There was a lot of new Apple services announced today, so I wanted to give you some of my initial thoughts. I’ll dig in a bit deeper in the next couple of days.
### Apple TV+
I am more impressed with Apple’s lineup of original content after being at the event and hearing from the people involved in making these shows a reality. Hearing from Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and Ron Howard was exceptional.
Of course, watching these shows will be the true measure of how good they are, but there is no doubt Apple has assembled some of the best talent in the world to make this a success. While not all of the shows are in genres that I might regularly watch, I’m going to give them all a try.
I really wish there were some more pricing details available. That is one of the critical points for me—what is the bundle price or is there even a bundle available. Still a lot of questions with the service.
### Apple TV channels and Apple TV app
This is a good start for Apple. Choosing à la carte channels from the likes of HBO, Starz, SHOWTIME, CBS All Access, Smithsonian Channel, EPIX is a great way to introduce customers to this type of viewing.
One of the most exciting points with the Apple TV app is that it will be available on Smart TVs as well. This clearly shows how seriously Apple is about its services business. It’s not trying to lock people into buying an Apple TV to use its video service, instead opting to make the service available in many different places.
### Apple Card
I don’t know why I wasn’t more interested in this before. I should have known that Apple would do something completely different from other companies, and they did.
From the application process to the reporting of transactions, everything here is easy. I was really impressed with the Apple Card. From the start of the presentation to the very end, everything made perfect sense to me.
It’s like Apple took its hardware and software strategy to make the perfect credit card.
### Apple News+
This brings us to Apple News+, the companies new service that allows consumers to subscribe to a variety of magazines and premium news services for $9.99 a month.
I will give this a try, but I’m not sure yet about how long I’ll keep it. Part of my concern is that I stopped reading magazines a long time ago. I get a lot of my interesting tidbits from podcasts now and thoroughly enjoy listening to them throughout the week.
Even as part of a subscription, I’m not sure that I would take advantage of what the new service is offering. This is something I’m going to have to try before I make a final determination.
TV+ : Long meh presentations, no trailers, no pricing.
Channels: still will have to buy individual services; no mention of a bundle.
Card: satisfied with AM Exp and BOA – don’t see an advantage
News+: Subs. comes with curated content NOT all access.
Gaming: New, unreviewed content; no pricing.
No so great.
The ‘curated content’ bit is for WSJ only. It still appears like magazines will be full-content, including the actual pages you can flip through.
But, yeah, I’m pretty underwhelmed, not least due to the fact that much of it is pre-announced.
Why do I have a sinking feeling that there’s not going to be any bundle pricing on all this stuff?
I think looking back ten years, Apple Arcade might be what this event is really remembered for. That by far is the most important announcement. I hope they do the payouts to the different developers as X amount goes to developers as a whole, and the payouts are X/% of time spent in arcade games that month.
I think Apple TV+ could turn into a big thing if the initial run of shows are genuinely good and suck people in. Two of the announced shows are anthology series though, and I have never been one to love anthologies.
I hope New+ takes off. I don’t think I’ll be a customer though. I already read a fair number of news sites via RSS feeds and I don’t have to pay for it.
I wonder how difficult it will be for people to get around the copy protection for Apple’s video content. So far Netflix, CBS All Access and DC Universe all show up on torrent sites very quickly. If the content were being given away I’d gladly watch what interests me (duh) but I have my doubts as to whether I’m going to want to watch $10 worth of content a month. (And no, Oprah doesn’t seal the deal for me.)
I pay for Apple Music because I get access to basically all the music I could want for ten bucks a month. Plex + a good private torrent site gets you essentially the same thing for video but without the cost.
On the other hand my sister does pay for CraveTV, Prime and Netflix, so she might decide to spring for TV+. If so though things might get very messy in terms of how we do Family Sharing. We tried adding her to the group with me and my parents (I pay for whatever apps and music they want to buy which are rare.) As she also has a recurring charge for the 2TB iCloud account. I pay for the 200 gig version.
I hope we’ll be able to log into her Apple ID on our TVs without screwing up HomeKit for the house. (seriously the fact that homesharing doesn’t let you specify more than one card to take the funds off of is stupid!)
Millennials just don’t want to be attached to TVs like older generations. I like the financial literacy that Apple’s bringing to CC. All news is trash if it’s made for profit so it doesn’t matter where you go, you’ll eventually find yourself mired in the landfill. Arcade is nice for giving an opportunity to smaller game developers that can make content outside of the realm of being derivatives of popular games. Apple TV+ …going to fight subscription fatigue. Great content needs to be available from jump.
Apple didn’t say TV+ would be $10/mo. It’s probably a good guess, but if they’re smart they’ll come in well under that initially as they just don’t announce that much. Even by launch time it’s hard to believe they’ll have as many series as Netflix had Originals in 2015, for instance.
I think they need to do a bundle for Apple services. $10 for music, $10 for TV+, $10 for News+… no. But $20 for all 3? I might do that even though the $10/month really isn’t a material amount of money to me.
TV+- another streaming service with its own content. Typical PPV bundles.
News+ – it will do more to harm local media than they’re letting on.
Card? really? It’s backed by Goldman Sachs, the guys who almost brought down the US economy in 2007. No one went to jail. No one lost their job. No thank you.
All news is trash is like saying all Italians are mafia. Not only not true, but reveals one’s blindness.
Apple has set up the card to show the impact of only making minimum payment and highlight how much interest you are paying. They are nudging users to pay the card off and not pay interest, which much better than the status quo.
Gruber calls it on Apple Credit. 13 to 24 percent interest is not only not low, but 24 percent is usurious and should be illegal. I say it shows a malevolent side to Apple I’ve never seen before. At best it’s by a bunch of millionaires and billionaires who always pay the full balance every month and simply don’t get it. (Yeah, right.)
Given the lack of release dates and pricing, most of these were teasers, not full-on announcements. Not enough information. They jumped the gun.