With storage so cheap, Apple is trying to squeeze people into the cloud, I think. However that creates bandwidth dependencies, which leads to another bad experience.
It is beyond bizarre. You should what happens when you have three phones on the same account. That's another trap we inadvertently meandered into, and each time they improve their offerings we fall further down the rabbit hole. It tells me that my phone called me, I kid you not. Not the other two phones on our account, but mine.
All this being said - what a pain in the neck. You and kb are spot on. What's the cost to apple for another 16 or 32 GB of storage? Or (GASP) an SD slot? (Blasphemy!) I always end up paying for the bigger storage because 16 is just plain laughable. Especially as their OS continues to bloat out like my waistline.
Yeah, here in NZ I'm on one of the heftiest data allowances for mobile - 5GB a month, free talk and text (Text is huge in NZ, I'm not sure about other countries) here and to Australia. I hear other countries have "unlimited" but throttled data packages?? I used to work for a Telco; and it was fascinating to see how rapidly things progress from being a luxury, to a necessity. Mobile data used to be so clunky, inefficient and annoying that nobody used it. Now it's the thing people come into stores to discuss. Calling and texting is a given to be cheap, Data is the last frontier that Telcos (at least in NZ) can make money off - so I can't see us getting unlimited mobile Data in the near future, until they start to fail in convincing people that access to the internet is becoming a utility rather than a luxury. That and our infrastructure wouldn't cop it in it's current state.
T-mobile will basically let you stream any music for free. Video they'll still punish you, but music appears subsidized by the vendors. I have a 64GB phone and had every plan to load it full of music, but I discovered that I have near-instant access to all 200-plus GB of my library whenever I need it. You get say, Netflix and Hulu in a pissing match and I'll bet you one or both of them ends up subsidizing the data on that, too. At that point it comes down to how many Youtube videos you can watch over LTE.
Damn that's not bad. Currently only Spark in NZ subsidizes data for music streaming, but they just pay your Spotify subscription for you. So we have a ways to go, but hopefully things will change in time. Netflix is only just taking off over here but it's definitely happening. The small time competition companies just in our country are at least making people aware of the services they could be having.
I suspect things will improve - not fast enough, and not with enough quality, but they'll improve. Cell phone contracts are pretty much pure margin; they're amortizing the build-out so it's not like they're getting free money but that amortization can be pushed out if it justifies more customers. Market forces in the US have made cell plans a lot less rapacious. I remember when plans came with different numbers of texts per month. Nowadays it's nearly impossible to buy a plan without free MMS.