Apple One: One Shady Subscription Model to Rule Them All

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Just got the notice on my iPhone that Apple is increasing their Apple One subscription price. I don’t like it, but I feel like I’m stuck with it.

How did I get here? It all started when iTunes Match came out and I subscribed. It was glorious. Not only could I listen to my music from anywhere, I could listen to my music anywhere - the music I’d imported that Apple had magically matched to better quality versions of the same songs. With my large library this subscription could do all that for $25 a year? Sign me up!

Then I needed a little bit more than the 5GB of free storage Apple was offering. Okay. Fair enough. I’ll subscribe to that. Everything’s moving to the cloud anyway…

Then Apple Music gave me three free months and I decided leasing songs was going to be cheaper than buying them over the long run. I let the subscription renew.

Same kind of thing happened with the Apple TV. Free trial, I liked it well enough, I let it renew.

“Apple News will keep me informed,” I thought to myself out loud.

And so here we are.

Okay, let’s get the calculator out with the machete and cut through all this nonsense. Let’s save some money, right?

Wrong.

I hate Apple and any corporation with shady subscription models.

The price to beat is $37.95/month. Here’s what I tried to do:

Choose individual services. I don’t use Apple Arcade ($6.99/month). Ever. And, I don’t use Apple Fitness ($9.99/month). Ever. Let’s drop these and save $16.98/month. NOPE. That would bump my subscription price UP to $46.96/month because the bundle discount would disappear.

Choose a different plan. I’m on the premier plan now. It has 2TB of online storage which I’ve barely used a 1/1000th of. It has Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness which I’ve already said I don’t use. But it includes Apple TV+ and Apple News. If I back down to the Family plan ($25.95) and then add in the services I want, that’d save a little right? Let’s see… $25.95 (plan) + $9.99 (tv) + $12.99 (news) = NOPE. $48.93, still more than the price to beat.

Drop the nice-to-haves. Alright what if I cut out some of the nice-to-haves that I don’t rely on all that often. Let’s lose Apple TV and keep Apple News, and go down to the Family plan. $25.95 (plan) + $12.99 (News) = NOPE. $38.94 which is still more than I’d pay if I just stay where I’m at.

When Apple says they’re going green, it’s because they’ll be in the green with all the money people are wasting on the subscriptions they don’t want but are kind of forced into getting because of the all-or-none situation they’ve created.

Will I drop the Apple One subscription? I totally should, right? That’d show them. But in reality it wouldn’t. So I’m going to keep it. Wasteful? Yeah. Foolish of me? Yes.

But I’m hungry, Steve Jobs. I’m hungry and I’m foolish. So shut up and take my money.

By the way, anybody got any ideas on how to fill up 2 TB of storage? Digitize my large DVD collection? Re-digitize and import my large CD collection into a new music library that I can better control? Is there a way to use iCloud as a Time Machine backup solution yet?

And is Apple Arcade as dumb as it looks?