I’m hoping there is an annual discount on apple one. £80 annually rather than £120 monthly for fitness+ and £50 annually rather than £60 monthly for arcade eats into the discount otherwise! Not really interested in fitness but a general point on pricing.
I second that. They would need to be pretty steep with the annual discount though in order to offer the same value you get from paying monthly. Because the typical 2 months free like they offer with other services, would be a bit less of a discount, compared to the discount for those who pay monthly, which wouldn’t make much sense considering the lock in.
For example, on the individual plan, over a year if I pay monthly I’m saving £69.72 compared to paying monthly for each separate subscription. If Apple discounted an annual plan to £149, I’d only be saving £59.46 per year compared to paying annually for each separate subscription. And if I’m already paying annually for each one (£208.46 in total), I would now only be saving £29.06 by paying for Apple One monthly. It erodes the value, and I’d have to already be enjoying all of the services in the bundle to be saving money.
So to summarise. If I pay for my subscriptions annually, I only really benefit and make a saving if I use all the subscriptions available in the bundle. But when paying monthly, I only need to be subscribed to Apple Music and either tv or arcade, to not only make a saving, but also get one of the services plus extra iCloud storage for free.
We need something at least as equally good for those paying annually, though, the discount should be greater than £70 to make it worthwhile. £129 per year at the most.
Although I have noted that mentions of paying for TV+, Arcade, and music annually are not mentioned anywhere on Apple’s website now, though the options still remain. Not sure if they ever were mentioned on the website though, but fitness plus has a clearly defined annual price.
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I also enjoyed this!
Overall, I thought the event was fun and well-executed, but in terms of announcements there wasn’t anything which hadn’t leaked so I wasn’t “surprised” by anything. I didn’t think the new iPad Air would have so many colours but that is a minor thing.
I expected Apple One to be a disappointment but I think they’ve put together some nice packages well. I’m not sure it will encourage that many more subscriptions, though, so it may not have the effect Apple hopes for.
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I would have preferred apple one to be £24.99 rather than £29.99 but I have ordered 2 new apple watches as we currently have s1 and almost got the s5 but it was not worth it.
I always thought the same thing because my precious in ears always came out
AirPods Pro I’ve got now and they’ve not fallen out, i think it’s the weight of them that makes a huge difference. I’ve got kinda small ears but they stay in just fine even when I’m biking and it’s windy etc.
Only time they’ve ever fallen out is when I’ve brushed my face with my arm and hit my airpods
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Agreed. I just checked the Apple Music options and it has always annoyed me there was no annual Apple Music family option. Only individual. It may be that they take that options with the subscriptions to as you get potentially so much value across 6 they don’t want to give a bulk buy discount.
Although it seems Apple Music is an outlier, as with arcade and tv+ and now fitness+ they are all automatic family included rather than 2 tiers.
The other thing that would be nice is to be able to bump storage on the plans, I have 2tb and it seems the only way to get that would be premium when really I probably want family plan with 2tb (had news+ for 6 months free from EE and basically never really used it)
I just wish you could chop/change the individual plans.
Fitness I can see myself using. Arcade I absolutely will not. If I could swap them I would eat the individual plan up in a heartbeat.
To get fitness I have to spend £9.99 plus Apple Music at £9.99 plus iCloud which doesn’t present any savings for me right now.
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Some solid if unspectacular announcements. The new Air looks good and takes away most of the reasons for me to keep buying Pros.
Apple One just isn’t for me. I can’t swap Spotify for Apple Music as it doesn’t support Google Homes and and the iCloud Storage is just plain stingy (shocker) unless you pay for Premier, at which point you’ve got to really like their services to make the price work.
Arcade started off good for me but quickly got stale. There are a few things on TV Plus worth watching, but I could just subscribe for a month or two in a year and I’d be able to see everything I wanted to.
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I thought Apple One wouldn’t be worth it but my other half and I already pay for Spotify family plan (£15).
Being able to save music to the watch and go for a run without the phone is a big plus for AM over Spotify and I can replace my one Nest mini for another Echo
Apple TV isn’t something I’d pay for separately, and neither is Arcade. But if I can get those (and an extra 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage) for £2.5 more every month then I’m up for it
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This is the only reason I have AM. I much prefer Spotify, I think the UI is better, probably because I’ve it for so long.
This is something that annoys me about Spotify, they API is there for them to add this functionality to the watch, but they’d rather cry and moan that 0.5% of their customers give Apple 30%
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There was a time I was sympathetic to Spotify, but now they just seem to be whining because someone is actually competing with them. They can integrate as much as they like, but they chose to do as little as possible.
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Good point.
In the old days, the APIs were not there for them to integrate with things like Siri, etc, so they had a legitimate complaint that Apple was locking them out at the platform level. This isn’t true any more.
Now they are just moaning about Apple getting a 30% cut if you subscribe via the App Store - which is the same as every other developer so hardly unfair?
I don’t think that their complaint is that it is unfair vs. other developers, but rather that it is unfair vs. Apple.
It’s not really unfair vs Apple.
The 30% is a rule of the platform, for the convenience of in-app purchase. If you purchase your subscription another way, Apple don’t get 30%.
I get the point that Apple Music subscription money is 100% income for Apple, but that is only because it’s their platform. If Android rules required a 30% cut, Apple would have to pay it for Apple Music on Android.
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I hope that’s something that can come 
but there’s various threads on that forum where people have repeatedly asked for it.
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It’s worth highlighting that Apple Music on Android bypasses Google Play IAB in order to avoid the 30% cut (the very thing they disagree with people doing on their own platform).
You’re allowed your own payment method on the Play store aren’t you?
If you use Google’s then you have to pay 30%
You can offer alternatives but you must offer IAB:
Developers offering products within another category of app downloaded on Google Play must use Google Play In-app Billing as the method of payment, except for the following cases:
- Payment is solely for physical products
- Payment is for digital content that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g. songs that can be played on other music players).
The answer is in the bit you quoted, I think.
Apple Music meets the definition of the second bullet point and is therefore not required to use Google Play in-app billing?
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