Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Too expensive for the prime family. $360 p/year is quite a bit. I wish they had a build a bundle option for family keeping the $20 p/m.
I would drop Arcade for News and would not mind to add another $2 for 1tb storage. I'll pass.
 
For me, none of these services are worth subscribing to. I tried but didn’t care for Arcade, i am about to finish a year free on Apple TV and I don’t remember the last time I watched anything on it- I tried watching some series the first month and went back to look again in August but still didn’t find anything I was in - I’m not a fan of ANY music streaming service,and the amount of cloud storage isn’t enough for me to back up much of anything without spending a lot more to buy more storage that I can get cheaper elsewhere. And News has too many loud and crass sites that play to one faction or the other using insults and put downs.
 
Hey....just wondering: who are you replying to?

Not any one specific person... More the sentiment of a number of people in this thread that Apple made a terrible move because these offerings aren’t designed for them. If you can’t tell the messages driving this little rant, you may not be reading the same thread I am...
 
  • Like
Reactions: CarlJ and DotCom2
is this story now outdated/incorrect as far as DRM files and Apple Music ?

Yes, everything in that Lifewire article is correct. But please note the most important part about DRM and that is "Always Make a Backup;"
Make a DRM free backup of your collection before subscribing to Apple Music with iTunes Match. That way, when you unsubscribe you will still have all your own collection right back the way it was. Just common sense here.
 
I’m sure I’m not alone in the following Apple services scenario. I’ve got Music family plan @ $14.99, 2TB iCloud storage at $9.99, and I’ve been using Apple TV+ for free since I bought my iPhone 11PM, and now that they’ve got at least a few shows my wife and I like, we want to have it continue on.

My wife would like to get News+ access, but we really don’t want or need Arcade and Fitness is probably not going to be used much (we’ve got a Peloton bike). So we’ll spring for the Premier plan at $30 a month and it will effectively be giving us TV+ for $5 a month, which isn’t bad. And maybe we will use News+ and Fitness some, to add a bit more to our benefit.

Similar situation here:
Music Family, 2TB and free ATV+ (expires Nov. 2) = $25/mo.
For an additional $5/mo., I can add News+, Arcade and Fitness+ to my current services? Kind of a no-brainer. And as almost everyone has already said, iCloud storage is a joke. Not only is it $$, 2TB is just enough for me. Right now. No way it’s near enough for an additional 3 family members and all of our digital lifestyles.

Maybe these bundles are all a Trojan Hose whose actual intent is to sell more storage.
 
I have two different accounts, one for itunes/applemusic (57,000 songs) and the other for icloud. All family shared. Im wondering how thats going to work.
I might just give this a miss if it's going to break anything.
 
Last edited:
I would get this if I could. I have Apple Music and 50 GB iCloud and would like to try TV+ Might as well get them all but News and Fitness will not be available here for a few more years I think.

I do hope their services and these package deals takes off so they see value in introducing News (even the non subscription version) and Fitness+ in Norway.
 
The sensible thing would be for Apple to create an add on of 1tb for $5 a month which can be added to any account / package and be added multiple times.
 
Apple in September announced Apple One,

I'm starting to doubt if the Apple ecosystem still has the value it promised. At least for those like me that are "excluded" by Apple. Living outside Apple's commercial focus regions (I live in Belgium) I can't simply buy the goods and services the make Apple's ecosystem complete: e.g.

LTE whatches are not available
HomePod is not available
Premium one is not available
Translation on IOS14 does not comprehend our mother tongue
Scribble does not recognise our writing unless we write in English

Danny
 
is this story now outdated/incorrect as far as DRM files and Apple Music ?


That article is kind of misleading. Why would you want to put your music to Apple Music and DELETE the originals? You wouldn’t. Just copy it to the library and keep originals somewhere else and the DRM won’t matter.
 
I still have 2 questions. Is there going to be an annual sub available ? Because I'm already save a little with an annual Apple Music and Apple Arcade Subs. Also, what happens if I have multiple subs ending at different period of time over the year and I want to subscribe to One ? Its still unknown and its an important thing to know.
 
  • Like
Reactions: OddyOh
With regards to whether Apple Music includes iTunes Match or not, see the following screenshot from Apple’s Support site:

E058917F-D95E-415C-983E-F2A6A43EF6E6.jpeg

So yes, Apple Music DOES include iTunes Match.
 
Learn to use a NAS. You can get a 2 bay Synology NAS with 4TB of storage in RAID 5 for backup for $600.
Learn how RAID works. RAID 5 needs a minimum of 3 drives. It stripes the data across N-1 drives and uses the remaining (Nth) drive for parity. Striping across just one drive is nonsensical. It's like evenly dividing something into one pile.
 
This is clearly designed to get more people to sign up to ATV +, news+, arcade and fitness+.

I suspect many people already subscribe to Apple Music and extra iCloud storage. The above services not so much (yeah I know some not yet available). So this is some MBA’s way of convincing the stupid media and Wall Street that those lesser loved services are doing well by propping up their subscriber numbers in a bundle.

for my family, switching from our current subscriptions for Apple Music family, 2 Tb iCloud and maybe paying for ATV+ come December comes to AUD $40.97. An Apple One Premier is AUD$39.99. We would save $1.02 and get the other services on top I would never be prepared to pay for otherwise.

Of course I expect I will never pay for ATV+ anyway due to lack of accessing it during the free year, so it isn’t worth signing up to Premier at all.
Apple doesn’t release subscriber numbers for the most part. Just total revenue for all services including: the $10+ billion a year they get from google for default search, AppleCare, labor for out of warranty repairs, iCloud, Music, Arcade, Apple TV+, News+ and Fitness+ (soon).

Occasionally they’ll release a milestone number, like 1 billion iOS devices or “x” number of Apple Music subscribers. But with respect to Arcade and the Plus services, I think it’s likely that no one will know sub numbers for some of these services for many years, especially the media and Wall Street analysts; both are known to be pretty bad at keeping secrets. It’s information that competitors shouldn’t have, and that no one really needs.

Apple’s goal is to grow the revenue aggressively, year over year, and to keep gross margin as high as possible—it’s been around 65% since they started reporting out profit margins for hardware and services separately. (High profits on services has allowed Apple to charge less for hardware.)

To the extent Apple One saves customers money compared to what they would otherwise have been paying without the bundle, that causes a hit to both Apple’s revenue and profit. If people are enticed to subscribe to a bundle (e.g. because they can add two or three services for a few extra bucks) then Apple’s revenue and profit increase.
 
Last edited:
We also need to know is Apple One will be US only for launch?
They already said that it’s launching in the USA, Canada, U.K., and Ireland, and then will be available in other countries by the end of the year.
 
Multiple Apple IDs

For Apple device users who continue to have multiple IDs split across iCloud services and iTunes/App Store purchases and subscriptions, Apple has a system in place to handle the dual Apple IDs within a single Apple One Bundle.

I've not seen anything in that linked article or elsewhere that suggests that Apple's solution is anything other than just using another 'space' in a family account for each different ID. Please someone tell me I'm wrong as I'd love them to have a fix, but I think this is just a workaround that's not going to work if you already have 6 family members.
 
Would it have really been that difficult to just let people sign up for whatever Apple services they want and offer a 20% monthly discount when you subscribe to 2 Apple services and a 30% monthly discount when subscribing to 3+ Apple services? Why complicate things with these ridiculous bundles Apple?

To get people subscribed to services they normally wouldn't even bother trying. For example, I'm looking at getting the Premier Plan for Music, 2TB and News+. It'll also give me Arcade and Fitness+, which increases adoption - either I'll become an active user of these two services, or even if I don't I'll still be a subscriber to them in Apple's reported numbers. This way when Fitness+ launches, Apple will be able to report hundreds of thousands of sign-ups from Day 1, even though many (most?) of those users have no interest in the service whatsoever and will probably never user it. Others may decide to try it as it's in their bundle, and become active users tying them tighter into Apple's ecosystem.
 
  • Like
Reactions: OddyOh and jkozlow3
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.