Apple All-In-One Services: What Would You Pay (if at all)? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

Apple Arcade is side bonus, and I wouldn’t pay for it per se. But it‘s fun. My wife is immediately addicted to Splitter Critters. I’m enjoying Thumper Mobile — a game I’ve thought about buying in the past. Also Galaga+ is fun.

Its big hole is there’s no idle-time match-three pattern matching games like Toy Blast, Candy Crush, Bejeweled, etc.

There are also a handful of games that look decent, some Solitaire and Tower Defense games, but they’re huge, 2-3GB. And I save my storage for downloading videos on travel. I’ll have to look at that later.

Overall, Arcade is fun for free. But not life changing to me.

 

[DaveF]

I’m so confused by the upgrade process for AppleOne. I signed up for it But it’s still renewing and charging me for all my individual TV, Music, iCloud plans.

I submitted for a refund of the TV and they did so…and canceled my aTV sub. So i have no aTV until AppleOne kicks in for its second month. I didn’t request the $15 back from music since i didn’t want to lose it.

And I just got charged for another month of 2GB iCloud storage a couple weeks into AppleOne. I requested a refund of that, will see what happens. Maybe I was supposed to manually turn that off? But I just checked and it won’t let me unsubscribe from iCloud data.

Apple used to be easy and “just works” but going to the all-in-one plan is the most confusing subscription management I’ve ever had.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Sounds annoying/disappointing, especially given it's Apple.

Thanks for giving the rest of us the heads-up should we do a similar upgrade...

_Man_

 

[DaveF]

I requested a refund of the duplicate iCloud renewal, and got that along with its cancellation. So I’ve only double-paid for Music.

Friends say their switch to AppleOne was smooth. But it’s been only frustration for me.

 

[Sam Posten]

I’m seeing a pattern here…

 

[DaveF]

Apple hates us.

 

[DaveF]

I wish it were smooth.

I pressed the AppleOne subscribe button on my iPhone. That’s it. Just did what Apple wants any user to do.

A week later, I’m charged for AppleTV renewal.
The next week Apple Music comes up and renews.
This week iCloud renews.

If I’m supposed to have canceled all my individual subscriptions first…Apple doesn’t say anything about that when signing up for the service.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I wish it were smooth.

I pressed the AppleOne subscribe button on my iPhone. That’s it. Just did what Apple wants any user to do.

A week later, I’m charged for AppleTV renewal.
The next week Apple Music comes up and renews.
This week iCloud renews.

If I’m supposed to have canceled all my individual subscriptions first…Apple doesn’t say anything about that when signing up for the service.

According to Apple, your individual services would have been cancelled when you are initially billed for the Apple One bundle.

 

[Ted Todorov]

AppleOne was smooth for me, but what has continually bitten me is my endless AppleID problem. Directly to the TL;DR version - it dates back to when AppleID was just a word, not an email address. The forced switch to an email was what caused all my never ending problems, two separate AppleIDs, etc. etc.

Bring back iTools! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe#iTools

 

[Johnny Angell]

I’m already subscribing to ATV+ and A Music and I’d like to have Apple News but that’s only in Premier which is another $15. I could add News only for $10, but I didn’t want to do that either. I was hoping that I could get News for another $5 if it were in the family plan.

BTW, on the family plan, can every member of the “family” have different apple id’s?

 

[Thomas Newton]

I’m already subscribing to ATV+ and A Music and I’d like to have Apple News but that’s only in Premier which is another $15. I could add News only for $10, but I didn’t want to do that either. I was hoping that I could get News for another $5 if it were in the family plan.

BTW, on the family plan, can every member of the “family” have different apple id’s?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201088

"Family Sharing makes it easy for up to six family members to share music, movies, TV shows, apps, books, an iCloud storage plan, subscriptions, and more all without sharing an Apple ID …"

A footnote indicates that "Not all content is eligible to be shared."

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I’m already subscribing to ATV+ and A Music and I’d like to have Apple News but that’s only in Premier which is another $15. I could add News only for $10, but I didn’t want to do that either. I was hoping that I could get News for another $5 if it were in the family plan.

BTW, on the family plan, can every member of the “family” have different apple id’s?

Yes. I am on a Family Plan and I have my own ID that is separate from the coordinator.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201088

"Family Sharing makes it easy for up to six family members to share music, movies, TV shows, apps, books, an iCloud storage plan, subscriptions, and more all without sharing an Apple ID …"

A footnote indicates that "Not all content is eligible to be shared."

This.

I haven't upgraded to AppleOne so far, but yeah, I do the family sharing thing... and yeah, seem to have bumped into limitations in that footnote w/ a couple paid apps so far, including the DVD Profiler app when I upgraded to iPhone 13 Pro w/ iOS 15+ -- this didn't seem to be a problem prior to upgrading to my new phone w/ iOS 15+ and/or before DVD Profiler disappeared from the App Store for a couple months before returning... though it seemed a problem for the other paid app I owned anyway... Not completely clear to me how that works as I still seem to be using a different shared AppleID (that I've always used before) for iTunes and App Store on my phone, but I did have to log in w/ my own, dedicated AppleID (that was originally used to purchase those apps) at one point to get the App Store to recognize I own those apps (in order to redownload them for my new phone)...

FWIW, my family continued to use that shared AppleID for iTunes and App Store as a legacy carryover approach to sharing from waaaay back when the current "family sharing" method didn't really exist. Unfortunately, I wasn't consistent enough about that and had used my own dedicated AppleID (for the App Store) on my 1st couple iPhones (provided by my job) for a couple years when those purchases were made (w/out fully realizing the implications/effects)...

_Man_

 

[DaveF]

We have Family sharing. It‘s good for iCloud storage. It’s increasingly useless for app purchases with everything moving to IAP the past several years.

 

[DaveF]

According to Apple, your individual services would have been cancelled when you are initially billed for the Apple One bundle.

But I‘m being billed a full months fee for less than a months service on everything. The experience makes no sense to me. First month of AppleOne is free. I expected all individual services to not renew during that first month with AppleOne bridging me to a new billing cycle. The actual process of being double-billed for everything sucks, more so being done by the wealthiest company in the country.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I guess timing is everything? Apple probably assumes most people who switch don’t notice / care about such things.

 

[DaveF]

My AppleOne Premiere subscription is on. I had to do one final appeal to Apple to get a refund on a double charge of iCloud. But now I'm on the $30/mo service and this should be fine until I might want to cut costs and pare down services (e.g. I lose interest in aTV or Music).

I've found, to my surprise, I don't need 1TB of data. But the step down is 200GB which is too little. So, fine. Excess cloud storage.

I have Apple News, but I hardly ever use it. When it launched, I found it was Apple's worst design app so I never built a habit of using it. And now, coming at it again, I don't hate it as much, but I still find it confusing. The mishmash of news I can access and subscriptions its trying to sell me and subscriptions I have outside (WaPo and NYT) that don't translate into News app leaves me constantly perplexed by it. And someone will link to a The Atlantic article, which I have in Apple News, but there's no way to make a web link go to News, so News fails all the time as a way to access what I'm paying for when someone is linking to an article in a normal manner.

Apple Arcade: My wife uses it much more than I do. But the important thing is that freebie is being used. (I play a little Galaga+ but it really feels like a scammy pay-to-play app that got the pay aspects removed while leaving all the annoying delaying timers and lootbox mechanics intact. The core game is good but it encourages me to play for maybe 10 minutes a day and then walk away for a couple days until I remember it again.)

 

[DaveF]

But, after almost three years of delaying, finally got my wife’s iMac connected to iCloud storage.

It was extra confusing and worrying to her. Her personal folder management goes back over 20 years to before there was a standard Documents folder on the Mac. So she never used that. We had to manually rearrange some large data folders to out stuff into the standard Documents folder to make sure it would sync to the cloud.

And then there was handwringing because it seemed like files weren’t syncing to the cloud and not loading right. But that ultimately boiled down to some other weird bug in macOS or Safari that wasn’t updating the Finder view promptly after downloading new files. A reboot fixed that.

And then a bunch gnashing of teeth getting SuperDuper working on the M1 Mac combined with the new APFS system. I still don’t know what was not working. But eventually we got it working again. (Not helping: my core understanding of file systems and formatting discs is fundamentally 20 years old and I don’t understand at all the new APFS system.)

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

Happy that you finally got iCloud functional. I have been using it since its introduction and for the most part, it has been very reliable for me despite the outages that tend to happen from time to time. Sync has always been dependable across all my Apple devices. iCloud has proven to be effective enough that I no longer use Dropbox or any of those similar services for my cloud storage.

I am also on the 200GB plan which seems to be more than sufficient at the moment.

I used to have Apple News, and honestly, I miss it a little. There was a really great selection of magazines I could easily jump from one to another. However, there is only one magazine I read these days and that's MAC LIFE and its subscription, I believe, is under $20 a year. MAC LIFE, which I read independent of Apple News, has nice animations on its cover and some of its articles. All of those animations are lost under Apple News as you get a .pdf-only version of the magazine. Not that the animations are a dealbreaker, but just one of the small lost perks.

And, for me, magazines have become more and more irrelevant (as have newspapers) due to the "breaking" news that the Internet provides.

My Verizon Wireless plan includes Apple Music every month so it's hard for me to justify paying for any of the Apple plans. I stopped paying for NEWS because it was just an extra $10 expense I no longer want to pay. From what I have been reading over the years, Apple has been losing money on NEWS and perhaps that's the reason it's only offered in the most expensive PREMIER plan.

 

[Thomas Newton]

And then a bunch gnashing of teeth getting SuperDuper working on the M1 Mac combined with the new APFS system. I still don’t know what was not working. But eventually we got it working again. (Not helping: my core understanding of file systems and formatting discs is fundamentally 20 years old and I don’t understand at all the new APFS system.)

Apple has been changing things to tighten up on system security. These things – as much or more than APFS, itself, are what have led to turmoil and inconvenience.

One change was to do real-time hardware encryption/decryption of internal SSDs on Macs with T2 chips or Apple Silicon processors. In normal use, you don't get extra protection; it's like leaving your car keys in the ignition of an unlocked and running vehicle. But if you separate the SSD from the keys, the contents of the SSD become so much gibberish. (I think that when you use the Monterey feature for preparing your Mac for sale/gift/junk, it doesn't actually wipe every section of the SSD, or try. It causes it to forget the old keys, after which the contents of the SSD might as well be erased, if you are not someone with the resources of, oh, say, the NSA.)

That one might make life a bit more complex for Mac Pro tower users who go to expand their internal SSD storage.

Another change was to split off some of the system files on a bootable volume, and put them into a hidden volume that has to be sealed with Apple's encryption keys. If you clone that volume in the normal fashion, a Mac will refuse to boot off the clone. Short of cracking Apple's encryption, the only ways to bless (properly seal) a copy of that system volume are by running the macOS installer, or using a special APFS recovery tool. But in initial M1 versions of Big Sur, that tool didn't work. The fact that pure cloning no longer worked and that even Apple's official replacement didn't work caused some headaches for the users and developers of SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.

A third change was to implement an option that disallows booting from external drives. If you've prepared a volume that theoretically is bootable, but you're not aware that you need to change preferences to enable external booting, that might also throw you for a loop.

Apple Support – About Startup Security Utility on a Mac with the Apple T2 Security Chip

The Eclectic Light Company – Creating a bootable external disk with a M1 Pro in Monterey