Tag / Apple

by Sam

Apple One

About a 4-minute read

A few years ago, I found myself at the digital crossroads – to stream or not to stream. I was tired of paying Comcast crazy amounts of money for both internet services and television services. I was also trying to decide what to do for a music service. While I have a lot of CD titles that are converted to digital (which is what I mostly listen to), there were a lot of gaps I wanted to fill. We had Amazon Echo devices that would play music, but without a premium subscription the catalog was very limited.

We’ve since solved the internet, television and music riddles with new services; my music solution came as a surprise, though “running the numbers” made the decision easier than expected. An Apple One Premier subscription made the most sense for us as a family. It might for you as well.

The Choices

I only looked at the unlimited (read: paid) solutions, for three reasons:

  1. The free catalogs are limited.
  2. I hate ads in the middle of my music, especially if I’m paying for it.
  3. A family plan was a must, as I’m not the only music consumer in my household.

The fact that I could take advantage of curated playlists was an added bonus (and I’ve really enjoyed discovering new things by way of the playlists).

It came down to Apple, Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon.

The Decision

I considered what other Apple services I was already using, and services that I previously considered but held off because the cost didn’t make any sense.

As a family, we’re fully invested in the Apple ecosystem (a topic for another post). That means all kinds of fruited devices – MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, and AppleTV. I was already paying for additional iCloud storage, because backups are important. iPhone and iPad devices have built-in backup solutions that run in the background – provided there’s enough space to park the backups. That meant $10/month to maintain that space; although it’s used for a lot of other things, its primary purpose is to make sure we don’t lose things (after learning that lesson the hard way with some photos).

Here’s the current pricing from Apple’s site – breaking down the individual service prices, the different purchasing levels, and the savings generated by bundling:

For iCloud storage and music by itself: $30/month. Family Plan: $28/month, and get tv+ and Arcade (although nobody is using it) thrown in. It already starts to make some sense.

Here’s how it stacks up to the other services:

As a standalone offering, Apple Music is competitively priced; once combined with other services, it’s very competitively priced.

Which made me start to look at what Premier offered – and what other costs that could potentially offset. In particular, I was looking at Apple News+.

It’s no secret that a lot of reading happens here, which means there are some subscription costs involved. There are some other publications I’d love to be able to read, but it’s simply not in the budget. Apple News+ solves for that, while saving me some significant money.

Making the switch to News+ has allowed us to drop subscription costs for:

  • The Washington Post
  • IndyStar
  • Time Magazine
  • Food Network
  • Consumer Reports

And for no additional costs, as a family we can now read:

  • Business publications (including Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, and Business Insider)
  • Wired
  • National Geographic
  • The Atlantic
  • Wall St Journal
  • Bicycling Magazine
  • Rolling Stone
  • Sports Illustrated
  • Several home & garden and food related publications
  • Several hobby-related publications (including gaming, woodworking, music, and photography)
  • Dozens of newspapers (including many hometown papers of serveral BTD readers)

It’s like having a full magazine rack in front of us – complete with search – whenever we are looking for something new to read.

Jumping to Premier also opens up Apple Fitness+, something I’m going to start exploring as I step up my exercise in the coming weeks.

For us, this was an easy call. If it looks interesting to you, there’s a “try it free” option to kick the tires.

If you found this helpful and would be interested in our streaming TV decision process, drop a note and let us know.