Apple One Bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade, News+ and Fitness+ for $30 a Month (techcrunch.com) 35
An anonymous reader shares a report: Seems everything charges a monthly fee, these days. It also seems that every Apple event brings another way to fork over $10 a month to the company. This time out, it was the addition of Fitness+, which brings metric-focused video workouts to an Apple TV near you. To keep things simple (and to keep you subscribing), the company is offering up a trio of new Apple One bundles. It's not quite mix and match yet, but there are three pricing tiers. Individual offers Apple Music, TV+, Arcade and iCloud for $15 a month. The Family version will get you those four services for $20 a month. For the hardcore, there's the $30 a month Premier tier, which bundles iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade, News+ and Fitness+.
Apple announcing their irrelevancy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Title should read “Apple One Bundles a bunch of apple services no one wants together for a price no one is interested in”
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
My wife uses iCloud free for app data backup and Google Photos free for photos. When she eventually exceeds the 5GB free limit I'll look at options, I already pay for unlimited storage on Jottacloud so could use that.
Re: (Score:3)
It seems that you too noticed that they didn't bother to offer AppleCare in the bundle, the one Apple service that most people actually want to protect their fragile devices.
Out of all of the services in the Apple One product list, the only one that I rely on is the 50 GB of iCloud storage to backup my phone. That only costs me 99 cents a month.
Re: (Score:1)
It seems that you too noticed that they didn't bother to offer AppleCare in the bundle.
Yes, that's the reason. It was too much of a bother. It couldn't be that "AppleCare" depends on what devices you own and when you bought them and when it runs out and they don't want to offer 387 different bundles. "Now, you could get bundle W7, which covers an iPhone 12+ and a series 5 watch and an iPad Air (2018), or bundle W8-, so you can include your Apple TV but not your watch, unless it's a series 4, in which case you need W9 regular"
Re: (Score:2)
That's pretty weak, though. They could have easily had a basic bundle that included AppleTV+, iCloud storage, and AppleCare+ coverage on "up to two devices", bumping that up to "up to four devices" if you went for the family plan.
That makes no sense, tied to hardware (Score:1)
It seems that you too noticed that they didn't bother to offer AppleCare in the bundle
AppleCare is totally different, it's a hardware service plan at best (really a warranty extension plan), not a software service plan.
It would make zero sense for it to be included in any bundle you were meant to subscribe to for a while, since it's tied to hardware and is inherently a limited duration thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple also already has an automatic upgrade program that gives you a shiny new iPhone with AppleCare bundled every year. Why not add some free Apple services to that, in order to sweeten the pot on that deal?
Re: (Score:1)
Why not add some free Apple services to that, in order to sweeten the pot on that deal?
Apple already gives you a year free of AppleTV+ with every new device, but it does seem like with AppleOne they would give you one o the lower tiers, or heck maybe even premier for free for a year...
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much this. I pay them the $1/mo. for a 50GB upgrade to my iCloud storage from their free tier (5GB), and we do the same for my wife's account for two reasons:
1) It makes for worry-free iCloud Backups for iPhones and iPads, since you're no longer having to manage minuscule storage.
2) It makes things SO much easier when sharing or dealing with photos, especially with grandparents spread around the country. While I could easily host my own thing, it's just not worth it when Apple's Photos app is already
Re: Apple announcing their irrelevancy. (Score:2)
Si basically, you are paying to do what Google photo does for free, and is cross platform instead of being locked to Apple devices. Sounds like the worst possible solution to your picture sharing problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Si basically, you are paying to do what Google photo does for free, and is cross platform instead of being locked to Apple devices. Sounds like the worst possible solution to your picture sharing problem.
1) If I wanted to do it for free, I’d host it myself, as I already said, just like I host plenty of other stuff. It just wasn’t worth the effort when I was already paying for iCloud storage because...
2) The storage space was already being paid for for use with backups and other cloud access. See the #1 reason I already listed in my first post. This was simply a value-add to an existing subscription.
3) If I cared to share cross-platform, Apple already lets me do that in a variety of ways (e.g. ho
Re: (Score:2)
Vendor locking-in your whole family to Apple was your original mistake, of course. You are stuck now. You can't move out of the garden, even if you think you can.
Re: (Score:2)
You are stuck now. You can't move out of the garden, even if you think you can.
Oh, please. Would you care to explain to me how my collection of DRM-free music, TV shows, and movies (yes, even ones purchased from iTunes; see: TunesKit) stored on a Windows box locks me into Apple's walled garden? Perhaps Microsoft is in cahoots with Apple to lock me in too, given that all of my photos/videos are automatically synced using DRM-free, industry standard file formats to my Plex machine thanks to Photos having cross-platform syncing with Windows? Oh wait, I bet you're aware of some secret mea
Re: (Score:2)
Ok so if a single one of your family member wanted to switch out of the Apple world, you realize you could no longer use the Apple Photo app to share pictures and get comments, right? Would you be ready to do the switch? Or will you just stop sharing with that person?
Are you using iMessage and Facetime, or do you favor cross-platforms alternatives?
But if you're more comfortable wrongly assuming that everyone with an iDevice is a sheeple who is incapable of understanding and mitigating the risk of lock-in or otherwise thinking for themselves, don't let me dissuade you from once again jumping to the wrong conclusions. We wouldn't want to face reality, after all.
Not everyone. But someone who list 2 reasons to pay for iCloud ($1 for 45 extra GB), and one of which is the ease to share and comment pictures with relatives, de
Re: (Score:2)
Also, even if you did switch your picture library to something else, you'd likely lose all your comments, likes and perhaps even albums. I'd be pissed if I lost my Google Photo, I admit it. I'd prefer to use something open source if it existed, but I haven't found anything matching the features, speed, ease of use and convenience. But at least it doesn't restrict my hardware choice, so it's a good start.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok so if a single one of your family member wanted to switch out of the Apple world, you realize you could no longer use the Apple Photo app to share pictures and get comments, right? Would you be ready to do the switch?
Sure, easily. That isn't a factor now, but were that to happen, I could:
1) Simply let them use the existing website that Apple already publishes and keeps updated for us (it's an opt-in feature for shared albums that we chose to enable because my wife has an aunt who prefers to access photos via her browser than through an app).
2) Add the original photos that are already on my Plex machine as an additional library in Plex, add the grandparents as managed users, and have them install Plex on their devices. S
Re: (Score:2)
2) Add the original photos that are already on my Plex machine as an additional library in Plex, add the grandparents as managed users, and have them install Plex on their devices. Setting it up would take 2-5 minutes on my end, plus time to walk them through downloading the app and logging in, and the user experience isn't as nice, but it'd work.
I also like and use Plex personally, but replacing Google Photo for my parents by Plex sounds like an IT hell to me. I already spend enough time supporting them, and their computer knowledge is above average.
The people I communicate with most frequently are all on iOS, so I use FaceTime more than anything else>
I am always amazed when someone says that. iOS has something like a 15% market share world wide. So let say you communicate with a group of 10 people, the probability that every one is on iOS is 0.15^10. You are a lot more likely to win at a lottery. But even in some cherry-picked markets where iOS has,
Re: (Score:2)
I am always amazed when someone says that. iOS has something like a 15% market share world wide. So let say you communicate with a group of 10 people, the probability that every one is on iOS is 0.15^10. You are a lot more likely to win at a lottery.
So, you're amazed that people don't make friends by compiling a list of every human on earth and then using a random number generator to select their companions? Because that's effectively what your analysis is predicated on people doing. In the real world, there are network effects at play (i.e. people are predisposed to get what those around them have), there are demographics at play (e.g. much of the global population simply can't afford an iOS device), and there are market realities at play (e.g. device
Apple software is ok but their services do suck! (Score:1)
Unstated in summary - max storage for Premiere (Score:2)
The Premier bundle ends up looking like a decent deal if you already subscribed to a few of the services and already use iCloud for device backup - one thing the summary didn't mention is that it gives you the (still max) 2TB storage for iCloud. The cheaper levels were quite a bit lower (just 200GB for the family plan, one level down).
Apple Fitness all by itself seems pretty expensive for what it is, but it does help make the bundle compelling.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Peloton exercise bike and then they pay $39/month for access to the classes
That's a good point, I have a gym membership but had no idea of the pricing of things like the Peloton access - so Apple's price is not so far off. And in conjunction with a watch adds a lot of monitoring that otherwise only higher end equipment would include.
I'm still not sure I'd use it much but I am curious what it's like. It could well be I'd find one of the workout types useful at home since they have a variety.
Re: (Score:2)
“Family”? (Score:3)
I didn’t watch the Keynote... has Apple figured out yet how to share files and folders with other people in a way that doesn’t completely suck?
It’s unbelievable how primitive their iCloud file services have been. Pretty much every other service makes it easy to set up shared folders - and has offered it for years.
Apple’s leadership team needs to read some John Donne.
Seems like it's good enough (Score:2)
has Apple figured out yet how to share files and folders with other people in a way that doesnâ(TM)t completely suck?
I don't know by what definition you are operating under, but iCloud sharing now works well enough to share things with other people that I plan to drop my paid DropBox account.
It could still use improvement for sure.
iCloud file syncing at least has seemed to be pretty reliable for some time.
Re: Seems like it's good enough (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
iCloud Backup is amazing until you realise that uploading automated LAN backups (to your desktop) the moment you connect to WiFi actually works better
That still is annoying to set up, and I prefer to have the daily backups offsite and do full local backups from time to time... I don't want to rely on some backup solution that may fail silently without me even knowing for a week or more.
Also, try extracting your passwords from iCloud Keychain without using AppleScript to slurp them one by one out of Safari.
I think I'll maintain my current iPayment level (Score:1)
That would be $0 per month. I avoid any kind of Cloud involvement I have a choice about, I don't use iTunes (which I find appalling), I watch TV in shockingly primitive ways, I have zero interest in letting Apple count my steps and it will be a freezing cold day in Hell before I bother with games on my cell phone.
And yes, I own an iPhone...have for years. The one thing I love about it is the free text messaging with other iPhone users. It's handy for me, because I actually pay for text messages otherwise
What about the content creators? (Score:2)
So before it was $10 to get Apple music (same price as Spotify or Google Music) for a single user, and $5 to get Apple TV+ (cheaper than Netflix but with much less content).
Now it's $15 to get both. Plus they also add Arcade and iCloud, not sure how much were those services worth, but it sounds like the content creators for TV shows and music are not going to get as much money as they did before. And no, I don't think Apple will operate at loss. They will make billions with these services.
So did the content
Re: (Score:3)
For TV it's easy, since Apple pays a set amount for each show. Content creators get that contracted amount for the show and Apple gets the rights to that show.
For Apple Music, again, everyone
Re: (Score:2)
For Apple Music, again, everyone is paid the same rate of some fraction of a penny per stream.
I don't beleive it's that's simple. I tought the model was more like Apple gets $3/30% and give back $7/70% to the rights owners. It's pooled among all subscribers but if my music represent 1% of all music streamed on Apple music, then I get 1% of that $7 multiplied by the number of subscribers, monthly.