It is not a bad deal though. As someone who is shopping around for a music app now, they are all around the same price, and Apple Music is pretty good from the UI standpoint, music quality, and feature set. YouTube Music is not cheaper, it just has the added benefit of having ad free videos on YouTube. Their music service is not as good as Apple Music from what I have seen of it (but that is very much just my opinion).
TV, News, Arcade, and Fitness is a little more difficult to compare to other services because they all offer something slightly different. I think the problem here is not value, but how much you need/want those other services.
For what it’s worth, I’ve dropped off the Apple One Premier train and switched to iCloud 2 TB ($9.99/month) and Apple TV+ ($99 annual). My family really wasn’t using Fitness+ or Music - my kids and spouse prefer Spotify and I use YouTube Music (which is included in my YouTube Premium subscription). I encourage you to looking at doing something similar and ask that you please report back on your findings.
As others have noted above, the premier family plan can be worth it if you use the majority of the services.
Our two human household uses them all to varying degrees. My wife uses Fitness+ and I regularly read the New Yorker, The Walrus, Smithsonian, Canadian Geographic, and National Geographic in News+. Based on how much the separate magazine subscriptions alone would cost makes it a bargain for us.
Agree 100%. It’s expensive if you use one or two features but if you start to do a side by side comparison cost wise for each feature, it’s probably comparable or even less expensive.
The only piece that’s listed in the April 8 version of the New Yorker on the web that I don’t see in the News+ version of that issue is the ‘Goings On’ section. I don’t know how generalizable that is to every issue, but it seems like most of it is included in the News+ version.
It feels like it’s the entire magazine, but I’ve not read a print version of any of them in several years although I had digital subscriptions to both for quite a while before News+ existed.
So Verizon offers the Apple Music Family plan for $10. I don’t use Fitness at all and I use Apple News+ maybe a couple times a month. We do use Apple TV+ and of course iCloud. So I canceled Apple One and I’m purchasing the TV and iCloud for $20 a month and Apple Music through Verizon. It’s saving me almost $7 a month. Not a lot but not insignificant, every little bit helps. I also think some months I won’t purchase Apple TV+ depending on the shows available, so that could be even more savings down the road. But I do agree @Bmosbacker that I don’t feel like the pricing is fair for what you get with Apple One.
Can I remind UK MPUs that you can read 1000s of papers and magazines from here and abroad for free via you local library. In my part of Wales they use Libby, and in other parts the libraries went for Press Reader. Next door in Herefordshire they use Press Reader too. I’m a member of both library services and much prefer Press Reader. I find Libby very unintuitive. I don’t know if every county in the UK opts for exactly the same range of magazines.
That’s true in the US too, at least in my state. I just checked the two counties in my area and one uses Libby and the other uses Press Reader. Although I have never used it the service and don’t know if there are any fees involved.
Yup, I use Press Reader to read the local newspaper courtesy of my local library.
The one thing that keeps me with Apple News is that I can save long articles out to Pocket and sync them to my Kobo reader which I find to be much nicer reading experience than my iPad.
Given your current storage needs and services you use, you would probably (for now) be best switching to the Family Apple One bundle (which includes 200GB) and upgrade the storage a la carte, adding an additional 200GB for $2.99.
It’s not entirely future-proof given your current data usage, and I agree with others that there should be more granular 500GB and 1TB storage options, but for now if would meet your needs at a lower cost than your current plan. I believe it is also no more expensive than buying everything individually so long as you would want the family plan for Apple Music.
Starting to encroach on my 200GB limit, and ~115GB of that is photos.
What are peoples’ solutions for selectively/periodically moving things out of iCloud Photos? Move old stuff to another Photo Library and archive that locally? How do you hold on to favourites?
I wish there was a way for me to store everything locally and only sync, say, the last X many years of photos to iCloud. The way Apple has things set up (i.e., “Optimize Mac Storage”) is basically the opposite of what I want lol.
Heretical thought here: why do you need to keep everything in a photo library? Why can’t you just have it in folders in the pictures folder on your Mac?
I only have 56 pictures visible in my photo library and then there’s another 600 or so in the Hidden folder. Easily accessible and I don’t have to see them if I don’t want to see them. Everything else is in folders in the Pictures folder.
I actually just picked up PowerPhotos a few days ago to help me with this problem! I had some old photo libraries kicking around that I wanted to consolidate, which is why mine has ballooned to 115GB rather suddenly.