Rasmus Wold @rasmuswold - Twitter Profile

Every photo you take on your iPhone is quietly recording a 3-second video in the background. You never turned this on. Apple ships every single iPhone with it enabled, and they have a $109 billion reason to keep it that way. It's called Live Photos. Been around since 2015. When you tap the shutter, your phone grabs 1.5 seconds of video before your finger hits the button and 1.5 seconds after. Then it stitches that clip to your picture and saves both. The storage cost is where it gets interesting. A regular iPhone photo is about 2–5 MB. How-To Geek tested Live Photos on an iPhone 13 and found each one runs around 13 MB total, roughly 5 MB for the picture and 8 MB for the video riding shotgun. So every photo with Live turned on takes 2.5x the space. Apple gives you 5 GB of free iCloud storage. For comparison, Google gives you 15 GB. At 13 MB per shot, you burn through Apple's free 5 GB in about 385 photos. Photutorial's 2024 data puts the average American at 20 photos a day. That's three weeks before Apple's free storage runs dry and the little "iCloud Full" notification starts nagging you to upgrade. $0.99 a month for 50 GB. $2.99 for 200 GB. $9.99 for 2 TB. And it keeps coming back. I've seen this complaint all over Apple's own support forums and across tech sites. People disable Live Photos. Software update rolls in. It switches itself back on. Apple has never explained this. Zoom out to the business side and the math clicks. Apple's services business (iCloud, App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, all of it lumped together) pulled in $109.2 billion in 2025, up 14% from the year before. December 2025 quarter alone crossed $30 billion in services revenue for the first time in company history. iCloud+ and Apple One subscriptions account for about 26% of that pie, which works out to roughly $28 billion a year in charges that auto-renew every month on a credit card most people forgot they entered. I'll be fair. Live Photos do have some genuinely useful tricks. You can scroll through the frames and pick the one where nobody blinked. Long Exposure mode blurs water in rivers and waterfalls without needing a tripod. And you can turn any Live Photo into a short looping animation. But honestly, for the vast majority of people, Live Photos is just a storage tax they never signed up for. It sits there on every iPhone, quietly eating space. And sooner or later, the $0.99 upgrade prompt does the rest.

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