YOUR iCLOUD BILL PAID FOR THIS ROOM'S ELECTRICITY. NOT YOUR STORAGE.
This hallway is your photo library.
Not a metaphor. This actual room.
Dell PowerStore arrays. Floor to ceiling. Hexagon panels hiding thousands of drives.
Every selfie you backed up lives on one of these disks.
You don't own it. You rent it. $9.99 a month. No end date.
But these drives have an expiration date.
Data centers swap them on a schedule. Not when they break. Before they break.
Whole pallets. Pulled out. Replaced overnight.
Then something weird happens.
Those same 20TB enterprise drives show up recertified. On eBay. For $180.
The exact hardware from this room. Same model. Same capacity.
Two drives. One NAS enclosure. $510 total.
That buys you 40TB. Sitting on your desk. No subscription.
iCloud gives you 2TB for $120 a year. Every year. Until you die or delete.
Five years of iCloud? $600. For 2TB.
One NAS? $510. For 40TB. Once.
The cloud isn't overpriced because storage is expensive.
It's overpriced because you never walked into this room and saw how cheap it actually is.