I’ll still hold on to my skepticism, that this is a very complex model to scale and that no one in their right mind should be “Giving” away cloud services when it’s a known monthly cost.
Well, but what’s the problem with known monthly cost? They are not giving away data for free. You pay $399 for the phone. Of course the cloud storage they probably just buy from some “supplier” is included in that price. The cloud storage is tied to the phone I guess. You also can assume that in 2-3 years 95% of your customers won’t use the phone anymore. Now you can actually calculate very well how much it will cost you.
And it is not like that’s the only “known monthly cost” when you sell a phone. Think of the people you have to pay that take care of software updates. Or storing all the spare parts for repairs… etc… All monthly costs that are just factored into the retail price beforehand. Nothing new in the world of selling products. And cloud storage will probably just get cheaper and cheaper anyway.
That’s also how “life long warranties” work. You just assume that almost no one will actually take advantage of that promise. But the handful of people that do - you can probably take care of them.