Do You Use It? Apple Services

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1

Much has been made in recent years of the importance and continued growth of Apple’s Services category in the company’s financial results, and Apple recently raised prices on several of its services, causing some people to reevaluate which services are worth the cost.

So I’m curious: which Apple services do you pay for and use? If you subscribe through Apple One, select both it and the individual services you actually use.

With Apple Music, iCloud+, and Apple One, which plan do you have? And again, even if you use Apple One, please fill out the plan-specific questions for Apple Music and iCloud+ so I have all that data together.

For instance, I currently have an Apple One Premier subscription, and I am happy to pay for 2TB of iCloud+ and a family plan for Apple Music. Apple TV+ is on the edge for me, and I may drop it soon. Even though I get them as part of Apple One Premier, I never use Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, or Apple News+.

Which Apple services do you pay for and use?
  • Apple Arcade
  • Apple Fitness+
  • Apple Music
  • Apple News+
  • Apple TV+
  • iCloud+
  • Apple One
  • None
0 voters
If you subscribe to Apple Music, which plan do you have?
  • Student
  • Individual
  • Family
0 voters
If you subscribe to iCloud+, how much storage do you pay for?
  • 50 GB
  • 200 GB
  • 2 TB
  • 6 TB
  • 12 TB
0 voters
If you subscribe to Apple One, which plan do you have?
  • Individual
  • Family
  • Premier
0 voters
2 Likes
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Adam,

If I subscribe to Apple One, do I also answer the specific questions related to Apple Music and iCloud+ as opposed to just checking them off on the primary question?

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Good timing. With the recent rate hike, I just canceled my Apple One sub (it renewed Nov 5).

I had subscribed to Apple Music for $10/month for years – since I bought the original HomePod – but I literally have used it for only a few hours in all that time. I always thought the idea sounded great, but the HomePod was such a flop for me and Apple took so long to fix the major bugs (and many still remain) that I never used Music or the HomePod.

(Literally 99% of my HomePod use is “Siri, shut up!” when HomePod starts talking randomly thinking I asked it something when I didn’t.) I just never listen to music. I listen to audiobooks in the car, walking the dog, yard work, and on hikes. There’s no time left for music.

When Apple TV+ came out, I got that, and I do watch some shows and like it. I mainly use it to watch Major League Soccer (which is an extra subscription price, but there is a discount if you already pay for ATV+). I’m not crazy about the ATV+ price increases, but they do make sense considering the way the library has grown.

(I actually like that ATV+ is small. I can’t find anything on Netflix and I’m decades behind on shows there. Even on ATV+ I’m still on season 2 of Ted Lasso and when I go to Netflix and discover a popular show that interested me is now ten years old with 100+ episodes, it overwhelms me and I don’t start watching it.)

Apple Arcade sounded awesome, but I never really used it. I was disappointed with a few of the games that I downloaded. They were 1GB+ downloads and I bored within 5 minutes of “play.” They were no different from the other games on iPhone I don’t play. To me the perfect game (especially on phone) is Tetris. Waiting 5 minutes for a car driving simulation just to launch and load up pretty much uses up all the spare time I have for game play!

When Apple One, which cost me about $20/month, jumped in price, I looked at what I was using and said, “No way.” All I was using is TV+ and iCloud – that’s not worth $20+/month!

I wouldn’t mind News+, but you can only get that at the premium sub. News+ should be a $3-$5 add-on, not $10. I’d never use Fitness+.

So Apple stupidly lost me as a customer. I had inertia and didn’t mind leaving the Apple One sub on before, but by drawing my attention to price (which was already high for what I used), they now made me cancel and save about $10 a month!

Now my only worry is that iCloud pricing jumps from $3 for 200GB to $10 for 1TB. There’s nothing in between, which is bizarre. I have lots of iOS devices and right now I use 180GB for backup and photo storage. No way am I paying $10 for 1TB I’ll never use. If Apple doesn’t change the storage pricing, I’d probably get rid of some older devices (or just not back them up on iCloud) so that I don’t exceed the 200GB. That strikes me as stupid on Apple’s part – each device I have should come with at least 10GB of free storage space, not just 5GB per Apple ID. By quibbling for pennies, Apple will make me hesitant to buy new hardware!

Not sure what will happen when Vision Pro comes out. Will that require iCloud storage or will it be more like a Mac where you back it up yourself?

4 Likes
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Two weeks ago we were on a family plan of Apple One Premier.

The price increase prompted me to look at how much we use it and I decided to cancel and go back to just a 2TB storage plan.

I’ve never used Fitness+ or Arcade and rarely AppleTV. I like Apple News but happy to roll with the free options. Whilst it offers a very comprehensive music library, I find Apple Music enormously frustrating and I doubt I’ll miss it as I rarely venture outside my own music.

Ironically, the money I saved on the Apple services has gone into a new service for something else.

1 Like
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Yes, please, so we’re keeping all the details together and I don’t have to try to back out the fact that you subscribe to Apple One Individual, say, and what that means for Apple Music and iCloud+ plans.

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It was outside the scope of the poll, but since I still like to buy music, I subscribe to iTunes Match. I do not subscribe to Apple Music.

At the moment, I buy most of my music in physical CD form from Amazon, though I occasionally buy digitally through the iTunes store or other sources.

Amazon has an interesting “AutoRip” feature that automatically adds downloadable MP3 versions of many CDs and vinyl records to your Amazon Music account at no extra charge when you buy the CD/vinyl through Amazon. I’ve found Amazon’s MP3s to be of high enough quality that usually I don’t feel the need to import the CD manually using a lossless format, though sometimes I will do so for particularly well recorded music.

Also, when you use the otherwise awful Amazon Music app to download purchases, it can import the MP3s automatically into your iTunes library, and then iTunes Match quickly syncs them to your iTunes cloud library.

5 Likes
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The only Apple Services I use are iCloud+, which is necessary to fully benefit from the Apple ecosystem, and iTunes Match. I have zero interest in any other services - I consider Apple to be at its best as a hardware company and the services seemed to have been introduced to appease Wall Street investors due to their concerns with the cyclical nature of iPhone sales.

The only products I love from Apple are the ARM-based Macs, which are truly wonderful. I use a fairly recent iPhone but don’t particularly like iOS (or FaceID) for enough reasons to write a small book (despite this, I will never own an Android device). I love doing development work on the Mac and using TeXShop to prepare some scientific documents.

I use the iPhone for simple things so very rarely buy apps and I have no presence on any social media. I don’t expect to ever purchase any VR/AR products, despite their seeming technical excellence. Public civility is already harmed enough by people walking around with their faces in their phones, can one imagine the dystopia we would have with people wearing one of these things, even if they evolve into spectacles?

1 Like
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None. The only service I could see myself using is iCloud+ for extra storage space.

The other services are IMHO garbage. I can’t stand soccer and I’m not interested in space cowboys shooting up Russians on the moon. I’m not into hiphop radio stations. I prefer to own rather than rent my music. I prefer to store locally and play my music than depend on cellular and pray to get it — I travel a lot and data roaming abroad is rarely great. That’s why my iPhone has a gargantuan amount of storage.

I resent the fact that although Apple keeps increasing the base storage on iPhones, it has left the “free” iCloud tier at paltry 5GB. Especially when the same Apple seems hell bent on pushing everybody and their dog towards iCloud for stuff we used to do locally. I’m not at all feeling like giving in to this little extortion scheme. It will be a long time before I pay for getting more than 5GB. I already pay several thousand every year in Apple tax for the hardware, now you give me the services you claim I should be using with it. I aint paying extra.

IMHO “services” is a Wall Street thing. They like it because to the stock folks it looks like free money (a first indication consumers will be the suckers) and they’ve always been worried with just hardware sales Apple would be doomed (Apple always seems doomed :man_facepalming:) . But from a user perspective, meh. I have yet to meet the person who tells me any of Apple’s “services” are actually great. Their usual best selling point is integration. Well duh, only the keeper of the walled garden can do that — and must. But reliable? Well documented? Scalable? Meh. I can invest in lots of other companies doing even better than Apple. But I can’t get a better MBP than the one from Apple. So what I want from Apple is not dividends, but an actually great product. They’d need to do a whole lot better to get me to consider any of their “services”. Let the Wall Streeters enjoy it, along with their corporate virus checkers. :laughing:

1 Like
9

I subscribed to Apple One Premier about a year ago. The price increases spurred me to reexamine what I was paying for, and I decided ultimately to drop back to iCloud+ at the 200 GB level, to Apple TV+, and Apple News+.

Apple Music was nice to have, but I didn’t really use it enough to justify the cost. I had it primarily to make it easier to play music on my HomePods. I’d rather save the money and just stream music to them from my phone or computer using AirPlay. Or maybe I’ll sign up for iTunes Match again.

The other stuff included with Apple One Premier, like Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness+, was largely unused. My family is still well under 200 GB total for iCloud storage, so the large quota included with Apple One Premier wasn’t much value to us.

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Sorry for all the “me, too” comments, but I think Simon laid it out well.

Since I’m fairly stable at about 3 GB in iCloud, it looks like I can postpone paying for extra storage for a while.

This. I thought 5 GB was low when it was introduced, even though I don’t need it. It was like a bad April Fool’s joke that hasn’t ended.

Absolutely, both hardware and software. I don’t know enough about hardware to criticize it intelligently, but I do know the software has a lot of room for improvement. Why a company with a billion dollars cash does not make Mail a better program is a mystery.

1 Like
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I currently only have Apple Music. It includes most of my owned music from when I had Match including many albums that Apple Music/iTunes store doesn’t have, and the playlists I set up on Match. The streaming part is siloed well away from my real library and is only on the Catalina mini. Music app knows about Apple Music service but not my files, iTunes (via Retroactive) knows about my library but not the service. My slow* connection is a problem–I have to download the music first or there can be stutters. But at least the music does usually download properly. It’s a nuisance that Home sharing won’t share Apple Music to my Sierra mac, but AirFoil does well enough.

I also had TV and Arcade for awhile, and combined them into a One package (individual) but soon canceled everything but Music.

There are some things I’d like to watch on Apple TV. But it simply does not work on slow connections. It doesn’t stream reliably and it can’t download for later–it drops the connection every few minutes or even seconds. When I got my iPad Air 5, I hoped it would work better since it has no hosts files, Snitch, or other potential blocks. Nope. Never got a single thing to either download or stream on the ipad. Other streaming services such as PBS, BBC, and Hoopla manage to stream just fine though they need to buffer for awhile before starting. But no stutters.

I wanted to like Arcade, and liked a lot of the games I downloaded. But I mostly play short puzzle games in between other things, and the dreadfully long wait to open an app while it shouts it’s arcade banner at me took longer than the time available to play a game. I’d rather just buy a game that doesn’t waste my time (well, yeah, the point of games is to waste time but…)

iCloud+ came along for the ride with One, but between the slow connection and my complete distrust of iCloud, was never part of the cost analysis.

I’ve never had any interest in the News app. I have rss–if something doesn’t have an rss feed, it doesn’t exist. (I got over FOMO when I was eleven and tried to make an outline of every subject that existed.)

  • ‘Slow’ connection is 1.5 Mbit DSL down, half that up. Connection itself works fine with non-apple apps. Apple stuff is a crap shoot on both Sierra (imac) and Catalina (2018 mini), and on the ipads (assorted vintages). The iOS App store is usually less unreliable than the other apps.
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I’m not subscribing to any of the listed services, but my wife subscribes to the $1/mo storage upgrade (I think that’s the 50GB tier). I have no such need, since I make backups to my Mac via USB and keep very little data of any kind in iCloud.

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I do, and will continue to, subscribe to Premier. All my family (four folks) use Music. My wife also use Fitness+. I use AppleTV+. We all use News+. And we all backup our iPhones to the cloud. I do not think they are garbage as others do. Well, except Arcade. No time for that stuff.

5 Likes
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I have a family subscription to Apple One Premier for three of us in a family group - it used to be four, but my daughter left the family group earlier this year. We all use Music (both for syncing libraries, listening on the go, and for listening on our Sonos system), we all use TV+ at some point or other (me more than them - IMO there are a lot of very good series on TV+ - Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Severance, and I’ve also watched For All Mankind and The Morning Show despite the shows becoming a little “soapy” over the last couple of seasons.) I use Fitness+ - just checking, I’ve done 896 workouts in the almost three years since it started, so I think I am getting my money’s worth.

I also use News and the News+ subscription basically pays for itself, as I have been able to drop a subscription to The New Yorker magazine that would cost as much as News+ standalone, but I get the bonus of reading other magazine articles and most articles on the Wall Street Journal that would otherwise be behind a paywall.

Our three person family group uses 238.7 GB of storage, mostly for photos storage and device backups, though I also use iCloud Drive for some documents as well. While iCloud Drive obviously can be troublesome for people, so far - knock wood - those issues have not happened to me. Perhaps the biggest reason is that with Advanced Data Protection, I like the privacy; that not even Apple can access my files (unlike, for example, Dropbox, One Drive, or Google Drive.)

When the price increased again this month, I looked again at the individual components to see if we could save money - both if we had just the iCloud storage that we needed (2 TB for the family), TV+ that we turned on for the months that we actively used it, Fitness+, Music family, without Arcade and News+, plus pricing it all out for individual users as needed (iCloud Drive 200 GB for each of us), including replacing Fitness+ for me with something else like Peloton, Music with some other service like Spotify, etc. Apple One Premier turns out still to save money.

3 Likes
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I haven’t found any of the services useful enough to subscribe.

I can manage with the stingy 5 GB iCloud space. I prefer to keep my photos backed up locally, and I’m not a high volume photographer anyway.

Messages I mostly delete, but those I wish to save I download and save with iMazing, which keeps space free.

I use iCloud to occasionally store files until I can transfer them to their final destination, which is never iCloud.

I’m a dinosaur who prefers to own his music, and I buy CDs still for the new music I want, along with an occasional MP3 single. I appreciate the AutoRip that Amazon has on some discs for its convenience. I can store all the music I want on my devices.

I find I don’t really play games on my iOS devices much. Occasional solitare, DoodleJump, chess/checkers/backgammon, but that’s about it. Apple Arcade doesn’t make sense for me.

There are some good shows on Apple TV, but not enough that it’s worth subscribing for me. Maybe someday I’ll binge some of them after I get a new device and take advantage of the 3 free months then cancel, but I don’t see enough value to pay for it.

News+? Also no. If I could actually read some of the newspapers and magazines, in particular (for me) the Wall Street Journal, it might be different, but the last I checked it was only for a subset of articles, so again, not worth it.

I’m generally very opposed to becoming someone’s “permanent” source of cash flow with subscriptions, so I avoid them as much as possible in general.

Kevin

1 Like
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We’ve been using Apple Arcade at our house since we got a free subscription some time ago, but we are considering canceling it because the price is going up and we are using it less (I have to confirm if the kids are playing Arcade games or not).

We go back and forth on Apple TV+, turning it on to watch a few new shows, then turning it back off when we’re run out of things to watch (there haven’t been that many that appealed to us, but the ones that do appeal have tended to be very good).

We also subscribe to iTunes Match because we have amassed a pretty substantial library over the years and we like to actually own copies of our music so we can burn them on a CD for the car (yes, our car is old) or put them on MP3 players the kids use (there are times/places where an iPhone is not appropriate/allowed, but an MP3 player is fine). And I just don’t like the idea of losing access to a song/artist because of some falling out with the streaming service.

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I actually have three individual subscriptions to iCloud+ at the 200GB tier. It kind of happened organically, first my wife, then me, then our youngest. There may be a cheaper way to accomplish this, but I can’t be bothered to figure out what it would be…

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The only reason why I have 50gb of iCloud+ is because I can’t figure out how to remove some of the stuff stored there to get back under 2gb. Maybe it’s stuff from my wife’s devices.

My experience with iCloud synching is a disaster. Contacts synching produced 44 copies of each contact with no way to clean up the iCloud content. Calendar synching has resulted in similar duplication. And trying to use iCloud backup was even more frustrating: Stuff got moved around my hard drive and deleted, which is NOT WHAT I UNDERSTAND BACKUP TO MEAN.

I don’t use Apple News because I find the ads annoying (it’s one thing that Google does better), so I’m certainly not -paying for- News+. With almost 2 months worth of ripped CDs, I’m not interested in Apple Music, even the new Classical service. (But I wish Apple would use the information from Classical to -fix- the total mess that classical metadata is for ripped CDs. I might be willing to pay for Apple Classical if it did that.) Now Music.app on the Mac is much less reliable now than it was several years ago, but that’s a different topic. No interest in Arcade or Fitness. Therefore in aggregate, no interest in Apple One.

1 Like
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I pay for iCloud+ at the 200Gb level though annoyingly I use just 52Gb. Most of it is family photos and videos and Apple is cheaper than Flickr. I also subscribe to iTunes Match so that my music is available on all devices. I’d be happy to ditch this if someone could point me to a lower cost alternative. As for the other services, they provide nothing that I need and cannot get elsewhere without cost.

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I pay for the lowest tier of iCloud+; I’m currently using just under 5GB so I’m right on the edge of needing extra storage, and I also use the custom email domain feature.

I tried out News+ after my iPhone purchase this fall but didn’t find it all that compelling. I tried Apple Music a long time ago but didn’t like how it interacted with my music library so won’t be doing that again.