Thank you for the kind and humbling comment. 
Google’s AI claims that one billion GB of middle tier AWS storage would cost $12,500,000/month
so 45GB * 1.5 Billion phones should cost about $837,000,000/month.
To quote the apocryphal comment of the late Senator Everett Dirksen: “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
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Apple would get a massive discount on that figure due to volume. It’s pretty easy if you speak to the right people and have a certain volume of AWS spend to get significant savings.
And we’re assuming all would use it.
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As for Cloud Storage. It feels like we’re now in the era where the intermediate and above computing users understand that the Cloud storage is just storing your data on another company’s hard drives. There are umpteen ways of sharing files. Steve Jobs, IMO, was correct when he told Dropbox founders their company was a “feature and not a product”. Not even Apple has been able to really differentiate their cloud storage offering.
Where Apple has become more Microsoftian is in the overt ways they are “digging for dollars”. Apple formerly was a company who exuded this air of “It’s expensive because of it’s exquisite design” it was harder to see the money money mechanisms turn. When Jobs returned he amplified this to new levels. You just had to have that new Bondi Blue iMac followed by the insatiable lust for amassing an iPod collection and having your music everywhere.
Jobs passed and Tim Cook continued to insist that what made Apple great was “in our DNA” which I always doubted. Jobs was no angel but he could sell a vision once he was onboard with it. To witness Tim Cook’s mastery is to look at the sheer scale of what Apple can operate at but they have taken multiple steps backwards in software design. Ads infesting the stores with promises of more coming. Apple crammed F1 down our gullets (it’s a good show but the promotion was a bit excessive) and now the soon to be infamous purple plea in the software for woo us into subscribing to the Creator Studio. Apple’s ability to create genuine insatiable desire has waned. My hope is that if Ternus is the guy he actively listens to what the Apple masses are vocalizing.
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I agree. Some people upgrade every year or two. But most iPhone users probably get a new phone when their old one dies, or is killed by a drop to concrete 
I suspect Apple’s next CEO will face the same problems as TC. Find new sources of revenue to support the stock price, and try to reduce Apple’s dependence on China.
+1
Here’s one review for those who are interested
It’s turning into that U2 album debacle, but a new debacle gets announced every other week as “progress.” Meanwhile I now can’t trust core apps.
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I completely agree. Something has drastically but slowly changed over the Tim Cook era. I’ve been using Apple products since 2003 and I’ve never kept the same hardware this long. I suppose that’s a testament to their build quality, but there isn’t anything pulling me to upgrade. The slow introductions of ads and upsells I still don’t get either. The App Store, Apple News, etc. have ads all over the place. iWork now pesters you daily if you don’t swap to the Creator Suite version and then is riddled with upsell in that new version. I don’t mind paying them more for a premium experience, but you have to deliver on that. I do wonder if they have just diversified their product line too much again and it’s hard to unify that vision like the Jobs era did.
Companies should always listen to their customers, but they don’t always need to act on their customer’s wishes. For many years Apple didn’t have focus groups and did what they thought was good.
Proposed designs for an Apple Phone famously revolved around evolutions of iPods and hardware keyboards. Apple blew the industry away.
Look at tablets pre iPad, they were stylus driven, had attached keyboards and had relatively poor screen and battery life. There was no “Me too” from Apple, the designed what they thought Customers needed rather than what customers wanted.
On the other side with Butterfly keyboards, Customers were complaining about hardware reliability, but I doubt it was the customer complaints which caused a change, rather than the cost of the replacements which caused a return to a reliable design.
But returning ports to the MBP could only be because of customer complaints/press feedback and rejection of the need for additional dongles.
I want Apple to forge ahead and innovate, not design by committee.
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