It was always unbelievable too me how much they hosted for free. I recklessly pushed over 100gbs of containers the last years, all free. Never made sense to me, even google doesn't do this anymore.
Looking at the rates of enterprise storage costs compared to what Google or Apple charges consumers - I was surprised by how subsidized people's photo libraries are.
They are not, but actual usage is typically a single-digit % of promised space. So power users are served at cost (or even at loss), but the overwhelming majority of users are actually overpaying for what they use.
I just compared the price of 2TB on backblaze B2 and Google Drive, they were roughly the same price. Google doesn't charge for bandwidth, but it's also against the ToS to do anything that would result in lots of downloads anyway.
Google also charges a flat rate for 2TB with the next lowest plan being 200GB. So the majority of users are paying for 2TB but not using anything close to that much. I suspect consumer storage is also much easier to offload to hard drives and tape backups while files on S3/B2 would mostly require SSDs with some probably being stored in ram.
And it's different in more ways than one. Hosting the images is just one fraction of the features that you get with Apple or some other provider. Searching, albums, sharing, are all baked in services that are still cheaper than, say, going through S3 and having a bucket with similar storage.
Apple does a pretty bad job of it then, because I have a local copy of my entire photo library too on an external hard drive. It’s quite nice really, cloud storage plus a local copy. I guess it’s somewhat of a moat because switching to some other cloud provider or my own system will be more expensive?
No I’m saying that Apple Photos literally copies to a local library automatically if you have a mac and open Photos.app. I didn’t even have to set it up. My partner did the same thing, and she’s decidedly not tech savvy. It’s one of the only reasons I ended up paying for Apple One for the 2TB cloud storage, is because of how easy they made it.
We are even using Docker Hub to store and distribute VM images... The so-called "container disk image" format is sticking a qcow2 file in a Docker image and storing it on a Docker registry.
