Remember in April when I complained about how hard Apple is selling me services, and how it made it sound like I would lose email?

Guess who else is selling me services? You got it. Google. Well, specifically Gmail.

 

 

Let's give that a shot.

Wait, okay, that's actually kind of helpful! has:attachment larger:10M is a neat search suggestion to get rid of some oversized emails.

Unfortunately I only have 125 that match. That's not nothing -- 125 at even just 10 megs each is well over a gigabyte, giving me nearly 8% of my 15 gigs of free space back and hopefully silencing this message for a while.

But what really hits me is the coincidence that Apple and Google are both yelling at me to pay something [or pay more in Apple's case] at the same time. 

Interestingly, Outlook seems to hard cap at 50 gigs even when you're paying $70 a year (includes 1 tb OneDrive). Google offers 100 gigs in gmail for $20 a year. Apple lets you lump email in with your iCloud, so potentially 2 terabytes (!??!), but that's shared with your iCloud backups, messages, and pictures, and runs $10 a month, so... Fastmail charges $5 a month for 30 gigs and $9 for 100, which seems to be obviously too much until you recall they aren't profiting on what's in your emails.

Regardless, what getting caught on both ends with "upgrade now!!1!" adverts tells me is that companies aren't scaling storage over time, as it becomes cheaper for them. And storage isn't being updated year over year because having people run out of storage is a profit center.

Not crazy, but not coincidental either. This is a decided, "let's all charge for services" play by all the companies. There's money in them thar hills.

Labels: apple, cloud, gmail, Google, hats o' money, icloud, outlook