Apple One
The new all–you–can–eat subscription service
APPLE HAS ROLLED out its Apple One subscription plans, offering substantial savings on bundles of Apple’s paid–for services, as well as the convenience of a single monthly bill. Ironically, considering the name, there are three Apple One plans:
> INDIVIDUAL includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage for $14.95 per month, saving $6 a month off the cost of subscribing to these services separately.
> FAMILY includes the same services and 200GB of iCloud storage for $19.95 per month, saving $8 a month, and all these can be shared with up to five other people.
> PREMIER includes the same services plus Apple News+, Apple Fitness+ (when it becomes available — it’s due before the end of 2020), and 2TB of iCloud storage, all for $29.95 per month, saving $25 a month. This can all be shared with up to five other people, but this tier is available only in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia — that is, regions where Apple News+ is offered.
Is Premier worth it? Apple News+ alone costs $9.99 per month, and adding this to an Apple One Family plan would come to $29.94, so for a penny more the Premier plan throws in an extra 1.8TB of storage and Fitness+ (the cost of Fitness+ is to be confirmed, but on these figures maybe $5 a month).
Want more storage at any of these tiers? According to an Apple support document reported by MacRumors, it’s possible for users to purchase additional iCloud storage separately, up to a maximum of 4TB in total. So you could add a 2TB iCloud plan ($9.99 per month) to your Apple One Premier plan and pay a total of $39.94.
What if you use one Apple ID for your purchases and subscriptions but a different Apple ID for iCloud? This is not uncommon, because iTunes Store accounts and Apple’s various cloud services accounts were originally separate. Apple has confirmed in a support note (support.apple.com/en-us/HT211862)
that you can apply the iCloud storage included in Apple One to the Apple ID you use for iCloud. It is still not possible, however, for users to consolidate their multiple Apple IDs into a single account.
To sign up from your iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap your name at the top of the screen, tap Subscriptions, and select Get Apple One. Then simply choose the plan you want; each comes with a 30–day free trial of any of the services you do not already have.
Services form an increasingly important part of Apple’s revenue mix — 22.5% in the September quarter just ended — so Apple One might partly be aimed at promoting less popular services (possibly Apple Arcade, take–up of which has reportedly been disappointing). But if you subscribe to most or all of these services anyway, the savings on offer make Apple One bundles a no-brainer. Plus, if you pay for your Apple One subscription plan with an Apple Card, you also receive 3% cash back.