Apple One: What You Need to Know

[kecinzer]

I’m looking for Family plan with 200 GB iCloud storage and I only hope, that I can buy additional 200 GB iCloud storage, as for now our family uses cca. 240 GB storage and I need to pay for 2TB plan.
So with 200 + 200 GB I will be satisfied for long time.

 

[Techwatcher]

I think you have the ability to pay for the higher storage tiers while on the Individual plan. I don't think there are any substantial savings on the increases, though.

But if Individual already includes 50 GB (.99 cents on its own), then I would assume they won’t charge you the full $2.99 for upgrading to 200 GB. Maybe $1.99.

 

[Brenster]

Yeah our family uses 330GB between 3 of us (me, my wife, and my mother in law). Device backups, photo libraries, iCloud storage, years of iMessages - really adds up!

We'll be getting the premier anyway. <shrug> But I can't imagine we're that far from normal.

Similar numbers to my own family. Pay for 2GB iCloud and that covers 372GB of photos, files, device backups for my household of 3 plus my parents. Love having my entire photo library going back to everything I imported in iPhoto/eMac G4 available to me on phone, iPad and ATV 4K.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned: Anyone who is already paying for a mag subscription (yes, some of us do) that is a part of Apple News. I'm currently paying for Barrons which I will quit and take on a bundle. I come out ahead as well as get much more storage (now have the 200gb which I've had for years and never gotten close to filling). Priced 'per/day' the bundles don't seem too bad...I exercise every day and will definitely give the Fitness a trial. Don't understand all of the fuss about storage....once you have your systems backed up and some space for synching/sharing photos I don't get it...the prices of HD's and SSDs are so low I don't understand why anyone would want the speed constraints and 'rental' of online storage as opposed to at-home backups (and leaving encrypted copies at work or with family and friends). I've never expected Apple to supply me with Free/Cheap/Subsidized on line storage. Prefer to 'own/physically posses' critical backups. Especially photos and videos. Maybe just old-fashioned.....actually liked the old 'e-World' and 'MacMe (?).

Currently on a free 6 month trial of News+ courtesy of my mobile carrier. Will be carrying on with the subscription though as News+ is cheaper than individual digital subscriptions to Time, The Atlantic & BBC Music. Also pay for 2 digital subscriptions to UK broadsheet newspapers over and above what I get out of News+.

Give me a break!!!

Nobody is forcing anybody to sign up for anything. Oh boo-freaking-hoo, none of the three quite simple options fit your needs. Guess what, they fit other people’s needs (posts in pretty much every thread about the bundles). Apple is not canceling the existing a la carte options, so you can still use those and not pay more to get services you don’t want. Consider this a non-event, keep using the services you’re using and stop the freaking entitled belly-aching.

There are much bigger things going on in the world that you should be more concerned with than whether or not Apple is catering to your self-centered, very specific needs when it comes to their services.

Well said. No one is forcing anyone to buy any of the Apple One bundles. If people are happier a la carte, stay a la carte. Happier with free alternatives (Google Photos free storage, Spotify free tier, own hard drives for backups, news via Facebook etc) be my guest.

Currently on:

Apple Music Family Membership £14.99
iCloud 2TB £6.99
Total £21.98

Once trials expire, I was planning on continuing News+ and TV+ (We all loved TMS, For All Mankind, Defending Jacob & Central Park ), so

AM FM £14.99
ICloud 2TB £6.99
News+ £9.99
TV+ £4.99
Total £36.96

With the Premiere bundle I get all of the above plus Arcade (nice to have, tried it for a couple of months) plus Fitness+ (wife will make use of yoga workouts) all for £29.95, so £7.01 less than what I would be paying for the 4 services I’d be paying for anyway? I’m in.

 

[rforno]

When Apple proves it can host a efficient, standards-based cloud service that rarely experiences problems or outages, and stops charging insane amounts for tiny increases in cloud space like it does for RAM, I might become interested in iCloud Drive. Until then, hard pass.

If Apple made Apple One services ala-carte, I'd also be interested. I have no interest in Apple Arcade yet they're forcing it on everyone across all packages.

 

[Apple cake]

Apple is good at convincing people that they need it if in reality they just merely want it not need it.

 

[amartinez1660]

There you've done it, Apple You've created a scheme where nothing is perfect and nobody is happy. You've created a package plan that is designed to benefit yourself which by default means it does not benefit your customers.

I'm sure Apple has the data to know how customers use their services and what kind of bundles would make sense to save customers some money. But saving customers money means Apple making less. NEVER!

It is a sure bet that nobody uses all these services forcing customers to pay for something they don't want. In my case, the main service I use is News+. I have a 200GB iCloud plan. And I use Apple TV+. Will never game and won't use the fitness app. I use TIDAL to get my music in hi-res. TIDAL has a generous family plan. So I will continue to pay $17.97 a month for the three things I use vs. having to pay $29.99. Epic Fail.

On another note. For those of you needing more iCloud. $9.99 for 2TB is a rip off. A 2TB drive costs $65 and you own it for life. Why pay someone $120 a year, every year to rent that much space? Learn to use a NAS. You can get a 2 bay Synology NAS with 4TB of storage in RAID 5 for backup for $600. In five years of iCloud savings the NAS is paid for and you have double the space. Back up your phones and iPads to your hard drive. Store your photos on the NAS. You have access to your files from anywhere. A NAS is the way to go. Save yourself from the hefty Apple tax.

The issue with the bundle is that it’s an all or nothing deal and using any third party redundant service (storage, music, movies) makes it a lot less of a deal. The only arguable one is TV+ since it did try to set itself further apart with its exclusive shows... so myself getting the bundle I’ll have everything plus still Netflix and Prime. Maybe if one day Apple Music adds HiFi audio it would make sense to you.

But on the numbers side with the premium tier for some here, just adding a few extra cents or a couple of bucks to what they were already paying would bring the 2TB service bundled together plus a lot of other stuff (you could then argue that the 2TB was a free upgrade), but let’s still assume $10 a month.

- Who pays the electricity bill that the NAS will be using for those 5 years (and more) while its paying itself?
- Who adds an integrated “back up now” or auto backup online on iOS for that NAS (if I live in Canada and go to the US, can I backup my phone via the iTunes backup at least?)
- Is that drive 100% guaranteed to last those 5+ years? Or do you need a bit of RAID redundancy (whence 2 or three 2TB drives). And again if I’m outside and the thing dies, who replaces it for me so I can still access it?
- Rare use case but it speaks of what’s possible: if I go to the Apple store and get a new phone (either next model or repair related), give the previous one back, can I just type in my Apple ID, set it up, then type the “NAS credentials” to start getting the photos or anything needed?

I have no clue about how a NAS works but if it starts adding extra steps then it’s probably not for me or wouldn’t use it for iOS things and more like a big storage of sorts for work related.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Similar numbers to my own family. Pay for 2GB iCloud and that covers 372GB of photos, files, device backups for my household of 3 plus my parents. Love having my entire photo library going back to everything I imported in iPhoto/eMac G4 available to me on phone, iPad and ATV 4K.



Currently on a free 6 month trial of News+ courtesy of my mobile carrier. Will be carrying on with the subscription though as News+ is cheaper than individual digital subscriptions to Time, The Atlantic & BBC Music. Also pay for 2 digital subscriptions to UK broadsheet newspapers over and above what I get out of News+.



Well said. No one is forcing anyone to buy any of the Apple One bundles. If people are happier a la carte, stay a la carte. Happier with free alternatives (Google Photos free storage, Spotify free tier, own hard drives for backups, news via Facebook etc) be my guest.

Currently on:

Apple Music Family Membership £14.99
iCloud 2TB £6.99
Total £21.98

Once trials expire, I was planning on continuing News+ and TV+ (We all loved TMS, For All Mankind, Defending Jacob & Central Park ), so

AM FM £14.99
ICloud 2TB £6.99
News+ £9.99
TV+ £4.99
Total £36.96

With the Premiere bundle I get all of the above plus Arcade (nice to have, tried it for a couple of months) plus Fitness+ (wife will make use of yoga workouts) all for £29.95, so £7.01 less than what I would be paying for the 4 services I’d be paying for anyway? I’m in.

I'm similar - Apple Music family, 2TB iCloud and would be getting TV+ when our 1 year runs out anyway so it's effectively only £5 extra for News, Arcade and Fitness+. At that price, I'll happily try out the new services. I doubt we'll use News but Arcade might be fun to try out and as my son gets older, could become pretty handy in a few years and Fitness+ looks very interesting for my wife as she already uses an app for Yoga workouts when she doesn't want to plan a session for herself and we both have Apple Watches already.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

The issue with the bundle is that it’s an all or nothing deal and using any third party redundant service (storage, music, movies) makes it a lot less of a deal. The only arguable one is TV+ since it did try to set itself further apart with its exclusive shows... so myself getting the bundle I’ll have everything plus still Netflix and Prime. Maybe if one day Apple Music adds HiFi audio it would make sense to you.

But on the numbers side with the premium tier for some here, just adding a few extra cents or a couple of bucks to what they were already paying would bring the 2TB service bundled together plus a lot of other stuff (you could then argue that the 2TB was a free upgrade), but let’s still assume $10 a month.

- Who pays the electricity bill that the NAS will be using for those 5 years (and more) while its paying itself?
- Who adds an integrated “back up now” or auto backup online on iOS for that NAS (if I live in Canada and go to the US, can I backup my phone via the iTunes backup at least?)
- Is that drive 100% guaranteed to last those 5+ years? Or do you need a bit of RAID redundancy (whence 2 or three 2TB drives). And again if I’m outside and the thing dies, who replaces it for me so I can still access it?
- Rare use case but it speaks of what’s possible: if I go to the Apple store and get a new phone (either next model or repair related), give the previous one back, can I just type in my Apple ID, set it up, then type the “NAS credentials” to start getting the photos or anything needed?

I have no clue about how a NAS works but if it starts adding extra steps then it’s probably not for me or wouldn’t use it for iOS things and more like a big storage of sorts for work related.

Cloud backup is very different from NAS backup. I use both, 2TB iCloud and a Synology NAS. The main thing I want iCloud for is photo and video backups of stuff taken on my iPhone. I suffered a major data loss a few years ago because my main storage hard drive failed. Lost pretty much all of 15 years worth of data. Luckily I managed to get almost all of my photos back off an old iPad using AnySync. Ironically, this data loss happened while I was speccing up a NAS but I'd delayed my purchase because bigger drives were due out any day. So these days, I want everything backed up multiple times.

I consider iCloud storage to be an incredibly cheap backup option. I just wish I'd used it earlier. A long life NAS storage will cost about $400 at a guess plus a couple of hundred minimum for the drives. Sure, technically, you can get much bigger storage for cheap but let's say you manage to get yourself a deal and have a sturdy NAS for $600. Assuming none of the drives fail and power costs are negligible, that's about $10 per month over 5 years, the same as the 2TB iCloud option. However, with iCloud, it just works, it's stored remotely so I don't have to worry about my photos in the event of a fire and I don't have to pay for all of the hardware upfront. I know there are other cloud storage backup solutions but iCloud 'just works' across all of my devices. It's really marvellous.

 

[HylianKnight]

While it's understandable that people want to be able to pick their services in these bundles, there's no advantage to Apple to offer discounts on things people are already paying for.

The whole purpose of One is to get people to buy into services they weren't considering before but will use if they have them.

Thank you. I wrote a brief post about why companies offer bundles but don’t feel like reposting it here. This sums it up.

 

[Lord Hamsa]

I've already got family music ($15) and 2TB cloud ($10). That means I'd get the other four services for a total of $5/mo. Might actually be worth it.

 

[Propine]

I can not imagine how they will enable me to listen Apple Music from one Apple ID and use iCloud from another account. On an iPhone the music library won't work, since it needs iCloud account from the same account as Apple ID. It somehow works on Mac though.

 

[MrKennedy]

But if Individual already includes 50 GB (.99 cents on its own), then I would assume they won’t charge you the full $2.99 for upgrading to 200 GB. Maybe $1.99.

One way to find out!

Though I think they'll charge the full 2.99 to go to 200gb. It's the same when you step up from the 50gb plan, they don't "discount" the increased tier.

 

[EdT]

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...

I don’t know if Apple has made a terrible move, but they have offered a service that I don’t have any interest in paying for. In many areas I am in the minority: I don’t like anyone’s music streaming service, Apple, Spotify or anything else. My workout preferences are not to do a group activity or competition and certainly not to share that information with companies that use the data to sell stuff to me I don’t need or even worse package and (supposedly) anonymize that data and sell it to other companies. But that’s my paranoia I don’t think Apple is required to make all apps and services conform to my beliefs.

But I’m not going to pay for this service.

 

[MidwestMacGuy]

The issue with the bundle is that it’s an all or nothing deal and using any third party redundant service (storage, music, movies) makes it a lot less of a deal. The only arguable one is TV+ since it did try to set itself further apart with its exclusive shows... so myself getting the bundle I’ll have everything plus still Netflix and Prime. Maybe if one day Apple Music adds HiFi audio it would make sense to you.

But on the numbers side with the premium tier for some here, just adding a few extra cents or a couple of bucks to what they were already paying would bring the 2TB service bundled together plus a lot of other stuff (you could then argue that the 2TB was a free upgrade), but let’s still assume $10 a month.

- Who pays the electricity bill that the NAS will be using for those 5 years (and more) while its paying itself?
- Who adds an integrated “back up now” or auto backup online on iOS for that NAS (if I live in Canada and go to the US, can I backup my phone via the iTunes backup at least?)
- Is that drive 100% guaranteed to last those 5+ years? Or do you need a bit of RAID redundancy (whence 2 or three 2TB drives). And again if I’m outside and the thing dies, who replaces it for me so I can still access it?
- Rare use case but it speaks of what’s possible: if I go to the Apple store and get a new phone (either next model or repair related), give the previous one back, can I just type in my Apple ID, set it up, then type the “NAS credentials” to start getting the photos or anything needed?

I have no clue about how a NAS works but if it starts adding extra steps then it’s probably not for me or wouldn’t use it for iOS things and more like a big storage of sorts for work related.

Since you asked:

The NAS I stated will use about 30 watts and will cost about $31 a year to run. Add two more years to the calculations if you want. But after the seventh year it is $31 a year vs. $120 a year. I will add these NAS do a lot more than hold your files and data. They run a lot of software and can host a Plex server, photo sharing features, collaboration apps. The more powerful ones can work as virtual machines. Host websites, etc. Also, I now buy computers with less storage space on them becuase I know I'll offload my files to the NAS. All our home Macs have 500GB drives. Really not very much storage but we only keep files we're using on the local drive. When a project or task is done the files get moved to the NAS for archiving. This saves a lot of money on drive space which Apple charges a steep premium for. You start adding all this up and the NAS becomes a no-brainer, in my calulation.

To back up your iPhone and iPad, you need to use a Mac or PC. Then you back those up to the NAS. It is easy to use time machine on the NAS. All our family has Mac's and we each back up on time machine to the NAS. You could buy separate external drives for this task. But if that's what you've been doing, you can eliminate the expense of all those individual drives. The process is similar with a PC.

I mentioned running in RAID 5 for redundancy. I've been using mine for over six years. Never a failure, unless you include power outages. At the same time, Apple Services are not 100% guaranteed either and go down from time to time. Enterprise level drives have a very low failure rate. I also own a second NAS that is at my brother's house and my home NAS backs up everynight to the other NAS. This level of redundancy helps if my house burns down or my main NAS gets hacked!

When I'm about to replace a phone, I do two backups to iCloud before I go in and restore from the cloud at point of purchase. But more people today get their phones delivered to the home and you could avoid that step.

I did not know a lot about what a NAS can do when I got my first one. My main motivator was to consolodate all my files and photos. I have old computers going back a few decades? What a pain to find all my old files and memories. With a NAS, I save everything to that and it will be there for the rest of my life. But once I got the NAS and started playing around with it, I learned they can do so much more. I like Synology and you can learn more about all they can do here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm

 

[MidwestMacGuy]

Cloud backup is very different from NAS backup. I use both, 2TB iCloud and a Synology NAS. The main thing I want iCloud for is photo and video backups of stuff taken on my iPhone. I suffered a major data loss a few years ago because my main storage hard drive failed. Lost pretty much all of 15 years worth of data. Luckily I managed to get almost all of my photos back off an old iPad using AnySync. Ironically, this data loss happened while I was speccing up a NAS but I'd delayed my purchase because bigger drives were due out any day. So these days, I want everything backed up multiple times.

I consider iCloud storage to be an incredibly cheap backup option. I just wish I'd used it earlier. A long life NAS storage will cost about $400 at a guess plus a couple of hundred minimum for the drives. Sure, technically, you can get much bigger storage for cheap but let's say you manage to get yourself a deal and have a sturdy NAS for $600. Assuming none of the drives fail and power costs are negligible, that's about $10 per month over 5 years, the same as the 2TB iCloud option. However, with iCloud, it just works, it's stored remotely so I don't have to worry about my photos in the event of a fire and I don't have to pay for all of the hardware upfront. I know there are other cloud storage backup solutions but iCloud 'just works' across all of my devices. It's really marvellous.

Sure it just works. But my data needs are way beyond 2TB. Our family of four combind has used up 9TB of data. When you combine all our storage needs with decades of files and photos, it is easy to eat through data. Apple won't even meet our needs and unlimited storage on Dropbox or others really gets expensive. For us the NAS was the best way to go.

 

[MidwestMacGuy]

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.

You are right. My bad. You would mirror the two dirves in a two bay setup.

 

[MidwestMacGuy]

This is ridiculous. Normal people don't investigate options that take 5 years to recoup. And you fail to account for real costs like failure rates, learning, stress, remote access, troubleshooting, and device integration.

I disagree. My main motivation was to figure out how to take several decades of my old computers going back to the days of Gateway and my my first 3.1MP digital Canon camera get all those document and photos stored in one place. Now I have over 9TB of data saved I can access anywhere in the world. As I said in another post, there are other savings like buying computers with smaller hard drives since I can store files on the NAS and I address the redundancy backup issue too. Sure, a NAS is not for everyone. But a NAS is probably the ideal solution for a larger group of people than you realize.

 

[EdT]

Since you asked:

The NAS I stated will use about 30 watts and will cost about $31 a year to run. Add two more years to the calculations if you want. But after the seventh year it is $31 a year vs. $120 a year. I will add these NAS do a lot more than hold your files and data. They run a lot of software and can host a Plex server, photo sharing features, collaboration apps. The more powerful ones can work as virtual machines. Host websites, etc. Also, I now buy computers with less storage space on them becuase I know I'll offload my files to the NAS. All our home Macs have 500GB drives. Really not very much storage but we only keep files we're using on the local drive. When a project or task is done the files get moved to the NAS for archiving. This saves a lot of money on drive space which Apple charges a steep premium for. You start adding all this up and the NAS becomes a no-brainer, in my calulation.

To back up your iPhone and iPad, you need to use a Mac or PC. Then you back those up to the NAS. It is easy to use time machine on the NAS. All our family has Mac's and we each back up on time machine to the NAS. You could buy separate external drives for this task. But if that's what you've been doing, you can eliminate the expense of all those individual drives. The process is similar with a PC.

I mentioned running in RAID 5 for redundancy. I've been using mine for over six years. Never a failure, unless you include power outages. At the same time, Apple Services are not 100% guaranteed either and go down from time to time. Enterprise level drives have a very low failure rate. I also own a second NAS that is at my brother's house and my home NAS backs up everynight to the other NAS. This level of redundancy helps if my house burns down or my main NAS gets hacked!

When I'm about to replace a phone, I do two backups to iCloud before I go in and restore from the cloud at point of purchase. But more people today get their phones delivered to the home and you could avoid that step.

I did not know a lot about what a NAS can do when I got my first one. My main motivator was to consolodate all my files and photos. I have old computers going back a few decades? What a pain to find all my old files and memories. With a NAS, I save everything to that and it will be there for the rest of my life. But once I got the NAS and started playing around with it, I learned they can do so much more. I like Synology and you can learn more about all they can do here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm

I just recently bought and installed a Synology NAS. It did intimidate me and there isn’t one good place to find information about set up and using it but I made it a lot harder in my mind than it was in reality. I bought a photo scanner and I am literally loading decades worth of personal photos and over 100 years of family photographs onto a 6 tb redundant NAS system. I’ve already converted my iTunes library to FLAC and moved a copy there as well. I still use iTunes and I still have iMatch (or whatever their cloud based backup of music is called now) but albums keep disappearing from my iTunes library, and the CD’s they came from are buried down in storage and Apple support doesn’t have any answers as to why individual songs from an album or entire albums disappear.

I thought most things would be a lot more complicated than they ended up being. The problem I am having right now is adding names and descriptions to old photos. The facial recognition software on Photo Station isn’t working well and I may have to go to a 2 step process: scan it into a temp folder on my Mac, enter the names/descriptions using Photo, then export them to the NAS.

And Plex was really easy and doesn’t need a NAS except for the size of audio or video files. I’ve been pretty happy with the combination of iMac/NAS/Plex.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Sure, a NAS is not for everyone.

There you have it. iCloud *is* for everyone and is more than enough space with the easiest set up on the market, which is why it's good value. For you, it is not, but your first comment was talking as if for *most* people, it's bad and nobody is happy:

There you've done it, Apple You've created a scheme where nothing is perfect and nobody is happy. You've created a package plan that is designed to benefit yourself which by default means it does not benefit your customers.

Specifically, it's a minority of people, like you, that are unhappy. For most people, particularly families who already have things like Apple Music Family and a 2TB iCloud support, it's a really appealing up-sell to get all of the other features that people wouldn't necessarily have got on their own. You've got to recognise that *you* are not the target market for this. Not everything Apple produces is made for you. There's a good reason why my Apple computers are about ten years old now; I stopped being their target market. I was pissed at first but I got over it.

 

[Xenious]

iTunes Match is part of Apple Music

Is there a way to prevent the Match feature from invoking while subscribing? I'm an old die hard and want to sync my files directly for music to my devices but I wouldn't mind streaming access to the rest of the catalog.

 

[jbachandouris]

I'm already paying for the 200GB family storage plan. I want Apple Music but I almost never stream music as I have XM radio in the car. My son uses the free versions of either Pandora or Spotify.

 

[compwiz1202]

What about those of us who pay for Apple Music once at year for $99 or less? It doesn’t make sense for me to pay monthly, when I am already saving money paying yearly versus the yearly cost paid monthly.

Same with what about people who get an Apple service included with another service like VZW gives AM for free. I cannot find an answer anywhere. Will they discount the AM part of the bundle off of the total like Disney does? If you have D+ through VZW but have the whole D+ Hulu E+ bundle they discount the price of D+. And with the free trial, what if you have some things you've free trialed and others you haven't. Will they discount the first month of One by the ones you haven't trialed yet?

 

[mtngoatjoe]

I am really looking forward to the Premier bundle! I already have to 2TB iCloud plan, but I've really wanted Apple Music and News+ for a long time (just too cheap to pay for them). I won't get a lot of use out of Arcade, but I'm hoping my daughter will like it (I'm so tired of the games she plays with all the stupid ads). My wife has an Apple Watch, so I'll join her in Fitness+ (and may buy a watch myself after saving my pennies for a while).

 

[compwiz1202]

Was really excited until I saw the family plan still only had 200 GB...wtf apple. The article says I can upgrade the storage. Anyone have a price on Family plan with 2 TB? a month

Yea this is the other thing they poorly explain. Do you add more on top or do you swap out to a higher one and pay the difference on top of the bundle?

 

[jamcgahey]

So I understand the argument that the purpose for these bundles are to get people to try Apple services that they normally wouldn't try. My argument is that they should offer a choice of those lesser-used services. For instance: Arcade or News+. Neither I am willing to pay for separately, but if I can get a package deal I would love to try out News+. Unless News+ is more popular than I thought? That or it may cost Apple too much money to offer it in the lower Family Bundle...