Jason Snell on his wishes for an iCloud storage bump this year:
The policy Apple uses to grant a small amount of free iCloud storage space needs to change. The free 5GB just isn’t large enough to do almost anything useful. Apple could raise the allotment, allow an additional amount per every device attached to an Apple ID (or set of family IDs), or even offer a year of a larger data plan with purchase of a device. I firmly believe that Apple doesn’t need to nickel and dime people with its iCloud storage plans—once people use them and get used to them, they will pay for more storage. But the upsell happens way too soon, before users can see how useful iCloud storage can be.
5GB is not a reasonble amount of free storage to give people these days. Google provide 15GB of storage by default on Drive, which is a big reason for people (myself included) to use it. The primary use of iCloud for most people is to store photos and videos that they take on their iPhone. 5GB won’t allow most people to even back up the photos they currently have, never mind take any new photos.
I agree with Snell. If Apple were to increase the free storage tier to something acceptable - minimum 10GB - then that would encourage more people to actually pay for storage beyond that once they realize how useful it is.