I subscribe to Apple One Premier a an annual cost of $455.40 because I already exceed the storage limits of the other plans. The monthly cost is $37.95.
I don’t use Arcade, TV+, Music, Fitness, News, etc. I don’t keep much in iCloud. I pay $0.99 a month for 50GB of iCloud. I feel fine. Not ripped off at all.
I don’t have a choice regarding iCloud storage. I have all my iWork documents, Apple email, and Photos in iCloud. I don’t see a way around this if I’m going to use their devices and want my stuff (and my wife’s) synced and stored safely.
I need very little synced between my Mac (1 TB SSD) and my iPhone (256 GB). I back up my iPhone to iCloud and to my Mac. And I make sure everything on my Mac is safely backed up with Time Machine backups to an old Mac mini, Carbon Copy Cloner backups to a collection of external drives, and an offsite backup to the Arq Premium service. Obviously, our perceived needs differ quite a bit.
I’m syncing with my iPad and iPhone. The biggest issue that my wife needs iCloud storage. We are not technically proficient enough (especially my wife) to deal with using just Macs and using all of the backup and cloning methods.
Notwithstanding any of those issues, MS sure seems like a much better “value.” And, yes, I’m aware of all of the other issues in using Windows, etc., lack of a mobile phone and lack of a watch. I used MS on Dell computers for 25 years.
I’ve always felt it was a shame when Apple stopped making their Time Capsule device back in 2018. It was a relatively inexpensive and quite simple Time Machine solution.
My brother still uses a Microsoft One Drive subscription on the Mac that he bought after he retired.
Microsoft Office 365 is an amazing deal. The storage on top of really good apps that are the standards in business. But you don’t have to rely on Apple stuff and pay their prices, there are ways around all of it, it’s just iCloud is easy.
OneDrive also works great on Macs, better than it does on Windows IMO. (On Windows 11, MS is really trying to integrate it into the OS. To the point that I deleted it from my Windows machines it was so annoying.)
you could have stopped right here. yes you are getting ripped off. AppleTV, News, Arcade, and Fitness are garbage. I wouldn’t even pay for Music but I can see how some people like it. Music only has value at $5 per month. I have a Nextcloud server for cloud storage but I do pay for Apple storage for my photos. $9.99 for the 2TB is all they are going to get from me.
My entire family uses Music and we share the 2TB iCloud plan. My wife and I use Apple fitness quite a bit (we love it), Apple+ has a lot of great shows, and I just figured out how to block ads from AppleNews which makes it almost usable.
For $50 CAD for a family of four I don’t think that’s bad considering the value we get for it. Splitting that up across different providers would almost certainly cost more and be more hassle.
The bundles are great if you use a few services anyway and can share w other people, but just storage - as others have mentioned….might be worth “un bundling”.
I use Apple Music, Apple TV+ and the storage for me and my wife. Storage for photos only will not work for us. I have a lot of Pages and Numbers documents. I never use Fitness+ or Arcade. I use News only because it is part of the package.
Perhaps I’m confused about the options. I want Music and AppleTV+, and I need a minimum of 1TB storage for documents, photos, and email. Is there a plan that will give that to me for less?
Ideally, what I want is this:
That would save me $360/year by eliminating Arcade, Fitness, and News.
I suppose one option is to buy music instead of streaming and eliminating Apple TV+. That way, all I’d need would be the storage plan.
Anyone here purchase instead of streaming their music?
Well, for starters you’re comparing an Office oriented set of services/apps with storage to a very different offering from Apple. Fitness+, News+, Music, etc is quite a bit different.
That said I agree that the Microsoft offering is a bargain. And I do wish Apple offered a 500GB tier of storage. I’ve been well served with the 250GB tier, using around 200GB. If Apple offered 500GB I’d be a bit more free to store more and do less pruning. Not sure that’s a good thing. But, in any case, I do think they are missing by not providing another tier in that gap.
I pay iCloud and Apple Music full time. I sub into AppleTV+ 4-6 months a year to watch shows then cancel for awhile to watch content on other services. In general I find that it works well to focus on a service for a month or so binging the shows I want to watch and then moving on. So easy to subscribe and cancel!
No, I don’t need the additional stuff. I’d be fine with a 1-2TB storage plus Apple Music plan and reduce the cost, but alas, I don’t such an option. I can do without everything else. However, I do enjoy music but I can’t find a good way to:
Buy music from Apple
Easily stream purchased music to all of my HomePods and in my car. I know this must be possible but it sure isn’t obvious.
We have a thread discussing that, link below. Not that Apple Music is a bad deal, it’s actually pretty good (my problem with it is the apps). Purchasing music means more time managing it, so unless that is something you want to get into, it’s probably not worth it in this day and age.
So that would be a total of 27€-ish per month, which is possibly cheaper than your current Apple One subscription (not so sure about exchange rates, sorry about the currency conversion!).
