/year for 2TB of iCloud storage. I might not be doing the math right but at $300 million/year for 8 million TB, that's $75/year in google expense for the $120 I'm paying Apple.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    The average user with 2TB of quota probably isn't using anywhere near that much. It is more likely to be closer to the previous smallest level of quota.
jpalomaki 5y ago
Or the business is simply growing faster than Apple can (conveniently) expand their own storage capacity. There’s long lead times for data center level expansion.

iJohnDoe 5y ago

Apple finally realized they weren’t very good at hosting stuff. They never were. Plus, it’s a no brainer leveraging Google and AWS. Their global footprint and expertise alone is worth it. Also, $300 million a year is a drop in the bucket to Apple’s bottom line. They probably make that alone from the millions of adapters they sell each year.

jbverschoor 5y ago
It's not just $300m. It's $300 for storage. I'm sure they spend more on the GCP platform. They also use AWS, which is over $350m a year. That contract ends in a year or two. Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. It's not hard to believe they're spending $1B+ on external cloud partners. At $57B net revenue ($274B), a high margin space such as the cloud services could make sense. Although if they're not selling it to the public it would only account for 1-2% net revenue. Apple likes to learn from companies.. Soon there will be an Apple cloud using low energy ARM (M1X) servers. Let's call it the "Digital Apple Tree". Maybe a small reference to the DAT recorder, as Apple likes music. Of course this last part is just made up ;-)
- ksec 5y ago
  >Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore. why?
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    could only find old articles mentioning it..
joezydeco 5y ago
Everyone is acting like that $300MM expense is being paid by Apple. I'm paying Apple $120/year for 2TB of iCloud storage. I might not be doing the math right but at $300 million/year for 8 million TB, that's $75/year in google expense for the $120 I'm paying Apple.
- jsnell 5y ago
  The average user with 2TB of quota probably isn't using anywhere near that much. It is more likely to be closer to the previous smallest level of quota.

jpalomaki 5y ago

Or the business is simply growing faster than Apple can (conveniently) expand their own storage capacity. There’s long lead times for data center level expansion.