Originally published at: Do You Use It? Apple Services See Widely Varying Popularity - TidBITS
The results of our poll asking which Apple services TidBITS readers use are in, with iCloud+ proving the most popular by far, followed by a surprisingly strong showing from Apple TV+. Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness+ brought up the rear, but remember, TidBITS readers aren’t representative of the overall Apple audience.
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I missed the poll, but I have NZ’s version of Apple One, which includes all except Apple News (News not available in NZ, yet, hopefully), and All but 1 feature of iTunes Match is available with Apple Music. Thats the promise of uploaded music always being available without DRM. While Apple Music is DRM heavy, that is any content not specifically purchased in the Music store will be DRM’ed, including uploaded music that has been matched. This is the main reason why I still subscribe to iTunes Match, while also using Apple Music through Apple One.
I AM DONE WITH ICLOUD. Ever since reloading Sonoma onto my laptop, calendar and reminders no longer sync. And while trying to resolve this, I wiped out the calendar on my phone, because SOME BLEEPING IDIOT AT APPLE THINKS THAT WHATEVER IS IN ICLOUD MUST OVERWRITE WHAT’S ON A DEVICE.
Furthermore, Apple’s support for iCloud problems has been basically a collection of broken promises. I was promised a response on the previous problem I had with Contacts duplicating every contact in my list 4 times on iCloud, and then having that crap back-sync to my phone. I got to the 2nd tier of support. “We’ll get back to you.” Never happened.
WTF is wrong with Apple these days? It used to be the few times I called Support I could depend on them being fully responsive, with callbacks/followthrough and with people who actually understood the underlying technology. Mebbe it’s that iCloud is such a disaster that no one in Apple Tech Support has any clue what’s going on.
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I like to think they represent the best of the Apple audience…
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Thanks Adam this was very helpful I do not and never will use Fitness, Arcade or News so why do I have to pay for them?
I appreciate this is intended as a summary thread rather than a discussion place but it would be so good to be able to ‘trade’ options for Apple One. I would happily trade Arcade and Fitness+ for another 6Tb of iCloud. Give each service a value and choose x number of value points for your subscription.
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If you choose the basic Apple One it is possible to add another 200 GB of iCloud storage separately. I have 400 GB that way.
Wait, really? How do you do that?
Step 1 subscribe or downgrade to Apple One with 200 GB. Step 2 subscribe to iCloud+ for another 200 GB. If I remember well it was very easy, just not obvious. Both with the same Apple ID of course. Maybe the (Dutch) settings are visible here: Tresorit Web Downloader
We really only want the 2TB iCloud, Apple TV and Music. Ala cart pricing before taxes is barely under $37 which is the price of the bundle.
The Apple tax does get tiresome as it is so pervasive.
On the hardware side, the SSD upgrade prices are truly extreme. I have used OWC for memory and drives since they started which allowed for truly custom equipment that did not sink the bank account.
My 2018 model Mac mini was custom configured with 8GB or Apple memory, 10Gb ethernet, the 2TB SSD and the Intel i7 cpu. I changed out the 8GB Apple memory for OWC 64GB (2 chips) that cost $372 vs Apple’s $1,400 price for the same amount of memory. The 2TB SSD was a $1,600 up charge pushing the mini to over $3,000 with sales tax and Apple Care.
The M3 Pro chips have a significant geometry change reducing memory bus speed to 150 Gb/s vs the 200 Gb/s of the M2 Pro. Moving files as server is memory intensive so I ordered a M2 Pro mini that can have only 32GB of memory, 10Gb ethernet, 2TB SSD and the upgraded processor. Military discount price with tax is $2,650 without Apple care which I will add later. This is much less expensive than the i7 mini, especially since it had OWC memory, and hopefully have more performance as a server.
I was going to suggest exactly the same thing. The two subscriptions for iCloud are additive. I discovered that by accident when I first subscribed to Apple One Premier and ended up with 4TB, which was way more than I need. My wife and I use only about 400GB combined, which is still too much for the 200+200 scheme but for Adam, it would be ideal.
I’m not at all surprised that Apple TV+ came out ahead of Apple Music in the Do you use it survey results. Apple TV+ has no rival for its content, whereas I can listen to the same song on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal or Qobuz. Personally, I’m keeping Apple TV+, even with the rate hike, as it has some of the highest-quality content and there’s always something worth streaming. I recently had a deal on Peacock for 99¢/month, and went the full year without watching a single show.
I’m a bit disappointed that there hasn’t been more interest in Apple News, which is only included in the Premier tier of Apple One. We tried Apple News for free when it first came out and then signed up for a few months, but dropped it because I just didn’t have the time to read all the magazines I’d planned to read. It didn’t take long to realize how much of the news feeds we enjoyed were only available with a paid subscription. Hence we resubscribed and later switched to Apple One Premier. Admittedly, my wife and I are news junkies, but Apple News is a really great deal for people who like to read.
Case in point, my wife has been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years. A subscription costs $10/mo, whether for the print edition, digital or both. That’s a huge chunk of the cost of Apple News right there, although talking my wife into giving up the printed copy took years. Now, she’s fully onboard. Additionally, I used to subscribe to National Geographic, Smithsonian, Scientific American and Newsweek (not all at the same time), but gave up subscribing when I just didn’t have the time to read them all and they accumulated into large stacks, waiting to be read. Now, with Apple News, I have access to all of them and more and can quickly skip them for articles of interest without feeling guilty for skipping all the rest. I really like how Apple News uses my personal interests to show my articles of particular interest from a variety of sources that I’d have never seen otherwise.
The biggest disappointment is Fitness+ which seems to be more oriented to attracting fitness freaks who like to exercise with their favorite celebrities leading the way. What I’d like to have is a personal fitness routine that’s personalized to my age, physique and personal interests, and adapted to my own rate of progress. Indeed, the fitness app on my Apple Watch uses ridiculous metrics to try to motivate me and it fails to allow for rest and recovery. Neither the fitness app nor Fitness+ even can tell me where I should begin. If it weren’t for my background, I’d be lost. I’ve read rumors that Apple is working on an AI-based fitness service - I just hope they don’t charge even more for it.
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Agreed - it’s actually the service I’m missing the most since dropping Premier.
Another ‘me too’. Whilst I didn’t read them as thoroughly as I did the print editions, there were several magazines I still enjoyed courtesy of Apple News.
Once again I’m with you. The Fitness+ routines I looked at were largely loud, brash trainers screaming faux encouragement. I don’t intend to offend in saying this, but they’re just a bit too ‘American’ for me. I’m a little more ‘low gloss’ and laid back.
I understand some may enjoy this but a variety of routines or programs targeted at specific age groups and fitness levels would be great. It would be easy to go down an age level if yours was too easy or go up an age level if it was too hard. I’d be happy to see things like swim or run programs (0-5k etc).
I think Fitness + has incredible potential but it needs broader appeal.
Oh, fascinating. I’ll have to think about this a bit. What might work is keeping my current Apple One Premier subscription but adding an iCloud+ 200 GB subscription (so I have 2.2 TB but only 300 GB used) and then downgrading to Apple One Family, thus changing my total to (400 GB available and 300 GB used). I’d worry that doing it in the wrong order could confuse iCloud significantly, if I ever had more data than capacity.
I would think Apple would correct this eventually, of course they are probably more interested in having subscribers across multiple services (for now).
Sidebar comment: One thing that frustrates me is that you cannot do one-time purchases of movies or series on AppleTV+. It can only be done on the Apple TV app, which is not confusing at all. 
Somehow Amazon and YouTube managed to keep everything in one interface. If they created a portal to buy movies and series it would be a simple matter to add a pop-up warning before commit just as Amazon does. The credit card data is already there.
Funny you should ask:
Note that affects only Apple TV. Nothing changes yet on other Apple hardware.