Oversubscribed?
Graham Barlow remembers when .Mac was the only service you could subscribe to through Apple
Fancy getting fit for the new year? Apple is on hand to help… Kicking off January with new additions to its Apple Fitness+ subscription service, offering a brand new kickboxing workout, a meditation sleep theme, new Time to Walk guests (including Jamie Lee Curtis) to listen to as you take a walk and three new trainers for other workouts. The Fitness+ workouts are all delivered in 4K ultra-high definition video so you can see every glistening bead of sweat drop from the trainer’s highly toned bodies.
It all sounds great. I mean, who doesn’t want to get in shape, get more sleep and go for a walk with Dolly Parton or Jamie Lee Curtis? But Apple’s subscription services are getting a bit out of control. Apple Fitness costs £9.99 a month. Or you can get it as part of an Apple One Premier plan, which also gives you access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, and iCloud+ with 2TB of storage, and it can be shared with up to five other family members. But that costs a whopping £32.95 per month. Or you can drop News+ and Fitness+ and get the Family deal for £22.95 per month, which still lets you share with five family members, or drop the sharing aspect altogether and go Individual for £16.95 per month.
Apple AR+
Confused? I think I am. I remember when there was only one single Apple service you could subscribe to. It was called .Mac, and you didn’t really need it anyway. For £60 a year, you basically got an email address with an @mac.com ending and 20GB of iDisk space. Later on it got renamed as MobileMe, had a disastrous relaunch during which it crashed and eventually became the (mostly free) iCloud range of services we have today.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but I’ve got a feeling that even more subscription options are on the way from Apple. If Apple’s rumoured augmented reality headset is released this year I bet there’s going to be a subscription service attached. But considering that people used to gladly pay £60 a year just for a mac.com email address and a few gigs of online storage, we’ve only got ourselves to blame when that happens.