Apple One Just Went Up in Price

[ralph_sws]

The skyrocketing in service revenue is not a good thing for Apple customers. It’s great for shareholders, but just something that will erode their hardware (already has) and cost consumers as Apple goes after “easy” money over making quality products. They just jacked up the price of Apple One to get free money. Normally they’d have to make a new product to do so.

Pretty soon they’ll be developing products simply around those services. Why throw in HMDI 2.1 or TB5? Fitness+ or iCloud+ doesn’t need them. Before long you won’t even be able to install FOSS or third party software because it eats away from their subscriptions.

The future of the internet looks like bots and brain rot.

Exactly. Apple has figured out that it’s much easier to squeeze another few dollars out of millions of existing customers every month than to build something genuinely new and convince people to buy it.
That is the danger of becoming increasingly dependent on Services: the incentive shifts from making better products to extracting more recurring revenue from the ecosystem you already control.
Raise Apple One by $2 and the money starts flowing immediately. No new hardware, no breakthrough feature, no manufacturing risk — just a higher bill.
Brilliant for shareholders. Increasingly ****** for customers.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

C'est la vie. When it gets there I'll adjust as always. But compared to price hikes among other streamers, and cloud/storage in general, and considering the overall quality of what Apple provides, I think a $2 price hike - that's .50 cents for each of the services I use, or .33 cents spread among all six Apple One services, is extremely reasonable. Especially considering Netflix, Disney+, and almost every other streaming and cloud service has gone up $10 or more in the same period. And they only provide one service each.

What's ironic is most of the people here were probably sucking back a $10 Starbucks while complaining about the $2/month price increase... 😅

You should just pay them more. Send them another $20 a month, just because you think the service is worth it lol.

I have never seen anyone defend a price hike. Peak gas lighting or trolling, I can’t tell anymore.

 

[Und Eser]

I bought all my Apple hardware outright, the thought of its function being subject to ever-increasing subscription charges and ever-decreasing OS/firmware support cycles is making me think about bailing on the ecosystem at some point.

 

[ralph_sws]

Not me, that's for sure.
Starbucks barely gets a nickel from me, as their prices have become beyond ludicrous.

Same here. In Poland, where I live, for the price of about five or six Starbucks coffees you can buy a full kilogram of decent coffee beans — enough to make roughly 70–80 good coffees at home. Five or six coffees versus 70–80. That really puts Starbucks pricing into perspective.

 

[ralph_sws]

C'est la vie. When it gets there I'll adjust as always. But compared to price hikes among other streamers, and cloud/storage in general, and considering the overall quality of what Apple provides, I think a $2 price hike - that's .50 cents for each of the services I use, or .33 cents spread among all six Apple One services, is extremely reasonable. Especially considering Netflix, Disney+, and almost every other streaming and cloud service has gone up $10 or more in the same period. And they only provide one service each.

What's ironic is most of the people here were probably sucking back a $10 Starbucks while complaining about the $2/month price increase... 😅

That’s some impressive mental gymnastics.
Dividing a $2 price increase by six services doesn’t magically turn it into a 33-cent increase. Apple raised the bill by $2. Period. You can divide it by six services, 30 days, 720 hours or the number of hairs on Tim Cook’s head — the amount leaving your bank account is still $2 more every month.
And “other companies raised prices too” is not a defense. It just means the entire subscription industry has discovered how easily customers can be trained to accept endless increases as long as each one is small enough.
The Starbucks comparison is even sillier. A $10 coffee is an optional one-time purchase. A subscription is a recurring charge that keeps coming every month and can be raised again next year. Those are completely different spending decisions.
But congratulations on doing Apple’s PR work for free. They raise the price, you invent increasingly creative arithmetic to explain why paying more is actually a bargain. That’s exactly the kind of customer every corporation dreams of.

 

[Und Eser]

Yep. The 1kg bag of coffee beans for ~£20 makes way more sense than 5 cups of readymade.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

Exactly. Apple has figured out that it’s much easier to squeeze another few dollars out of millions of existing customers every month than to build something genuinely new and convince people to buy it.
That is the danger of becoming increasingly dependent on Services: the incentive shifts from making better products to extracting more recurring revenue from the ecosystem you already control.
Raise Apple One by $2 and the money starts flowing immediately. No new hardware, no breakthrough feature, no manufacturing risk — just a higher bill.
Brilliant for shareholders. Increasingly ****** for customers.

No expensive R&D. No supply chain woes. No risk either. Worse yet, software is easy to fiddle with. Add a new button and all of a sudden it’s v2.0! You need version 2.0. Everyone needs 2.0!

Their entire UX is littered with dark patterns. Turn off Siri from the power button and the button just becomes an ad for Siri. Can’t remap it to anything else. Cannot remove iCloud Drive from the Files app. It just respawns. Endless recommendations and notices if you disable anything from syncing to iCloud. Maps has an obnoxious immutable notice if you enable offline mode. Half the Device Storage tab is “recommendations”. Also immutable. Be a good citizen and enable all your telemetry or you won’t get desert!

Not to mention ads everywhere. I still use the old Pages on macOS and every second launch it nags me to update to a subscription. Don’t like it? TFB!

Cook riddled Apple with cancer while everyone was too busy fawning over Apple silicon.

 

[ralph_sws]

Yep. The 1kg bag of coffee beans for ~£20 makes way more sense than 5 cups of readymade.

Exactly — and I know what I’m drinking 🤪

 

[turbineseaplane]

I've never understood what is gained by defending price increases handed down by the mothership.

 

[ralph_sws]

No expensive R&D. No supply chain woes. No risk either. Worse yet, software is easy to fiddle with. Add a new button and all of a sudden it’s v2.0! You need version 2.0. Everyone needs 2.0!

Their entire UX is littered with dark patterns. Turn off Siri from the power button and the button just becomes an ad for Siri. Can’t remap it to anything else. Cannot remove iCloud Drive from the Files app. It just respawns. Endless recommendations and notices if you disable anything from syncing to iCloud. Maps has an obnoxious immutable notice if you enable offline mode. Half the Device Storage tab is “recommendations”. Also immutable. Be a good citizen and enable all your telemetry or you won’t get desert!

Not to mention ads everywhere. I still use the old Pages on macOS and every second launch it nags me to update to a subscription. Don’t like it? TFB!

Cook riddled Apple with cancer while everyone was too busy fawning over Apple silicon.

Exactly. Apple increasingly feels less focused on making the best product and more focused on maximizing lock-in, subscriptions, and recurring revenue. Apple Silicon distracted a lot of people from how aggressive the monetization has become.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

I've never understood what is gained by defending price increases handed down by the mothership.

Keeping the reality distortion field up and running so one does not dissolve into a stew of cognitive dissonance I’ve always thought. Some people are so entrenched in the system, they would lose it if they even opened a window with permission.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

Exactly. Apple increasingly feels less focused on making the best product and more focused on maximizing lock-in, subscriptions, and recurring revenue. Apple Silicon distracted a lot of people from how aggressive the monetization has become.

Ya the walled garden is starting to feel like a prison. I chose Apple. Now I feel like I married an abusive alcoholic.

“Leave me and you’ll pay!!! I’ll make sure you’ll pay!!! And your kids too!”

Apple just feels like a shakedown.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Keeping the reality distortion field up and running so one does not dissolve into a stew of cognitive dissonance I’ve always thought. Some people are so entrenched in the system, they would lose it if they even opened a window with permission.

Despite decades of using and mostly loving all the Apple kit I've had, I just have never felt compelled to be defending them. This feeling has grown as they have grown.

Multi-TRILLION dollar companies don't care about me, don't need me, and absolutely don't need anyone to defend them. Quite frankly, we should all be watching their every move like a hawk and be very outspoken and cautious about what the "real angle" always is.

I know it's somewhat said as a joke (by me, quite often) about "make number go up", but quite literally that is all they are worried about. If we happen to get some enjoyable products along the way it's a happy by product, if not coincidence, but by no means is that their actual targeted goal anymore.

We all sort of got frog boiled here.

A company starts out as one thing, particularly when small or the underdog, and ends up as something very very different once a certain scale, success level or market position is achieved.

It's prudent to always be updating our views of the company as a result.

 

[trafficdistro54]

Of course it's growing - people love Apple Music and other Apple subscriptions as they are very affordable (Apple Music is around 70 cents a day for all you can eat music in a wide variety of genres). It's still just 26% of Apple's revenue.

Affordability is very questionable these days with Apple subscriptions. I'll stick to Sirius XM which is much more affordable than Apple music.

 

[ralph_sws]

Ya the walled garden is starting to feel like a prison. I chose Apple. Now I feel like I married an abusive alcoholic.

“Leave me and you’ll pay!!! I’ll make sure you’ll pay!!! And your kids too!”

Apple just feels like a shakedown.

It used to be a walled garden. Now it feels like the walls got higher, the gates got narrower, and Apple installed a card reader on every door.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

Honestly, I pulled most of my stuff out from the cloud last year when I saw the writing on the wall. I have the following with Apple:

Mail, AM, Hide my Email and a few things like Notes and Safari, the latter being forced on me as only the EU got true third party browsers without webkit. I could shift those out or remove them entirely with very little disruption to my life. Apple doesn’t know how little they have to offer these days. I wouldn’t miss the AI slop that most of which can’t be turned off, just muted from the user’s view eating away your battery, processing, RAM and battery every waking second.

On my Mac I moved to FF and couldn’t be happier. I ponied up for a VPN to replace Private Relay. I could move to Bandcamp as I am not happy about AI slop being recommended to me so AM is on the chopping block as of late. I hate the $1 monthly fee out of principle and could 100% live with a free tier. I don’t need every picture on every device. Even an ISP with 1Gbps speeds isn’t a big selling point these days. I don’t watch movies or tv much anymore. It’s telling when most of your media library is from 90-00s! Movies don’t hit like they used to. They all feel like UE demos! Terribly flat acting, terrible scripts, terrible character development. All costing 100x more than movies made just 20 years ago. All show, no substance. And the CG isn’t even that much better than 2010!!

Apple can go all in on services but to me, I have already pumped the brakes. AI slop is the last thing that will win me back! Don’t much like the surveillance of it all either. I looked over all of Apple’s apps and every single one sucks up telemetry with clearly opaque identifiers! That crept in pretty sneakily! Not a single app they make doesn’t have a unique identifier, beaming data back to the mothership!

TBH I don’t like music fed to me by an algorithm. I loath AI reading or writing for me. Even making pictures or upscaling existing content I find unpalatable. I enjoy doing things on my own. I much more enjoy perusing Bandcamp on my own and discovering artists myself. AM is a nightmare to navigate anyway. Whoever thought locking you into albums (often singles because no one does albums anymore) with no clear way to keep music flowing after you reach the end is the anti-christ! Their legendary UX has given way to smarmy upsells and endless dark patterns.

At this rate, I have no plans to upgrade any device. Perfectly happy with my M1 Max Studio and iPhone 15 that can’t get the full dose of AI! Wish I never upgraded my iPad Air third gen for the M4 Pro! Biggest waste of cash, ever. Already replaced my hompods with quality speakers. Apple Watch S7 is a music player. The AirPods were my one gem but their firmware is just a train wreck these days so once my Pro 2s die, I’ll check out what else is on the market. Heck, Apple has better support for Android fast switching over more models than they do with their own hardware (like the Beats Studio Pros that only support the former!).

I already have one foot and 4 toes out the door Tim.

 

[GregoryPeckEPA]

If we happen to get some enjoyable products along the way it's a happy by product, if not coincidence, but by no means is that their actual targeted goal anymore.

1000%. I felt this when Cook put up a fight against giving the FBI a skeleton key to their servers. Yes it was good for the user, but he did it because if he had complied, it would have effectively dismantled their entire “privacy first” slogan, which they put all their eggs into, costing them likely trillions and maybe even completely tipping the tables towards their competitors. The choice from a fiscal POV seemed clear. The user got a free ride because it didn’t cost them any more gas. That is not the same as having it be done in the service of Apple’s customers.

Job’s Apple had integrity. Cook’s Apple not so much. Yet the marketing stayed the same.

Cook’s Apple is 1) it has to make me money or else the user can’t have it, 2) if it doesn’t cost me bags of money, then, we’ll see. The “we’ll see” is akin to your parents saying that when you ask for ice cream on the way home. 9/10 it’s going to wind up “it’s too out of the way” as you pull up to your drive way. Yet you flew past 3 Dairy Queens to get there!

 

[citysnaps]

That’s such a dumb way to frame it. Of course $2 a month by itself won’t “crush” anyone. The point is that Apple TV+ launched at $4.99 and is now $14.99 — that’s a $10 increase, or roughly 200%, in just a few years.
And it’s not happening in a vacuum. Netflix goes up, Disney+ goes up, Spotify goes up, cloud storage goes up, internet goes up, utilities go up, groceries go up — everything keeps creeping higher while people like you keep dismissing every single increase as “just a few cents a day.”
That’s exactly how companies get away with it: every price hike sounds tiny when you deliberately isolate it from all the others.

Apparently you are not aware that Apple does not own the rights to most of the Apple TV content (other than movies produced by Apple Studios), and thus licenses the content via a fee to the movies rights holder. Thus, the rights holders determine how much Apple pays them, and Apple charges the viewer a fee.

Also, contrary to what many here believe, Apple is not immune to inflation driving increased costs of doing business, including employee salary and benefits increases, increased company overhead expenses, etc.

 

[citysnaps]

I've never understood what is gained by defending price increases handed down by the mothership.

Did it ever occur to you that Apple is subject to price increases that are imposed by the rights holders of the digital content that Apple hands down to Apple customers?

 

[ralph_sws]

Apparently you are not aware that Apple does not own the rights to most of the Apple TV content (other than movies produced by Apple Studios), and thus licenses the content via a fee to the movies rights holder. Thus, the rights holders determine how much Apple pays them, and Apple charges the viewer a fee.

Also, contrary to what many here believe, Apple is not immune to inflation driving increased costs of doing business, including employee salary and benefits increases, increased company overhead expenses, etc.

That still doesn’t explain a 200% price increase.
Apple TV launched at 4.99 and is now 14.99. US inflation since late 2019 has been roughly 30%, not 200%.
And no, “the rights holders determine how much Apple charges the viewer” is not how this works. Apple negotiates content costs and Apple sets the retail subscription price. Every streaming company has content costs, salaries and overhead.
More importantly, Apple’s Services business is hardly being crushed by rising costs — its gross margin is around 75%.
So yes, costs went up. Nobody disputes that. Pretending inflation and licensing somehow forced Apple to triple the subscription price is corporate-apologist nonsense.

 

[ralph_sws]

Did it ever occur to you that Apple is subject to price increases that are imposed by the rights holders of the digital content that Apple hands down to Apple customers?

Did it ever occur to you that Apple chooses what it licenses, negotiates those deals, and sets the price you pay? Higher licensing costs aren’t a blank check for a 200% price increase.
The funniest part is watching a customer do Apple’s PR work for free. Are you on the payroll, or is this just a hobby?

 

[citysnaps]

That still doesn’t explain a 200% price increase.
Apple TV launched at 4.99 and is now 14.99. US inflation since late 2019 has been roughly 30%, not 200%.
And no, “the rights holders determine how much Apple charges the viewer” is not how this works. Apple negotiates content costs and Apple sets the retail subscription price. Every streaming company has content costs, salaries and overhead.
More importantly, Apple’s Services business is hardly being crushed by rising costs — its gross margin is around 75%.
So yes, costs went up. Nobody disputes that. Pretending inflation and licensing somehow forced Apple to triple the subscription price is corporate-apologist nonsense.

Nice try. I didn't say that.

I said "Thus, the rights holders determine how much Apple pays them, and Apple charges the viewer a fee."

 

[citysnaps]

Did it ever occur to you that Apple chooses what it licenses, negotiates those deals, and sets the price you pay? Higher licensing costs aren’t a blank check for a 200% price increase.
The funniest part is watching a customer do Apple’s PR work for free. Are you on the payroll, or is this just a hobby?

Why the constant sideways insults? I'm trying to explain how Apple deals with rights owners for content. And that Apple charges customers a subscription and a fee when customers access some movie content.

 

[Und Eser]

Seems quite a few defenders of ever-increasing profit margins to appease shareholders see performative accusation and reductive virtue-signalling as valid retort.

 

[ChantyBinx]

I agree that Apple One isn’t perfect, I for one don’t care much for a news platform that advertises to me and I wish there was an option between 200GB and 2TB…

But you’d be hard pressed to find anything close to a music subscription, streaming service, cloud storage, paid email provider, let alone fitness or gym subscription … let alone ones you can share with five people for anything close to the price of Apple One Premier, let’s be real.

In my recent journey to Android I tried a 1TB phone to specifically eliminate the need for cloud storage or sync because the number of subscriptions I’d need to come close would be at least double the £37 per month.