Apple iCloud Hits 125 Million Users

Sites include Apple.com . Published on May 9th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

When Apple entered the cloud storage fray with the iCloud service, many scoffed at the move and predicted that it wouldn’t take hold, but how wrong could they be? Today the iCloud service is growing at a rapid rate and according to an announcement by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer; the service now has over 125 million users and counting.

To put the growth in perspective, it was only a few months ago that Oppenheimer announced that the service had 85 million users; forward on from that (2 months ago to be exact) and we heard from CEO Tim Cook that iCloud had a commanding 100 million users. And to make the growth even more profound, consider too that Apple’s iCloud service is barely 7 months old.

Analysts are pointing to the strong sales in Apple devices for the rapid growth in the service usage. Apple sold over 35.1 million iPhones at the end of its Q2 fiscal period for 2012. Add to this the 11.8 million iPads also sold, and you can see why the correlation between device sales and iCloud use is a relevant and accurate one.

The only fly in the ointment is the fact that Apple offers 5 Gigs free storage to users and so Apple may not be extracting the revenues just yet from paid customers. Still, it’s perhaps safe to predict that the ‘freemium’ model will pay off in the near future for Apple.